Constructing A Consumer Focused Industry

The old saying ‘safe as houses’ is being challenged around the world like never before. Over recent decades homeowners have experienced the devastating effects of defects like asbestos, leaky buildings, structural failings, and more recently the combustible cladding crisis. The provision of safe and secure housing is a critical starting point to ensure that social value can be delivered in the built environment. However, some of these dangerous defects have resulted in a lack of security, safety, health, well-being, and social value for households and the wider community. The problems homeowners experience go beyond the substantial financial costs for defect rectification. Too often there has been a lack of government and industry support to help the housing consumer through these issues or to prevent them from occurring to begin with. It is time for a rethink and restructure of government policy, support, and industry practices to better protect housing consumers and deliver high-quality and sustainable housing that creates social value. Through evidence-based research and international case studies, this book focuses on the effects that dangerous defects have on the housing consumer. The ongoing construction cladding crisis is used as a primary case study throughout to highlight these implications, with other previous large-scale defect examples, such as leaky buildings and asbestos. Based upon the range of emerging evidence, we propose ideas for policy makers, construction and built environment professionals, owners corporations, and households on how to move forward towards a higher-quality, sustainable, and socially valuable way of residential living. Government policy has long focused on ‘making industry work’ through building regulations and standards. It is now time for greater government and industry focus on the consumer to make ‘consumer protection work’ in the built environment. There is a need to prevent dangerous defects like combustible cladding, better support consumers when defects emerge, and to create buildings for social value rather than minimum standards. Now is the time to build a better future for the end-user.

This open access book explores the environmental, social, and financial challenges of housing provision, and the urgent need for a sustainable housing transition. The authors explore how market failures have impacted the scaling up of sustainable housing and the various policy attempts to address this. Going beyond an environmental focus, the book explores a range of housing-related challenges including social justice and equity issues. Sustainability transitions theory is presented as a framework to help facilitate a sustainable housing transition and a range of contemporary case studies are explored on issues including high performing housing, small housing, shared housing, neighbourhood-scale housing, circular housing, and innovative financing for housing. It is an important new resource that challenges policy makers, planners, housing construction industry stakeholders, and researchers to rethink what housing is, how we design and construct it, and how we can better integrate impacts on households to wider policy development.

Forever immortalized in the television series Mad Men, the mid-twentieth century marketing world influenced nearly every aspect of American culture - music, literature, politics, economics, consumerism, race relations, gender, and more. Jan Logemann traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research and commercial design who transformed capitalism, from the 1930s through the 1960s. He argues that the history of marketing consumer goods is not a story of American exceptionalism. Instead, the careers of immigrants point to the limits of the "Americanization" paradigm. First, Logemann explains the rise of a dynamic world of goods by emphasizing changes in marketing approaches increasingly tailored to consumers. Second, he looks at how and why consumer engineering was shaped by transatlantic exchanges. From Austrian psychologists and little-known social scientists to the illustrious Bauhaus artists, the migr s at the center of this story illustrate the vibrant cultural and commercial connections between metropolitan centers: Vienna and New York; Paris and Chicago; Berlin and San Francisco. These mid-century consumer engineers crossed national and disciplinary boundaries not only within arts and academia but also between governments, corporate actors, and social reform movements. By focusing on the transnational lives of migr consumer researchers, marketers, and designers, Engineered to Sell details the processes of cultural translation and adaptation that mark both the mid-century transformation of American marketing and the subsequent European shift to "American" consumer capitalism.

How can innovation in the construction industry be strengthened? What instruments and approaches are being used by governments to promote it? What works and under what circumstances? These key questions have profound implications. This book presents a framework for the analysis of innovation models and systems in construction and an international comparison of these systems, with a focus on their application in practical policy development.

Luxury is no longer a privilege of the high-net-worth individuals. It is now accessible to all. This has become possible because the essence of luxury has changed: from something based upon materialism and conspicuous and hedonic consumption to one that embraces enrichment and experiences for the consumers. This evolution creates challenges for luxury brands and for the managers of luxury brands. Building Consumer-Brand Relationship in Luxury Brand Management is a collection of innovative research that focuses on the conception and marketing of luxury as an experience and explores more integrative and comprehensive approaches to modeling and understanding the consumer-brand relationship with luxury brands and their sustainability in a global and multicultural world. Highlighting a broad range of topics including digital marketing, consumer demand, and social responsibility, this book is ideally designed for marketers, brand managers, consumer analysts, advertisers, entrepreneurs, executives, researchers, academicians, and students.

This book analyses the founding years of consumer law and consumer policy in Europe. It combines two dimensions: the making of national consumer law and the making of European consumer law, and how both are intertwined. The chapters on Germany, Italy, the Nordic countries and the United Kingdom serve to explain the economic and the political background which led to different legal and policy approaches in the then old Member States from the 1960s onwards. The chapter on Poland adds a different layer, the one of a former socialist country with its own consumer law and how joining the EU affected consumer law at the national level. The making of European consumer law started in the 1970s rather cautiously, but gradually the European Commission took an ever stronger position in promoting not only European consumer law but also in supporting the building of the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), the umbrella organisation of the national consumer bodies. The book unites the early protagonists who were involved in the making of consumer law in Europe: Guido Alpa, Ludwig Krämer, Ewa Letowska, Hans-W Micklitz, Klaus Tonner, Iain Ramsay, and Thomas Wilhelmsson, supported by the younger generation Aneta Wiewiórowska Domagalska, Mateusz Grochowski, and Koen Docter, who reconstructs the history of BEUC. Niklas Olsen and Thomas Roethe analyse the construction of this policy field from a historical and sociological perspective. This book offers a unique opportunity to understand a legal and political field, that of consumer law and policy, which plays a fundamental role in our contemporary societies.

Construction productivity-how well, how quickly, and at what cost buildings and infrastructure can be constructed-directly affects prices for homes and consumer goods and the robustness of the national economy. Industry analysts differ on whether construction industry productivity is improving or declining. Still, advances in available and emerging technologies offer significant opportunities to improve construction efficiency substantially in the 21st century and to help meet other national challenges, such as environmental sustainability. Advancing the Competitiveness and Efficiency of the U.S. Construction Industry identifies five interrelated activities that could significantly improve the quality, timeliness, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability of construction projects. These activities include widespread deployment and use of interoperable technology applications; improved job-site efficiency through more effective interfacing of people, processes, materials, equipment, and information; greater use of prefabrication, preassembly, modularization, and off-site fabrication techniques and processes; innovative, widespread use of demonstration installations; and effective performance measurement to drive efficiency and support innovation. The book recommends that the National Institute of Standards and Technology work with industry leaders to develop a collaborative strategy to fully implement and deploy the five activities

This report presents a comprehensive assessment of the policy instruments adopted by the Netherlands to reach carbon neutrality in its manufacturing sector by 2050. The analysis illustrates the strength of combining a strong commitment to raising carbon prices with ambitious technology support, uncovers the pervasiveness of competitiveness provisions, and highlights the trade-off between short-term emissions cuts and longer-term technology shift.