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Important financial savings, along with reductions in environmental impact, can be achieved by planting lawns with low-input turfgrass species. Drawing on data from an online survey, this article provides empirical evidence on the factors that influence consumers’ willingness to adopt low-input turfgrasses. We group consumers into two segments: Willing Adopters and Reluctant Homeowners. Regardless of segment, consumers who regard maintenance requirements as more important were more willing to adopt low-input turfgrasses, whereas those who placed a higher value on appearance, were more unlikely to change to a low-input turfgrass, especially for Reluctant Homeowners. We categorized the barriers to adoption as follows: 1) Promotion, 2) Benefits and Accessibility, 3) Peer Effect, 4) Sample, and 5) Information. Our models predict that consumers’ willingness to adopt low-input turfgrass can be significantly increased if the identified barriers are removed. Based on our study, suppliers/retailers should adopt heterogeneous and multiple marketing strategies, such as promoting through multiple channels, informing and advising the public on proper information, providing photos or exhibiting in-store samples, triggering communication between different types of consumers, and providing incentives and improving accessibility, to target different consumer groups.
The economic downturns of 2007–09 and the COVID-19 pandemic affected most industries in the United States, including landscape services and equipment sales, and provoked both short-term disruptions and long-term changes. To understand how the landscaping industry has responded, we investigated patterns of consumer expenditures on landscape services and equipment from 2009 through 2021 using a representative sample of 76,895 US households. We categorized US households as detached single-family residents and townhouse residents to more fully articulate the factors that turned potential consumers into purchasers and the factors that affected purchasers’ expenditures. We used a double-hurdle model to identify key factors that drive consumer demand for landscape services and equipment over time, including social-demographics, geographic characteristics, housing conditions, year and seasonal trends, and the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that during the studied period, the demand for landscape services declined in terms of both the percentage of consumers purchasing the services and the purchasers’ average expenditures, while the demand for do-it-yourself (DIY) equipment remained relatively unchanged. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the percentage of consumers who purchased landscape services increased, while the expenditures on landscape services decreased in 2020 and then began to rebound in 2021, but not enough to reverse the overall downward trend. In contrast, purchases of DIY equipment were relatively stable in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and mainly relied on current consumers.
Outdoor water use, especially for lawn and landscaping irrigation, accounts for a substantial proportion of residential water use and often peaks during summer months. Understanding how to reduce outdoor water use can play a critical role in balancing the increasing demand for and subsequent protection of water resources. This study aims to find out if information-based strategies can be effective in reducing homeowners’ water use as well as identifying the key determinants that can enhance water conservation campaigns. Using online survey data from 2077 randomly selected urban homeowners with home lawns in a relatively water-rich state, we found that social norm-based information is generally more effective to promote household water conservation behavior than education information. Moreover, the results showed that the households’ water-saving actions, lawn watering knowledge, awareness for local water scarcity, attitudes toward water conservation, socio-demographics, and landscape characteristics all play a role in determining household water conservation intention.