Assessing ethical consumer behavior for sustainable development: The mediating role of brand attachment

Abstract

Despite being ethically concerned, sometimes ethically minded consumers opted for unethical brands. This research aims to uncover the underlying reasons and the role of self-congruence theory to bridge this intention-behavior gap. This paper analyses the impact of actual self-concept (ASC) and ideal self-congruence (ISC) on different dimensions of ethically minded consumer behavior (EMCB) in presence of brand attachment (BA) as mediator. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to investigate these issues in a sample of 674 respondents. The results reveal that the positively significant relationship of the ASC and ISC with the dimensions of EMCB is negatively mediated by BA. For managers, findings offer a strategical direction and real-world approach to improving BA and ethical concerns simultaneously without exploiting customer's actual self while promising a strong customer value. This study develops holistic theoretical model that addresses the intention-behavior gap in sustainable development literature and enhances the understanding of self-congruence and ethically minded consumption where brands are involved.

Exploring the antecedents of sustainable consumers' purchase intentions: Evidence from emerging countries

“…Campaigns and advertisements depicting deteriorating environmental circumstances serve to raise environmental awareness and concerns. It may help to increase sustainable products intake (Rasool et al, 2020).…”

“…Because of the increased environmental consciousness and buying power of Asian customers, Asian countries have become the primary target market for worldwide marketers (Lavuri et al, 2022). Eco-friendly products are created without chemical materials, such as organic products since they are loaded with antioxidants required by the body (Rasool et al, 2020). Because ecofriendly products do not harm the customer, demand from healthconscious consumers has increased in the recent times (Paço & Raposo, 2010).…”

Consumer appreciation of a shark-free eco-label for small pelagics

“…For this reason, we have included an index of the propensity to environmental behavior, measured trough a set of four questions taken from the ethically minded consumer behaviour (EMCB) scale (Sudbury-Riley and Kohlbacher, 2016). The EMCB scale has been recently used to evaluate several choices of consumers including retail shops (S anchez-Gonz alez et al, 2020), brands (Rasool et al, 2020) and product's attributes (Capitello and Sirieix, 2019). Since information generally plays an essential role in the appreciation of eco-labelling (Salladarr e et al, 2010), we asked if respondents knew that sharks' stocks were declining due to fishing activity, and we split the sample in two subsamples, one where this question was asked before of dichotomous discrete choice and maximum WTP, and one when this was asked after.…”

Positive and Negative Behaviors of Oppositional Loyalty in Online Communities

“…When enterprises' behavior violates social and human behavior norms through the influence of moral identity, moral judgment, moral reasoning choice, and distrust, it generates negative word-of-mouth, schadenfreude, brand avoidance, and anti-brand activism [100]- [102]. According to moral principles, brand attachment not only positively influences ethically minded consumer behavior [103] but also has a close relationship with value-based fairness, communicationbased fairness, and loyalty intention [89]. Based on the literature mentioned earlier, we propose the following hypotheses:…”