Crafting Effective Sustainable Fashion Communication on Social Media Crafting Effective Sustainable Fashion Communication on Social Media

Abstract

Sustainable consumption is an issue that firms try to encourage through different tools. A common approach to influencing environmental consumer behaviors and attitudes is message framing. Specifically, gain-frames highlight the benefits of engaging in a behavior, while loss-frames emphasize the costs of not doing so. The goals of this study are twofold: to examine the effects of sustainable message framing on customer engagement intention and to investigate the moderating effect of attitude towards sustainable message on this relationship. An experimental study was conducted with 66 participants equally distributed between two framing groups. Drawing on the prospect theory, it was proposed that, compared to loss-framed messages, gain-framed brand messages on social media may produce higher customer engagement intention. Based on the theory of customer engagement marketing, it was anticipated that increases in the level of additional attitude towards sustainable message could strengthen the effect of gain message framing. Results provide empirical support for both hypotheses.