Will You Purchase Environmentally Friendly Products? Using Prediction Requests to Increase Choice of Sustainable Products

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Web End = J Bus Ethics (2015) 129:5975 DOI 10.1007/s10551-014-2143-6

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Web End = Will You Purchase Environmentally Friendly Products? Using Prediction Requests to Increase Choice of Sustainable Products

H. Onur Bodur Kimberly M. Duval

Bianca Grohmann

Received: 21 September 2013 / Accepted: 6 March 2014 / Published online: 22 March 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract Research shows that commitment-based interventions are among the most effective strategies to encourage pro-environmental behaviors, but methods to elicit commitments from a large number of individuals(i.e., door-to-door or phone campaigns) are often costly and unrealistic. Predictions requestsa commitment-type strategyare an effective mass-communication strategy and have the potential to inuence pro-environmental behavior among large audiences. This research is the rst to demonstrate that prediction requests in a consumer behavior context inuence preference for environmentally friendly products. In addition, this research examines the role of individual and contextual factors in inuencing the efcacy of prediction requests. Study 1 shows that exposure to an advertisement with a prediction request leads to increased preferences for environmentally sustainable (vs. traditional) household cleaning products, compared to a control advertisement, and that this effect is greater when the prediction request is paired with an audience cue (vs. prediction request only). Study 2 indicates that the effect of prediction requests on preference for sustainable products is greater for individuals with interdependent (vs. independent) self-construal. Substantive implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Keywords Sustainability in marketing Ethical

consumption Ethical attributes Self-prophecy Self-

construal Social inuence Social responsibility

Ethical consumptionconsumers adoption of consumption behaviors to support socially responsible practices undertaken by organizations (e.g., buying fair trade, sweatshop-free, organic, or local products; supporting cause marketing campaigns; boycott of products perceived to be unethical)is still gathering momentum (Papaoikonomou et al. 2012). Although ethical consumption and corporate social responsibility enhance each other (Sebastiani et al. 2013), the latter has attracted more attention by researchers (Vitell and Muncy 1992). Research on ethical consumption has nonetheless started to identify important factors (e.g., consumer characteristics and situational factors; Bray et al. 2011; Carrington et al. 2010) that encourage...