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1. Introduction
Imagine you are a consumer who intends to purchase social enterprise products. How will you choose in the face of the utilitarian benefits, hedonic benefits or corporate social responsibility (CSR) image of social enterprise products? Rational consumers prefer utilitarian benefits, emotional consumers prefer hedonic benefits and ethical consumers prefer social enterprise products based on an image of good CSR (Brinol et al., 2015; Kuokkanen and Sun, 2020). What can be done to enable consumers to produce long-term and persistent repurchases instead of one-spot purchasing based on altruism? (Chiu et al., 2018; Cho, 2015) In these circumstances, social marketers must adopt different kinds of programs to enhance consumers’ brand identity and brand trust, and then promote repurchase intentions for social enterprise products for the sustainable development of social enterprises. Traditional marketing focuses on utilitarian benefits and hedonic benefits, and the CSR image, which can be an important factor that shapes consumer choice behaviour, has rarely been discussed (Arnold and Reynolds, 2012; Kuokkanen and Sun, 2020). Consumers cannot shape their preferences among brands using rational attributes only. Consumers seek out brands that create identity and trust; that intrigue them in a sensorial, emotional and image way (Iglesias, et al., 2018). The purpose of this study is to understand what drives consumers to repurchase the products of a social enterprise. The aim of the study is to assist social enterprises marketing managers to find out different driving forces embedded in social marketing programs to achieve repurchase intentions of social enterprise products (French et al., 2017).
Ebrahim et al. (2016) proposed a preference-repurchase intention (PRI) model, which stated that consumer preference for purchasing a product is based on the product attribute perception and related factors. Preference reflects consumers’ long-term and persistent attitude toward a certain object (Amir and Levav, 2008). “Repurchase” reflects a repetitive and loyal purchase tendency within a certain period (Ebrahim et al., 2016). The PRI model focuses on product information and classifies it into attribute perception, price perception and appearance perception to detect whether objective perception affects brand preference and in turn, affects repurchase intention. This model provides knowledge of how product attributes influence brand experience and brand preference (Shah, 2017). In this study, we propose the identity-repurchase intention...