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1. Introduction
Major consumers brands and retailers are increasingly coming under scrutiny for their perceived ethical obligations (Shaw and Riach, 2011; Thompson and Arsel, 2004). Retailers across North-America and Europe have been promoting ethical or sustainable products as a way of improving their reputation, differentiating themselves and meeting economic objectives (Nicholls, 2002). However, in their seminal works, Devinney et al. (2010) and Eckhardt et al. (2010) suggest that mainstream customers do not purchase products for ethical reasons. Indeed, they (amongst others: Arnould, 2007; Auger and Devinney, 2007; Carrington et al., 2010) suggest the traditional methods used by consumption researchers to investigate market size and purchase motivation are too distant from behavioral reality, and vastly overinflate the importance of ethics in consumption.
In this paper, we step beyond traditional approaches by exploring the “moment of truth” (Carrington et al., 2010, p. 139) – the point at which the consumption behavior happens. We ask the question: what motivates mainstream consumers into consuming ethical products? Through an extensive study of mainstream fair trade consumers, utilizing a soft-laddering interview technique (Reynolds, 2006; Kaciak and Cullen, 2009), we are able to explore the underlying motivations for ethical consumption at point of purchase. We find these largely unrelated to the high cognition, high involvement and information-rich consumer debates which dominate the literature. We find many more socio-cultural and nuanced motivations as the core drivers of consumption. However, by looking at mainstream ethical consumption, rather than radical or fringe consumers, typically targeted by phenomenological researchers (Arnould, 2007; Connolly and Prothero, 2008; Thompson and Coskuner-Balli, 2007), we are able to provide a more market focused analysis of relevance to researchers and practitioners.
2. Ethical consumption and retail
In this study, we use the term ethical consumption to cover a range of terms circulating in the literature including sustainable (Connolly and Prothero, 2003), moralistic (Luedicke et al., 2010), green (Gleim et al., 2013), organic (van Doorn and Verhoef, 2011) and fair trade consumption (White et al., 2012). Although these are often discussed in isolation within the literature, they are complementary from a theoretical perspective, with the same methods and theories being applied with similar outcomes in all spheres (Shaw and Riach, 2011; Tully and Winer, 2014). We, therefore, adhere...