Abstract
Despite the growing success of well-marketed environmentally friendly
products, there remains a gap between consumers’ positive attitudes towards
green issues and products, and their inconsistent and often conflicting
consumption behaviour. Indeed, this is a challenge for social marketers seeking
to advance the sustainability agenda. Therefore, this study problematises what
has been conceptualised as attitude–behaviour gaps (Boulstridge & Carrigan,
2000), and explores how groups of consumers have re-construed such practices
and their meanings through the formation of New Consumption Communities
(Szmigin, Carrigan, & Bekin, 2007). Multi-sited ethnographic findings illustrate
the social processes through which ethical and green forms of consumption are
established and normalised. Findings also stress the importance of normative
and habitual reframing through ‘ethical spaces’ (Barnett, Clarke et al., 2005) in
establishing and maintaining increased consistency in participants’ consumption
meanings, behaviours, and goals. Thus we re-frame attitude–behaviour gaps as
coherent inconsistencies, which allows for a move away from solely trying to
explain and change individual consumer behaviour, to identifying how suitable
upstream and downstream (Verplanken & Wood, 2006) approaches and policies
can be used to facilitate more sustainable forms of consumption.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 103-128 |
Journal | Journal of Marketing Management |
Volume | 28 |
Issue number | 1-2 |
Early online date | 14 Oct 2011 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2012 |
Keywords
- behavioural inconsistency
- consumption
- social marketing