Ethical consumption behaviours in supermarket shoppers: determinants and marketing implications

ABSTRACT

Understanding how consumers make ethical purchases has numerous benefits for firms and other stakeholders. Although several ethical decision-making frameworks seek to explain such purchasing behaviour, they typically focus on the content of such decisions, rather than considering how such decisions unfold in a given context. Yet, the complexities of consumer choice suggest that greater insight into how consumers make ethical purchases in store can enhance understanding. We report our findings from a survey of a geographically disperse sample of 688 UK shoppers and argue that a naturalistic theory of decision making, image theory, enhances our ability to explain consumer behaviour in this setting. As well as contributing to theoretical understanding of consumer choice, this has implications for the merchandising of ethical products, such as Fair Trade and ‘green’ goods.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethical decision making
• Fair Trade
• non-GM
• green purchasing
• image theory

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Marylyn Carrigan and Scott J. Vittell for their valuable comments on previous versions of this manuscript. An early version of the article was presented at the Academy of Marketing Science conference in Baltimore, 2008.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chanaka Jayawardhena

Chanaka Jayawardhena is Professor in Marketing at Hull University Business School, UK. His research interests are in the fields of services marketing and customer relationship management. He has won numerous research awards including two Best Paper Awards at the Academy of Marketing Conference. Previous publications have appeared in the Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management among others.

Kevin Morrell

Kevin Morrell is Associate Professor in Governance at the International Centre for Governance and Public Management (IGPM) at Warwick Business School. His main interests are governance and narrative and he is widely published, having written full papers in more than 20 different refereed journals (www.kevinmorrell.org.uk has more detail). Kevin has also worked at the Universities of Birmingham and Loughborough and at King’s College London and recently finished a monograph on Aristotle titled Organization, Society and Politics: An Aristotelian perspective.

Chris Stride

Chris Stride is a Senior Lecturer and Statistician; though based at the Institute of Work Psychology, University of Sheffield, he has analysed data and published widely across a range of social science disciplines, with recent works appearing in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Psychotherapy Research, Journal of World Business, Accident Analysis and Prevention and the British Journal of Criminology.