The coherence of inconsistencies: Attitude–behaviour gaps and new consumption communities

Despite the growing success of well-marketed environmentally-friendly products, there remains a gap between consumers’ positive attitudes toward 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 and 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 and 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 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 and Wood 2006) approaches and policies can be used to facilitate more sustainable forms of consumption

Why Ethical Consumers Don’t Walk Their Talk: Towards a Framework for Understanding the Gap Between the Ethical Purchase Intentions and Actual Buying Behaviour of Ethically Minded Consumers

actual behavioural control, consumer ethics, ethical consumerism, implementation intentions, intention–behaviour gap, perceived behavioural control, situational context, theory of planned behaviour, word–deed gap,

Bags for life: The embedding of ethical consumerism

The aim of this paper is to understand why some ethical behaviours fail to embed, and importantly what can be done about it. We address this by looking at an example where ethical behaviour has not become the norm, i.e. the widespread, habitual, use of ‘bags for life’. This is an interesting case because whilst a consistent message of ‘saving the environment’ has been the basis of the promotion of ‘bags for life’ in the United Kingdom for many years, their uptake has only recently become more widespread and still remains at low levels. Through an exploratory study, we unpack some of the contextual barriers which may influence ethical consumerism. We do this by examining the attitudes which influenced people to start using ‘bags for life’, and how people persuade others to use ‘bags for life’. We use a case study analysis to try and understand why ethical behaviour change has stalled and not become sustained. We find that both individuals and institutions play a significant interaction role in encouraging a sustained behavioural change towards ethical consumerism