Behind Ethical Consumption: Purchasing Motives and Marketing Strategies for Organic Food Products, Non-GMOs, Bio-Fuels

This book presents five related studies, each dealing with the issue of the motivations behind ethical choices of consumption and discussing their implications on marketing strategy. The fields of investigation selected range from organic food to genetically modified products, from bio-fuels to new low-emission transport technologies, the consumption of each of which has by its very nature a recognized ethical validity. On these themes, this volume offers a European point of view and, in particular, an Italian one, either extending studies undertaken in various countries, or proposing new and original lines of research into the antecedents of purchase intentions that have never before been explored. In particular, this volume examines three critical issues in ethical consumption. The first area of research regards the psychological determinants of consumers’ purchase intention, identified within a consolidated model of social psychology, the “Theory of planned behavior”, extended to other relevant variables (i.e., moral norms, moral disengagement, and self-identity). The second issue considers values pursued by consumers, as well as cross-cultural individual differences, to verify the degree of homogeneity in results obtained in trans-national studies. The third and final area of research covered by this book deals with the latent dimensions of ethical product image (in particular, the “Big five factors” of product personality) and how these bear upon the significant determinants of ethical consumers’ purchase intention