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The purpose of this paper is to provide the theoretical insights with regard to the green purchasing intention–behavior gap and the role played by social media influences in abating this gap. This paper takes into consideration a wider aspect with regard to the antecedents of behavioral intention through personal and social identities in place of the antecedents presented in the theory of planned behavior and social-identity theory. Furthermore, as the theories lack an explanation of how to reduce the intention–behavior gap, this paper also argues the source credibility model (SCM) in explaining the impact that social media influences can have on the behavioral gap.

Hypothetical deductive method is proposed for this concept paper under the positivism research paradigm.

Not applicable as this is a concept paper. However, the paper discusses the theoretical and managerial implications.

This is a concept paper. Yes this paper discusses the theoretical, managerial, and social/ecological implications.

This paper highlights the relevance of consumers' personal and social identities when consumers make purchasing decisions regarding green products. How managers can make marketing strategies, based on credibility model, involving social media influences as product endorsers and ambassadors, as well as the policy makers to design products, earmark consumer behavior and to conduct marketing campaigns in time to come.

As to how policies can be designed and adopted for bio-based economies where sustainability and circularity are given priority and to increase the attention of businesses moving toward sustainable practices.

Original thought developed based on research, theoretical and market gaps.

Consumers support local businesses as an ethical choice. However, consumer ethics researchers have not paid much attention to local consumption, limiting the understanding of why consumers believe local consumption is ethical. To address this research gap, this study aims to develop and test the theoretical model for local consumption decisions by integrating moral foundations theory and local–global identity literature.

An online survey of US adult consumers (n = 362) was conducted to test the theoretical model. A correlational structural equation model was used to analyze the data.

The results confirmed that consumers’ moral obligations to engage in local consumption are driven partially by pro-group moral foundations, and that this identity-based motivation is an intuitive predictor of local consumption behaviors. The findings of this study demonstrate that traditional ethical consumption frameworks that assume knowledge-based decision-making are not enough to explain local consumption, and provide arguments for the need to consider both moral intuitions and moral reasoning.

This study synthesizes two isolated streams of literature and presents an integrated model to holistically explain consumer motivations for local business support. Local consumption was rarely investigated and its unique characteristics were not fully understood in the context of ethical consumption. This study specifically focuses on local consumption, advancing our knowledge of this understudied consumer behavior.

Oppositional organizational identities are fraught with conflict and often evoke powerful social and cultural identities. Such identities may be a divisive force among consumers. The purpose of this paper is to understand how consumers construct frames that facilitate identification with oppositional organizational identities.

The authors use online reviews from TripAdvisor.com and Yelp.com of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, USA. The Creation Museum is an ideal research context due to its location within American public discourse regarding religion and science. Through a grounded theory approach of the reviews, the authors propose three identity frames.

The data suggest that consumers primarily construct three frames to identify with the Creation Museum: transformational experiences, interpretive bricolage and oppositional scripts. Together, these frames engender resonance and facilitate consumer identification.

This paper is one of the first to examine how oppositional organizational identities garner consumer support. Given that consumers are increasingly attentive to organizational processes and the ubiquity of information technology, which reduces the costs of information and interaction, the study provides a much more holistic perspective on oppositional organizational identity and offers a multitude of future avenues for further research.

Brand identities have a dual nature that appeals to the head (rational appeal) and to the heart (emotional appeal) of their consumers. Furthermore, consumers can process information in a predominately analytic or intuitive cognitive style (CS) manner. This study aims to analyze the influence of brand identity-cognitive style (BI-CS) fit on the perceived value of a brand. It also analyzes how different forms of social influence affect the perceived value of the brand.

Using a two-step experimental design, Step 1 examines the effect that BI-CS fit has on consumer-based brand equity (CBBE); Step 2 evaluates the effect that the three elements of social influence–compliance, identification and internalization–have on CBBE.

Both the BI-CS fit, and the identification and internalization forms of social influence have a significant and positive effect over the perceived value of the brand. A rational brand identity is given a higher perceived brand value by analytic CS consumers than intuitive CS consumers. Conversely, an emotional brand identity is given a higher perceived brand value by intuitive CS consumers than analytic CS consumers. However, whether the brand identity is more emotional or rational is less important than the values and beliefs that the brand communicates to create social influence.

This study contributes to the branding literature by introducing the CS concept to better understand the influence of emotional and rational brand identities on consumers with either rational or intuitive cognitive thinking styles and reinforce the importance of the brand duality concept.

The results demonstrate the importance of brand duality and show how firms could present emotional or rational brand identities depending on their consumers’ CS to increase the effectiveness of their messaging to build stronger brand images that increase the perceived value of the brand. These findings could have important implications for market segmentation.

Brand identities can be emotional or rational, and this creates more or less value depending on the consumers’ CS, but what is more important is that consumers internalize the brand’s message or identify with what the brand represents. Although this has been discussed in prior literature, the original contribution of this paper is tying all these concepts together.

Past research argues that identity-linking messages must use established descriptors of the social group (i.e. prototypical identity appeals) to be effective. The authors show that less established descriptors (i.e. identity-linking messages low in prototypicality) can be optimal for an important customer segment, namely, for those that affectively identify with the social group. This is because of the distinct self-motives underlying the cognitive and affective social identity dimensions.

A pilot and two experimental studies were conducted, using gender and nationality as the target identities.

Consumers feel more hopeful and have higher purchase intention for products advertised using identity depictions that fit with their predominant (uncertainty-reduction or self-enhancement) self-motive. Consumers predominantly high in affective/cognitive social identity prefer identity-linking messages that are low/high in prototypicality. An abstract mindset reverses these effects by encouraging a similarity focus.

Future work should identify potential boundary conditions of the findings. Further, all studies use ascribed social groups. Future work should explore whether consumers relate differently to different social group, such as achieved groups, non-human groups or aspirational groups.

Adverts using established descriptors of a brand’s target social group may no longer fit the brand’s positioning. Understanding when and when not to use less established group descriptors to market brands is important for practitioners.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research to explore the conditions under which priming consumers’ identity using less/more established (i.e. low/high in prototypicality) descriptors has a beneficial, or detrimental, effect on consumers’ purchase intention. In understanding these effects, the authors draw on consumers’ self-motives underlying cognitive and affective identification, a distinction not yet made in the identity-linking communications literature. The authors also explore the mediating role of hope – a central motivating emotion – in identity marketing.

Oppositional loyalty toward rival brands is prevalent. Although its antecedents have increasingly received scholarly attention, the literature is rather disparate. Based on identity theory, this study aims to propose that oppositional loyalty is a brand identity-driven outcome and provides a unified framework for understanding the formation and activation of brand identity in influencing oppositional loyalty.

Structural equation modeling was used to test the theoretical framework based on an online survey of 329 brand community members. Multigroup analysis was used to test the moderating effect of inter-consumer brand rivalry and brand community engagement.

The results show that self-brand similarity, brand prestige and brand uniqueness lead to consumers’ brand identity (i.e. consumer-brand identification), which, in turn, facilitates oppositional loyalty. Furthermore, the results indicate that inter-consumer brand rivalry and brand community engagement are identity-salient situations that strengthen the relationship between consumer-brand identification and oppositional loyalty.

Identity has great power in shaping consumer behaviors. Fostering consumer-brand identification is critical for firms to prevent consumers from switching to competing brands. Inter-consumer brand rivalry and brand community engagement can help firms consolidate their customer base by evoking consumers’ brand identity.

This investigation makes theoretical contributions by providing a unified theoretical framework to model the development of oppositional loyalty based on identity theory.

The present research responds to researchers’ calls for more research of consumer animosity on potential boundary conditions (e.g. product categories) and marketing strategies that may mitigate such negative impacts on marketers’ product and/or brand performance, with a special focus on the soft service sector. This paper aims to address the unique characteristics of service internationalization, i.e. cultural embeddedness, hybridized country origins and high consumption visibility, by proposing a social identity signaling model to explain consumer animosity effects in the soft service sector.

Two surveys (Pretest with 240 participants and Study 1 with 351 participants) and one experiment (Study 2 with 731 participants) were conducted to empirically test our hypotheses in the Japanese-Chinese relationship context.

The stronger the national/cultural symbolism and social expressiveness, the stronger the consumer avoidance for the service category. Then the consumer culture positioning strategy that can mitigate an offending country’s cultural symbolism can reduce consumer avoidance.

This research introduces two factors that could affect the negative social identity signaling capacity of service categories in the animosity context: the national/cultural symbolism reflecting an offending country and the social expressiveness communicating social identity. In line with the social identity signaling perspective, the present research specifically uses consumer avoidance as the dependent variable to capture the notion that consumers avoid consuming services because they wish to avoid being associated with an offending country that may threaten their in-group social identities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of incorporating Chinese elements in global brands on consumer purchase likelihood.

Six global brand products from three categories that utilized Chinese elements are used to test hypotheses. The Total Effect Moderation Model is used to analyze by combining moderation and mediation under a general analytical framework.

The results show that cultural compatibility has direct positive effect, in addition to an indirect effect (through local iconness) on purchase likelihood. Meanwhile, consumer cultural identity is found to moderate the impact of brand local iconness on purchase likelihood.

Evaluation and improvement of cultural compatibility in a global brand that incorporates Chinese elements is recommended for multinational marketers entering Chinese consumer markets. Meanwhile, marketers should pay attention to consumer cultural identity in the market segmentation process.

This paper takes a unique perspective to investigate whether and how global brands can succeed when adding local cultural elements to the product design, packaging and promotion in emerging markets like China.

In Brazil, bacalhau dishes represent strong cultural, religious and traditional values. The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical perspective integrating theories on social identity, role‐based identity, and cultural capital to explore multi‐phase bacalhau prosumption. The aim is to understand how consumers maintain their social identity and role‐based identity in this process.

Data gathering is based on focus‐group discussions. A total of 13 focus‐group discussions were developed with 104 consumers from five different cities in Brazil. Discussions of all five phases of bacalhau prosumption reveal how people maintain and reinforce their social identity and role‐based identity.

It was found that consumers achieve their social identity through comparison with both in‐group and out‐group members in what they prosume and how they prosume. Consumers also try to maintain their role‐based identity through continuously comparing their actual behaviour with the behaviour standards associated with the role of being a good host/hostess. While economic capital is expressed by the prosumption objects, cultural capital is reflected in consumer prosumption practices.

This study has developed a new theoretical perspective, integrating theories on social identity, role‐based identity, and cultural capital. This novel perspective is applied to a complex food prosumption context including strong cultural, religious and social elements, and allows us to capture both the “being” and “doing” aspects of bacalhau prosumption.

The aim of the study is to analyse negotiations about ownership and style in access-based apparel related to processes of identity construction.

The study applies a qualitative and interpretative method and relies on semi-structured depth interviews and focus group interviews with clothing library users as the main data source. The conceptual context of this paper is that of consumer culture theory approaches to consumer identity construction and the role of object ownership in consumer identity projects.

The empirical analysis highlights how processes of consumer identity construction related to symbolic values of clothing and self-possession mechanisms related to ownership are negotiated in encounters with access-based types of fashion consumption with effects on potential consumer adoption of access-based forms of consumption. The findings are structured in six analytical themes.

There are several aspects of this research which are of relevance to the sustainability agenda and which have societal implications. Identity has been identified, in previous research, as a key conceptual tool for exploring, predicting and deepening the understanding of pro-environmental and sustainable behaviours. As such, if the aim is to strengthen the commitment of societies to environmental and sustainable behaviours, then this will require greater knowledge of consumers' identities and meaning-making processes. This is a challenge, not least in terms of recognizing the barriers identified in this study as relating to issues of consumer identity construction.

This study reveals multiple possibilities as well as barriers for implementing collaborative apparel consumption schemes in a fashion and apparel context. Some of the barriers might be explained by clothing's emotional character and close relationship to identity formation. Furthermore, the participants questioned whether access and renting services could substitute the meanings of owning. In conclusion, the authors argue that clothing may be a challenging type of goods to integrate in liquid forms of consumption and findings point out complexities amongst fashion-conscious consumers regarding meaning and identity values of collaborative apparel consumption. Theoretical contributions of an interpretative consumer identity approach for understanding barriers as well as possibilities for consumer adoption of access-based fashion are developed in the concluding sections of the article.