Examining the Mechanism of the Attitude-Behavior Gap in Ethical Consumption and the Concept of Creating Value from Ethical Factors

Abstract

Although consumers express their willingness to adopt ethical products, they rarely actually purchase such products. The reason for this attitude-behavior gap is that social desirability bias leads to positive attitudes in marketing surveys, while ambiguity of benefits leads to negative behavior in real life. To resolve this discrepancy, there is a need to evaluate the main factors of a product comprehensively, but current literature is limited to ethical factors only. This study complements this knowledge with two surveys targeting the Japanese coffee market. In the first study, loyalty factors were examined using structural equation modeling. Positive effects were found for brand, product quality, and sales channels, with a negative effect only for ethical factors. In other words, the survey obtained responses that were not subject to social desirability bias. Hence, we conducted a demonstration to ensure that ethical factors are recognized as a value. The second study showed through a randomized controlled trial that the concept of product quality brought about by good working conditions on farms is more appealing than the concept of presenting poverty issues.

Keywords

• ethical coffee
• social issues
• social desirability bias