From Green to Ethical Consumers: What Really Motivates Consumers to Buy Ethical Products?

Abstract

Ethical consumers have evolved from boycotting to consuming and ethical consumption has attracted much attention from marketing researchers recently. Several studies have been conducted to understand what motivates consumers to buy certain ethical products such as fair trade, eco-friendly or animal-friendly. While a number of disparate, and primarily descriptive, studies have identified motivations of ethical consumers towards an array of different products and in a variety of contexts, researchers are yet to develop a more generalizable framework for understanding ethical consumption motivations. In this paper, we present a framework of four universal motivations to explain why consumers buy ethical products.