Social Sustainability as Buying Local: Effects of Soft Policy, Meso-Level Actors, and Social Influences on Purchase Intentions

Abstract

Recently issued United Nations Sustainable Development Goals call for people to make extensive behavioral changes, including consuming food more sustainably. The authors explore the role that meso-level retailers play in local purchasing, an activity that the United Nations recognizes as a contributor to sustainability. In so doing, the authors promote more balance within the marketing literature, which has focused more on the environmental component of products and purchasing and less on the local dimension. This article spotlights "soft" policies, those that use persuasion and encourage voluntary action, rather than direct methods, such as subsidies and regulations. The authors develop a core hypothesis about how social norm messages and attitudes toward local food affect consumer purchase intentions. They test this hypothesis across national contexts via online surveys of 316 Italian consumers (Study 1) and 186 U.S. consumers (Study 2). The analysis reveals that in both countries, the effectiveness of social norm messages increases with unfavorable attitudes toward local buying. The study concludes with thoughts for researchers and policy makers about how meso-level actors, such as retailers, can elicit more local purchasing.

How Does Retail Engage Consumers in Sustainable Consumption? A Systematic Literature Review

“…Examples of non-food products are sportswear [72], fashion products [44,73], clothing [39], fashion, beauty, and home décor [74], laundry detergent, and sanitizing wipes [75]. Researchers studied ecological, green, and sustainable products, such as ecological food products [76], eco-friendly products [77], grocery products with an eco-label [49], eco-labelled food [78], eco-fashion [79], green food and groceries [80], green fashion products [52], green products [81], sustainable seafood [38], apples from the sustainable food categories [40], sustainable household and personal care products [58], environmentally sustainable apparel [82], sustainability certified food products [41], and local food products [50].…”

“…Most articles were limited to one country. The rest of the articles considered/compared two or more countries: seven [38], five [54], four [41,73], and two countries [46,50,55,60].…”

“…Most articles focus on European markets, especially the UK [38][39][40][41]46,[53][54][55]60,70,[83][84][85] and Sweden [41][42][43]46,47,54,59,72,74,76,77,86]. Other European countries considered by the reviewed articles include Austria [41], Belgium [45,73,78], Denmark [41,54], France [38,49,54], Finland [87], Germany [38,54,60,73], Italy [38,50], Netherlands [51,73,88], Norway [38], Poland [38], Spain [38], and Switzerland [69,73]. American markets are represented only by the USA…”

“…Other European countries considered by the reviewed articles include Austria [41], Belgium [45,73,78], Denmark [41,54], France [38,49,54], Finland [87], Germany [38,54,60,73], Italy [38,50], Netherlands [51,73,88], Norway [38], Poland [38], Spain [38], and Switzerland [69,73]. American markets are represented only by the USA [50,55,75,81,82,89] and Canada [71]. The Asian markets that were studied include Australia [80,90], Hong Kong [79], Japan [48], Korea [44,52], Taiwan [57], and New Zealand [58].…”

“…To encourage pro-environmental behaviour (e.g., the purchasing of green products), retailers can use realistic descriptive norm information about a minority behaviour [49]. The strategy of making reference to social norms in the marketing communication of retailers (e.g., "Join the millions of Italians that buy local" or "Join the Millions of Americans in Buying Local Produce") is a way to instil such norms related to sustainable consumption [50].…”