Promoting sustainability through social marketing: examples from New Zealand

This paper investigates the social marketing of sustainability in New Zealand and examines the usefulness of advertising campaigns to enlist and empower people, as both consumers and citizens, towards environmental care. It draws on discussions about ‘citizen‐consumer subjectivities’ and the model of the ‘political economic person’, which link sustainability and consumption through asserting people’s capacities as reflecting citizens. Printed advertisements by local and national government agencies about air pollution, fuel dependency and energy consumption are analysed to see whether advertising campaigns can operate on multiple levels for a range of audiences – desirable for broadening understanding of sustainable consumption and dealing with the complexity and experiential aspects of ‘doing’ sustainability. The advertisements analysed have an authoritative dimension that downplays this complexity and variability. The paper concludes that these advertisements do not go far enough to involve individuals in processes of co‐producing knowledge about sustainability, and to vest them with expertise in exercising sustainability in their daily lives. The implications are that advertising campaigns that engage with the complexity surrounding consumption in people’s modern lives, and with variability in meanings of sustainability, have the possibility of inciting citizen‐consumer political subjectivities.     

Inclusive or exclusive? Investigating how retail technology can reduce old consumers’ barriers to shopping

This paper investigates older consumers in-store shopping experiences and the barriers that they face. The aim is to understand how new retail technologies (e.g., interactive in-store displays, self-service tills, robots etc.) can help seniors access satisfying, autonomous retail experiences, helping them to achieve a sense of inclusion in physical retail settings. Drawing upon the social inclusion/exclusion theory and information overload theory, the research employs a qualitative approach based on an inductive design, including face-to-face semi structured interviews with 36 consumers aged 75+. The findings highlight (i) old consumers have scarce interactions with in-store technologies (adding knowledge to motivations literature), (ii) the need to develop new technologies to support these consumers, and (iii) the extent to which these technologies are excluding rather than including old consumers (adding knowledge to the drivers of the field of exclusion). Results provide guidelines for retailers to enhance the sense of inclusion for old consumers through a better usage of new technologies.     

一种新的服务开发理念:可持续服务创新

随着环保和可持续发展的观念日益深入人心,环保意识和环保消费创造了新的市场需求,不仅在制造业领域,而且在服务业领域都应当重视和实践可持续发展式的经营管理。将可持续发展的思想用于服务创新理论的理念,对实施可持续服务创新具有重要意义。归纳总结可持续服务创新的主要途径,旨在引起服务业对可持续发展思想的足够重视,为实施可持续服务创新提供一定的参考。     

论经济发展中的文化因素

随着人们对经济现象和文化现象之间关系的兴趣的增长 ,文化和经济发展的关系开始得到关注。在实践的发展援助世界推动下 ,对文化在发展中国家的经济增长和变迁过程中的作用的认可 ,逐渐变得更加明显。发展思维逐步从以商品为中心的发展模式转向以人为中心的发展模式。     

Introduction on the European Corporate Sustainability Framework (ECSF)

This article describes the European Corporate Sustainability Framework (ECSF). This framework addresses complex issues such as Corporate Sustainability, Corporate Responsibility and Corporate Change. It is a conceptual framework based on the tradition of the quality management approach and the concept of phase-wise development. The framework is based on several theories and models, all proven individually over several decades. These theories are the Emergent Cyclical Levels of Existence Theory (ECLET) of Professor Graves, The Four Phase Model^© (Hardjono), EFQM's Business Excellence Model, Kaplan and Norton's Business Balanced scorecard, the research deliverables of the project The European Way to Excellence and the SqEME^® methodology. All these models, theories and/or studies belong to the interpretative sociology (Milwax Burell and Morgan, 1992). The aim of the ECSF is to support organizations in their implementation of Corporate Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility (CS-R) by addressing the ambiguity and complexity of these issues.     

Governmental and Corporate Role in Diffusing Development Technologies: Ethical Macromarketing Imperatives

SUMMARY

Despite the recent growth and globalization of production and trade, global income inequalities are widening, especially among the developing nations and global sustainability is weakening. We suggest a macromarketing approach to resolve this situation. It is in the best interest of the governments and the multinational corporations of the developed world to offer and diffuse their development technologies among the developing nations. We apply the theories of economic resources, development technologies, global sustainability and distributive justice to characterize the nature, structure and ethics of such developmental interventions.     

Away from home: How young Chinese consumers travel with global brands?

This interpretive study investigates how a group of young Chinese students consume global brands of American origins, in China and in the UK. More specifically, this research examines how meanings attached to global food brands travel abroad with consumers and investigates the relationship between brand consistency and brand meanings across national boundaries. Findings from a thematic analysis of focus group interviews conducted over a nine-month period, reveal that some brand meanings are context and culture specific (contextual meanings) while other meanings travel with consumers across borders (core meanings). Theoretically, this study shows how global brands provide a platform of structural meanings, ideas and practices that are global and globalising in themselves, allowing a degree of fluidity and adaptation in relation to the local context of consumption.     

The Ethics of Online Retailing: A Scale Development and Validation from the Consumers’ Perspective

While e-commerce has witnessed extensive growth in recent years, so has consumers’ concerns regarding ethical issues surrounding online shopping. The vast majority of earlier research on this area is conceptual in nature, and limited in scope by focusing on consumers’ privacy issues. This study develops a reliable and valid scale to measure consumers’ perceptions regarding the ethics of online retailers (CPEOR). Findings indicate that the four factors of the scale – security, privacy, non-deception and fulfillment/reliability – are strongly predictive of online consumers’ satisfaction and trust. The results offer important implications for e-retailers and are likely to stimulate further research in the area of e-ethics from the consumers’ perspective. Sergio Román is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Murcia (Spain). He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Arizona. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Business Research, International Marketing Review, International Journal of Market Research, European Journal of Marketing and Journal of Marketing Management. His research interests are focused on personal selling and sales management, international marketing and business ethics.     

Effect of Consumers’ Attitude on Buying Organic Products in Iran

In this study, the effect of consumers’ attitude toward buying organic products in local markets is investigated. The purpose of this study is to help contribute to the economic development of rural areas in Iran, specially the north. Ten demographic factors, including better taste, price, availability of supply markets, high quality, good health, proper behavior of sellers, adaptation to environment, advertising effect, and keeping up with the Joneses, were considered as effective attitudinal factors in buying of products. Data were collected through questionnaires, based on a sample of 405 specimens during 5 months. Dumb variables regression was used to test the hypotheses. Results showed that except for two factors (gender and residence), other factors have a significantly positive effect on purchasing. Consumers’ satisfaction of price and ease of access to markets were interesting points of research; also proving the effect of keeping up with the Joneses on consumer purchasing is the most important finding of the research, studied for the first time on organic products.     

Exploring factors which motivate older consumers’ self-service technologies (SSTs) adoption

Although the proportion of the older population is growing, the majority of research on technology adoption behaviour, such as the adoption of self-service technologies (SSTs), tends to focus on younger consumers. To fill this gap, this study is designed to explore factors which motivate older consumers’ adoption of SSTs by applying Gatignon and Robertson’s diffusion process model. Responses were collected from 104 respondents who were aged 55 or over and who had used self-checkouts in the past. The data were analysed using partial least squares path modelling with SmartPLS 3.0 software. The results indicate that perceptions of SST characteristics, including usefulness, enjoyment, and control, are indirect antecedents of older consumers’ SST adoption through service quality and/or perceived risk. Another key predictor of older consumers’ adoption of SST is prior usage experience with SSTs, which strongly influences usefulness and compatibility. Findings from this study contribute to the literature because little research has explored what drives older consumers to use SSTs.     

基于SEAM的河南省经济可持续发展实证分析

经济可持续发展是经济发展的内在要求。运用社会生态核算矩阵对河南省近年的经济可持续发展能力进行评估,结果发现虽然该省经济可持续发展能力逐渐增强,但仍然处于偏弱的范围,存在人口、经济结构和环境资源等制约因素,并提出统一认识、优化经济结构和统筹人口、资源、环境和经济发展等政策建议。     

Can fast-food consumers be loyal customers,if so how? Theory,method and findings

Customer loyalty studies generally indicate that fast-food customers are not genuinely loyal to brands or products mainly because they function under low-switching cost conditions. The purpose of this research is to empirically study whether fast-food customers genuinely become loyal and, if so, how. The study adopts the theory and method of the satisfaction-trust-commitment-loyalty explanation chain and examines the consumer survey results obtained under conditions of low-switching costs. Analyses of the results indicate that the proposed relationships provide appropriate explanatory power for the phenomenon at hand and that fast- food customers truly become loyal despite conditions of low-switching costs. The findings and the research and practical implications are thoroughly discussed.