Sustainability, Sociodemographic Differences, and Consumer Behavior

Bibliographic Data

ID4770806
AuthorsMartina Topić (0000-0002-5894-2979, Department of Advertising and Public Relations, College of Communication and Information Sciences, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA, corresponding author), Ioannis Kostopoulos (0000-0002-3154-900X, Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK), Miloš Krstić (0000-0002-7937-0543, University of Nis)
Year2024
Volume70
Issue5
Pages583-589
Publication date2024-03-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Behavioral Scientist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7642 • E-ISSN: 1552-3381
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00027642241235822
OpenAlexW4392401717
LanguageEN
References cited21

Modern society is driven by consumerism, and people increasingly use their leisure time and consumption to define who they are.During leisure time, purchasing becomes the primary means of communicating values, attitudes, status, and way of life.In a consumerist culture, an individual needs a steady and growing income to keep up with mass supply and consumption.Life is transforming the cycle of earning and spending like never before, with earnings continually being reinvested into consumption.The many negative effects of employment, long hours, and the need for higher salaries, on the one hand, and consuming as an endless cycle of goods and things, on the other, produce two complementary sides of the consumerist society.(Mont, 2004, Sheth et al., 2011).The increase in consumption has led to a host of environmental issues that have an impact on the community's ability to develop sustainably.Other, crucial environmental problems include climate change, air, water, and land pollution, irrational use of energy, exhaustion of natural resources, etc.The movement that brings back hope in the preservation of basic social and natural values is the movement of sustainable development, and, within it, also green marketing (Otto & Kaiser, 2014).From the above discussion, it becomes apparent that environmental affairs are a hot topic on the news and public agenda, with an increased public and media debate on sustainable behavior.In addition to that, a plethora of research on purchase behavior indicates that people nominally support environmental concerns but do not always follow this up by buying from companies claiming to have green policies (Kanchanapibul, 2014).The latter often comes from cynical attitudes where many people believe that all green business is, in fact, greenwashing, and this is connected to media coverage where studies are showing that media express hostility towards businesses but, at the same time, some authors argued that media stimulate environmental destruction by concurrently advocating for economic growth and the continuation of capitalism whilst nominally calling for action on global warming and climate change (Grayson, 2009

Business · Consumer behaviour · Environmental health · Sustainability · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification · Environmental Education and Sustainability · Environmental Sustainability in Business · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology

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