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Me, myself, and future generations: The role of affinity and effectiveness in the creation of consumer environmental stewardship (CENS)

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posted on 2016-06-06, 08:33 authored by Niek Hensen, Debbie Keeling, Ko de Ruyter, Martin Wetzels
© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Policymakers, consumer advocate groups, and researchers agree that consumers need to increase their proenvironmental behaviors if a decent standard of living is to be ensured for future generations. Despite high levels of environmental concern, consumers still refrain from large-scale adoption of proenvironmental behaviors. Social marketers agree that a change in attitudes is not enough to stimulate the necessary behavioral change and are looking for ways to help consumers overcome the costs (e.g., price premiums, inconvenience) that are often associated with proenvironmental behaviors. Currently, consumers often see proenvironmental behavior as a trade-off between short-term personal benefits and longer term collective benefits. The authors contribute to the social marketing literature on proenvironmental behavior by introducing the concept of Consumer Environmental Stewardship (CENS), which centers on the use of intrinsic motivation to stimulate a personal sense of responsibility for the environment. The findings, based on a survey and three experiments, show that the stimulation of consumers' affinity with future generations (AFGs) and perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE) can help to promote CENS, which in turn raises proenvironmental behaviors. However, this research also shows that increasing levels of AFGs can backfire and result in lower levels of CENS, if consumers experience low levels of PCE.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Psychology and Marketing

Volume

33

Issue

5

Pages

389 - 406

Citation

HENSEN, N. ...et al., 2016. Me, myself, and future generations: The role of affinity and effectiveness in the creation of consumer environmental stewardship (CENS). Psychology and Marketing, 33(5), pp. 389-406.

Publisher

© Wiley

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016-04-18

Copyright date

2016

Notes

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: HENSEN, N. ...et al., 2016. Me, myself, and future generations: The role of affinity and effectiveness in the creation of consumer environmental stewardship (CENS). Psychology and Marketing, 33(5), pp. 389-406., which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/mar.20882. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

ISSN

0742-6046

eISSN

1520-6793

Language

  • en