Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date

2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Business Administration

Committee Chair

George Deitz

Committee Member

Mehdi Amini

Committee Member

Orrin Cooper

Committee Member

Subhash Jha

Abstract

Green research in marketing is a rich field with multiple financial and brand implications to the firms and their stakeholders including consumers. This three-essay dissertation examines two important research streams in green marketing, organic food product attribute importance, and food safety transgressions. The first essay applies bibliometric methods to analyze the literature on green research in marketing. Based on the keyword analysis and literature review the essay identifies several gaps in green marketing research and offers potential research opportunities. Guided by the first essay’s insights, the second essay focuses on the relative importance of the organic food product attributes that influence consumer purchase decisions. The AHP analysis provides the relative importance of the attributes and finds that health is a major motivator for the purchase of organic foods. Moreover, clustering revealed three consumer segments based on the order of preference for the organic food attributes. The third essay investigates the effect of food safety transgressions on consumer reactions. Using the perspective of construal level theory, the essay specifically examines the effect of psychological distance of the transgression on consumer purchase intention and negative reactions like word of mouth, complaining, and boycotting. The essay focuses on three contextual factors: the chronic mindset of the consumers, perceived efforts of the firm, and gender. A one-factor experimental design studying the detrimental effects of food safety transgression demonstrates that the presence of low perceived efforts of the firm further strengthens the negative reactions. However, there were no effects of the high perceived efforts on the consumer’s negative reactions. Our findings advocate high efforts of the firm and strong prior relationships with the consumers offering a more nuanced understanding of the consumer relationships with the firms.

Comments

Data is provided by the student

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest.

Notes

Embargoed until 7/13/2024

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