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Citizens of the (green) world? Cosmopolitan orientation and sustainability

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Abstract

Contemporary consumer markets are characterized by both a heightened need for sustainability and an increasingly cosmopolitan lifestyle. This article bridges these two trends and studies two untapped questions: (1) How do cosmopolitan consumers relate to sustainable behavior? and (2) How should environmental messages be framed to successfully target cosmopolitan consumers? Four studies in three countries show that high-cosmopolitan consumers demonstrate environmental concern and engage in sustainable behavior. To successfully target this promising segment with sustainable products or messages to promote sustainable behavior, marketers and public policymakers should highlight the benefit of these products/behaviors for the global (rather than the local) environment. However, the findings also show that high-cosmopolitan consumers can be successfully targeted to support local environmental initiatives when activating their local identification. The article offers implications for businesses, non-government organizations, and public policymakers in designing effective messages to promote sustainable behavior.

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Notes

  1. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

  2. Riefler et al. (2012) delineate consumer cosmopolitanism from Global Consumption Orientation (GCO) because these concepts differ in their conceptual domains as well as their consequences. For the research purpose at hand, one might assume that consumers high on GCO would respond strongly to globally framed messages because they are congruent with their preference for globality and their aspirational membership to a global consumer culture (Alden et al., 1999 Hence for a consumer group with strong GCO, one would hypothesize a higher effectiveness of global message frames for sustainable products than local message frames.

  3. The C-Cosmo scale is a conceptually and psychometrically sound measurement instrument and it had been shown not to be affected by social desirability (Riefler et al., 2012).

  4. Study 3 intended to compare the effects of local versus global message frames. For additional insights, a comparison between the superior messages matches (i.e., global message aimed at cosmopolitan consumers and local message aimed at non-cosmopolitan consumers) and a neutral message seems useful. For this purpose, we replicated Study 3, including a control condition (You and your new green car. Contributing to a more environmentally friendly driving) with a sample of 77 American respondents on MTurk. Among high-cosmopolitan consumers, the globally framed condition (US$22,395) was more effective than the neutral condition ($19,294; t(68)=1.839, p=0.070). Among low-cosmopolitan consumers, the locally framed condition ($25,714) was more effective than the neutral condition ($18,722; t(56)=2.057, p=0.044). Further, within the neutral condition, we found no differences between high and low cosmopolitans, which further strengthens the findings on the message frame effects. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

  5. The primed salience of local identity did not affect the salience of the cosmopolitan orientation (t(292)=0.327, p=0.74).

  6. Across all four studies, the mean of cosmopolitan orientation was 5.41 with a standard deviation of 1.02. All empirical cut-off values for high cosmopolitans in Studies 2–4 fall within the range of 1 standard deviation from this overall mean value.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Oliver Buettner, Danit Ein-Gar, Ann Kronrod, and Yael Steinhart for their valuable input on this research. The authors thank Raz Shalev for designing the adverts used in Study 3 and Marco Meier for his methodological input.

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Correspondence to Petra Riefler.

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Accepted by David C Thomas, Area Editor, 28 December 2014. This article was with the authors for three revisions.

The research was conducted when the author was a Visiting Scholar at the Marketing Department, Carroll School of Management, Boston College.

Appendices

APPENDIX A

Measurement Items

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figure b

APPENDIX B

Stimuli of Study 3: Ads Using Global/Local Framing (In Hebrew)

Globally framed/locally framed slogan: You and your new green car. Contributing to a more environmentally friendly world/Israel.

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figure a

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Grinstein, A., Riefler, P. Citizens of the (green) world? Cosmopolitan orientation and sustainability. J Int Bus Stud 46, 694–714 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2015.1

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