Unpacking the Ethically-Minded Consumer: Understanding the Role of Personal Journeys in Alignment of Purchase Intentions and Shopping Behaviour

Ethically-minded consumers rarely translate their ethical values into ethical purchasing behaviour (Auger & Devinney, 2007). In this study, we take an ethnographic approach to understand how the broad features of ethically-minded consumers’ lives impact the mis/alignment of their shopping/consuming practices with their ethical concerns. Through exploring the lives of ‘hard-core’ ethically-minded consumers, the ‘personal journey to conscious consumption’ emerged as a life project that was common yet unique for each informant, and had a determinate role in the mis/translation of their ethical concerns into their shopping baskets. The ‘journey’ concept and other significant emergent themes are presented in this paper.

Citation:

Michal Carrington, Benjamin Neville, and Gregory Whitwell (2011) ,"Unpacking the Ethically-Minded Consumer: Understanding the Role of Personal Journeys in Alignment of Purchase Intentions and Shopping Behaviour", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 9, eds. Alan Bradshaw, Chris Hackley, and Pauline Maclaran, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 599-601.