Leveraging COVID-19 Outbreak for Shaping a More Sustainable Consumer Behavior

The mediating role of exogenous shocks in green purchase intention: evidence from italian fashion industry in the Covid-19 era

This work investigates how the COVID-19 outbreak has affected consumers’ green purchasing intention in the fashion industry. It examines how this exogenous shock has influenced the relationship between consumer green purchasing intention and its three relevant antecedents (environmental knowledge (EK), environmental concern (EC), eco-friendly behaviour (EFB)). A survey of 1433 Italian consumers was carried out. The data were analysed through a structural equation modelling method to evaluate the direct and indirect mediating effects of the COVID-19 shock on the relationship between green purchasing intention and its antecedents (i.e., EK, EC and EFB) by considering traditional and online purchasing channels. The results of the model confirmed a positive relationship between green purchasing intention and its antecedents. The COVID-19 pandemic was also found to positively mediate the relationship between green purchase intention and two out of its three antecedents (i.e., EK and EC) in both traditional and online purchasing channels. This paper contributes to the literature on sustainable consumption by assessing magnitude of the relationship between green purchasing intention and its antecedents, and the mediating role exerted by a complex exogenous shock such as the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Effect of Fear of COVID-19 on Green Purchase Behavior in Pakistan: A Multi-Group Analysis Between Infected and Non-infected

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and its effects on an individual's life have altered the consumer behavior. In the context of purchase and consumption, a shift from conventional to green purchase has been noticed. Although the factors underlying this shift were relatively unexplored, the study aimed to identify the factors that influenced a significant role in the green purchases during the outbreak and the relationship of these factors with green purchase behavior (GPB). Subsequently, this study investigates and interprets the role of fear of COVID-19 (FCV), psychological distress (PD), and mortality salience (MS) in predicting consumer's GPB. This research adopted a quantitative methodology using data collected from 432 respondents in various cities across Pakistan. Smart-PLS 3 was used to evaluate the measurement model, structural model, and multi-group analysis (MGA). Despite having the negative psychological and physical impact of the pandemic, a significant proportion of customers have switched to healthier and sustainable products. This research revealed that the FCV, PD, and MS plays a substantial role in adopting GPB. All the direct relationships were positive and significant. In addition, MS and PD partially mediate the effect of FCV on GPB. Furthermore, the MGA revealed that the infected respondents were interested in purchasing green products than uninfected respondents due to their FCV; conversely, the PD and MS were higher in uninfected individuals than infected ones. However, there is a vast literature on GPB, but little has investigated the cumulative impact of FCV, PD, and MS on GPB.

Sustainable Tourism Issues in European Countries during the Global Pandemic Crisis

Sustainable economic growth can be achieved through tourism by protecting the environment, maintaining natural resources, creating employment, improving cultural diversity, and recognizing cultural heritage values. The concept of tourism sustainability is gradually growing globally and becoming a dominant aspect in modern business, as companies need to meet stakeholders’ demands regarding environmental management. Sustainable tourism incorporates environmental, social, economic, and cultural issues into operations. The demand for green tourism, ethical consumption, protection of natural resources, and living close to nature is expected to increase. In particular, the latter gains more and more popularity due to the stress caused by the global pandemic and also because values have been re-evaluated at every level of society. In this paper, we explore sustainability in the tourism industry within the international context during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a specific focus on tourism in 35 European countries for the period between January 2020 and September 2021. We aimed to study the impact of tourism on sustainability based on the Eurostat database, using cluster analysis and descriptive statistics. The results indicate that tourism will recover slightly, even though the pandemic will continue, recording different effects in European countries. Furthermore, we highlight the relationship between income and tourism, the clusters on tourism being significantly different according to income. The results also identify potential recovery options to align this business area with global sustainable development goals, generate effective transformational change, and suggest how to create a viable growth process pushed by a glocal perspective.

Consumer Knowledge Sharing Behavior and Consumer Purchase Behavior: Evidence from E-Commerce and Online Retail in Hungary

The twenty-first century has been full of fundamental changes in consumers’ behavior patterns, especially with the use of diverse social media knowledge-sharing platforms. Therefore, companies have highlighted the significance of knowledge sharing and the importance of social network use in purchasing processes. Accordingly, his paper tries to reveal how consumer purchase behavior (CPB) can be affected by consumer knowledge sharing behavior (CKSB) and the moderating role played by value co-creation dimensions, which are citizenship behavior (CB) and participation behavior (PB), within a sustainable e-commerce field. To test our hypotheses deducted from the literature review, we opted for the PLS-SEM method. We also employed other innovative approaches, such as the IPMA matrix, MAICOM test, FIMIX approach, and CTA analysis, to evaluate the outer and inner model. Our statistical population covered individuals living in Hungary with at least one online purchase involvement. We distributed the questionnaire via various online platforms and, finally, 433 completed questionnaires were prepared for analysis. The results showed that CPB, CB, and PB are positively influenced by the CKSB. However, the link between CPB and CB was not confirmed. As for the moderating role of gender, the permutation test was applied to compare male and female groups and see the difference between them. With a focus on CKSB, this study contributes to the success of international marketing strategies to attain higher competitive advantages.

Sustainable Consumption in Consumer Behavior in the Time of COVID-19: Topic Modeling on Twitter Data Using LDA

By using text mining techniques, this study identifies the topics of sustainable consumption that are important during the COVID-19 pandemic. An Application Programming Interface (API) streaming method was used to extract the data from Twitter. A total of 14,591 tweets were collected using Twitter streaming API. However, after data cleaning, 13,635 tweets were considered for analysis. The objectives of the study are to identify (1) the topics users tweet about sustainable consumption and (2) to detect the emotion-based sentiments in the tweets. The study used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm for topic modeling and the Louvain algorithm for semantic network clustering. NRC emotion lexicon was used for sentiment analysis. The LDA model discovers six topics: organic food consumption, food waste, vegan food, sustainable tourism, sustainable transport, and sustainable energy consumption. While the Louvain algorithm detects four clusters—lifestyle and climate change, responsible consumption, energy consumption, and renewable energy, sentiment analysis results show more positive emotions among the users than the negative ones. The study contributes to existing literature by providing a fresh perspective on various interconnected topics of sustainable consumption that bring global consumption to a sustainable level.

Water, Energy, Food, Waste Nexus: Between Synergy and Trade-Offs in Romania Based on Entrepreneurship and Economic Performance

Boosting the externalities across the water, energy, food, and waste (WEFW) sectors is challenging, especially considering tightening constraints such as population growth, climate change, resource-intensive lifestyles, increased waste production, sanitary crises and many others. The nexus approach supports the transition to a more sustainable future because intersectoral trade-offs can be reduced and externalities exploited, making imperative for decision makers, entrepreneurs, and civil society to simultaneously engage, with respect to all the components of the nexus. This research addressed intersectoral synergies and trade-offs in the case of the WEFW nexus in Romania, judging from the perspectives of entrepreneurial activity and economic results. The objective of this research was to explore the nexus in-depth by statistically analyzing the financial and economic indicators reported by active enterprises at county-level, based on the Romanian Ministry of Public Finance data. Research results describe the effects of the policies implemented in the fields of WEFW sectors. At the same time, attention was paid to the quality of the entrepreneurial activity, analyzed from the perspective of economic performance. This paper fills a research gap regarding the WEFW nexus by resorting to an economic and entrepreneurial performance assessment in order to find sectoral pathways toward policy cohesion in Romania. Findings suggested the existence of major trade-offs among sectors, owing to the fact that each county has a different development degree.

Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Make Consumers Shop Alone? The Role of Emotions and Interdependent Self-Construal

The paper aims to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and possible future global epidemic events on shopping behavioral patterns. Specifically, the paper investigates consumer pandemic-related isolation behavior (which manifests itself via preference for shopping without leaving home, and avoiding contact with other people while shopping offline) as a consequence of consumer interdependent self-construal, with the mediating role of consumer pandemic-related emotions of disgust, fear for oneself, fear for others, and sadness. The results of two surveys conducted in different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland (October 2020, and January 2021, respectively) suggest two opposing indirect effects of interdependent self-construal on isolation behavior: a positive effect through disgust, and a negative effect through sadness. Additionally, a positive indirect effect through fear was visible in the second study. Moreover, two dimensions of interdependent self-construal (i.e., vertical and horizontal) are demonstrated to have opposing effects (a positive effect and a negative one, respectively) on pandemic-related disgust, and in turn on isolation behavior. The above results indicate that, in the context of the pandemic, consumer self-construal influences pandemic-related emotions, and in turn consumers’ tendency to isolate themselves. Implications for marketers and society were discussed from the perspective of economic and sustainability goals.