Social media painting the world green

: assessing the impact of social media’s social influence capabilities on the purchase intentions of environmentally responsible products

Abstract

Planet Earth has never been so sick, and human actions are the major cause of this illness.Shaping consumers’ mind towards more sustainable shopping preferences may be not only thesolution for this problem, but also the only way to assure future generations’ health and welfare.As the world is living a powerful social media revolution, and social influence has proven to besuccessful in eliciting pro-environmental choices, relying on social media’s social influencecapabilities may be an effective way to enhance environmental consciousness in consumption.Indeed, users’ shopping behaviors have shown to be easily affected by the number of brand’s“likes”, influencers’ endorsements and eWOM, so this study aims to examine whether thesesocial nudges positively impact the purchase intentions of environmentally responsibleproducts, both separately and interactively.To accomplish this objective, a 2 (high number of brand’s “likes”, low number of brand’s“likes”) x2 (with influencer, without influencer) x2 (with positive comments, without positivecomments) experimental design was developed. Results show that both influencers and eWOMare important inductors of greener choices, justifying the need to consider them in companies’marketing strategies. The number of brand’s “likes” and the interaction between influencersand eWOM may also impact users’ intentions to buy eco-friendly options, but both effects arestill not precise enough. In turn, contrary to what was expected, when facing the remaininteractions, consumers were not sufficiently influenced to go greener, which suggests that theyhave no effect on the purchase intentions of environmentally responsible products.

Date of Award	27 Jan 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Daniel Fernandes (Supervisor)