Consumer – green brand relationships: revisiting benefits, relationship quality and outcomes
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-09-2016-1316 |
| Published date | 11 March 2019 |
| Date | 11 March 2019 |
| Pages | 166-187 |
| Author | Erifili Papista,Sergios Dimitriadis |
| Subject Matter | Marketing |
Consumer –green brand relationships:
revisiting benefits, relationship
quality and outcomes
Erifili Papista
Athens Laboratory of Research in Marketing, Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece, and
Sergios Dimitriadis
Department of Marketing & Communication, Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece
Abstract
Purpose –The study aims to develop and test a relationship-building model for green brands. It synthesizes findings on the consumer motives
offered by green brands, with relationship marketing and branding literature to the specific context of green brands to build a parsimonious model
testing the links amongst four relational benefits, i.e. confidence, socialization, self-expression and altruism; two relational mediators, i.e.
satisfaction and relationship quality; three behavioural outcomes, i.e. word-of-mouth, expectation of continuity and cross-buying; and two
moderators of the benefits-mediators relationship, i.e. environmental consciousness and relationship length.
Design/methodology/approach –Data are collected from consumers of three brands of natural cosmetic products, totalling 848 qu estionnaires.
Structural equation modelling is used to test the hypothesized relationships across the three brands.
Findings –The results show that confidence benefit has the strongest influence on relationship quality, followed by self-ex pression and altruism.
Relationships quality and satisfaction with the green brand have a significant impact on all three behaviou ral outcomes. Both environmental
consciousness and length of the relationship moderate the hypothesized interrelationships.
Research limitations/implications –A new set of relational benefits for the green context is suggested. Several future research opportunities are
suggested.
Practical implications –The study offers suggestions for managers to leverage relationship benefits for relationship strengthening.
Originality/value –No previous work has studied in an integrated way the relationship benefits and mediators to model the consumer–green brand
relationship. The study provides a better understanding of the antecedents of consumer loyalty towards green brands.
Keywords Relationship quality, Green marketing, Brand relationships, Relationship benefits, Brand loyalty, Green branding
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The market trend of consumer support for green products has
driven a considerable increase in both the number of products
promoted as environmentally friendly and the sales growth
enjoyed by such brands (Borin et al., 2013;Chen, 2010;Lin
et al., 2017a). The current marketplace reveals a mounting
emphasis on environmental sustainability, and firms are
increasingly seeking ways to respond by investing significant
resources in developing environmentallyfriendly new products
(Olsen et al.,2014). The value of the global green market has
experienced a fourfold increase in just four years, rising from
US$209bn in 2011 to US$845bn in 2015 (Leonidou and
Skarmeas, 2017). This increasing market penetration of green
products has shifted the focus of both academics and
practitioners from the initial purchase to repeat purchases, i.e.
the construction of a strong and sustainable relationship
between the consumer and the green brand. This focus on
relationship developmentalso requires a shift from the concept
of the green product to the green brand, whichentails a specific
set of attributes and benefits related to the product’s reduced
environmental impact that builds its brand equity and offers a
significant eco-advantageover its competitors (Hartmann et al.,
2005;Lin et al., 2017a).
However, the development of the consumer–green brand
relationship is an especially difficult task due to the
complexitiesof the specific“green”sector.First of all, the green
consumer faces a number of barriers that inhibit the purchase
of the product, such as augmented prices, increased time and
effort to evaluate and search for the product, extensive
information search (Gleim et al., 2013), which increase the
perception that “it is too hard to be green”, leading ultimately
to inaction (Johnstone and Tan, 2015;Narula and Desore,
2016). Moreover, due to instances of greenwashing, a growing
number of consumers question corporate motives for greening
and doubt the environmental performance of products, which
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on
Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/1061-0421.htm
Journal of Product & Brand Management
28/2 (2019) 166–187
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 1061-0421]
[DOI 10.1108/JPBM-09-2016-1316]
Received 16 September 2016
Revised 30 March 2017
7 January 2018
30 June 2018
Accepted 4 July 2018
166
deters them fromnew or repeat green purchases (Leonidou and
Skarmeas, 2017). Furthermore,environmentally oriented anti-
consumption emerges as an increasingly recognized means of
inducing a transition towards more sustainable products and
environmentally friendly lifestyle (Garcia-de-Frutos et al.,
2018). These context-specific characteristics create significant
needs to identify factors that can influence green consumption
and present a generalframework for green marketing and green
consumption(Groening et al., 2018;He et al., 2015).
Observing such green markets specificities researchers have
called for context-specific work on consumer benefits and
customer-green brand relationship (Hartmann and Apaolaza-
Ibanez, 2006;Lin et al., 2017b), as the consumption of
products with environmental attributes delivers additional
benefits compared to conventionalalternatives (Hartmann and
Apaolaza-Ibanez, 2012). Green brands do provide a specific
value offering or set of consumer motivations stemming from
their environmental productdesign, performance and altruistic
nature, that reinforce supportive consumer behaviour towards
the brand (Ahmad and Thyagaraj, 2015;Chen, 2010).
However existing studies have addressed green brands’
customer benefits and their influence to green brand image,
perceived value and purchase intention in a rather fragmented
way (Hartmann and Apaolaza-Ibanez, 2012;Hartmann et al.,
2005;Lin et al., 2017a), without using integrative relationship
benefits typologies and testing their relative effect to
relationship strength constructs, as the relationship marketing
literature has. Thus, the question as to the benefits that lead to
the construction and strengthening of the consumer–green
brand relationshipremains still largely unanswered.
On this basis, our study represents an attempt to adapt
existing consumer–brand relationship literature to the green
branding contextto develop and test a specific model consisting
of antecedents, mediators and outcomes of the consumer–
green brand relationship. Specifically, this work intents to
contribute to the existing consumer–green brand relationship
knowledge throughtesting:
a context-specific set of relational benefits relevant to the
field of green branding;
the two key mediators, relationship quality (RQ) and
satisfaction, simultaneously; and
the effects of two moderators, environmental
consciousness and length of the relationship, on the
relationship between perceived benefits and mediators.
To the best of our knowledge,this is the first study to:
address the important issue of relational benefits in the
green branding context;
apply an integrative relationship quality framework to
measure green consumers’relational behaviour; and
extend the existing consumer–brand relationship work to
the green branding context.
For practitioners, such an understanding will provide
guidelines on how to strengthenand monitor the bond between
consumers and greenbrands.
Literature review
Our research model is built on the well-establishedsequence of
effects suggestedby the marketing relationshipliterature, which
comprises a set of relational benefits that lead to behavioural
outcomes via the mediating role of satisfaction and/or the
higher-order construct of RQ (Hennig-Thurau et al.,2002;
Palmatier et al., 2006). The literature review is structured in
accordance with these three building blocks.For each building
block, the conceptualizations and findings of relevant studies
from the fields of relationship marketing and branding are
reviewed, then existingevidence on the green branding context
is presented and research hypotheses are developed (see
Figure 1).
The consumer–brand relationship background
Relational benefits
The field of relationship marketing is rich in literature on the
factors that motivate the development of relationships
(Bendapudi and Berry, 1997;Gwinner et al.,1998;Reynolds
and Beatty, 1999;Sheth and Parvatiyar, 1995). Within the
marketing literature, the relationalbenefits approach is one the
dominant theoretical frameworks that explain why consumers
become involved in a relationshipof exchange and maintain the
relationship for long term (Kinard and Capella, 2006;
Palmatier et al.,2006;Yang et al., 2017). The relational
benefits approach is founded on the assumption that, for a
long-term relationship to exist, both the service provider and
the customer must benefit from the relationship (Hennig-
Thurau et al., 2002). Gwinner et al. (1998) define relational
benefits as those benefits that consumers receive from long-
term relationships above and beyond the core product or
service performance and are the first to propose a specific
organized typology of benefits, developed within the context of
services. Building on the Gwinner et al. (1998)initial typology,
subsequent research over time has applied and added several
context-specificbenefits (see Table I).
In the branding field, research has rather sporadically
identified various benefits that contribute to the development
of the consumer–brand relationship (Keller, 1993;Orth et al.,
2004), without testing a specific typology as the field of
relationship marketing has. According to Keller (1993),
benefits are the personal value consumersattach to the product
or service attributes; that is what consumers think the product
or service can do for them, which can be distinguished into
three categories according to the underlying needs to which
they relate: functional, experiential and symbolic (Park et al.,
1986). Although functional brand benefits are of great
importance because they correspond to the product-related
attributes, as consumers are faced with more and more brands
having similar functional promises (Biel, 1991), they tend to
Figure 1 The ConceptualModel
Relationship
Quality
Trust
Commitment
Intimacy
Love/Passion
Self-connection
Satisfaction
Moderators
Env.consciousness
Relationship Length
Relational
Benefits
Confidence
Self-expression
Socialization
Altruistic
Relational
Outcomes
Word-of-mouth
Expectation of
continuity
Cross-buying
Consumer–green brand relationships
Erifili Papista and Sergios Dimitriadis
Journal of Product & Brand Management
Volume 28 · Number 2 · 2019 · 166–187
167
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