Shades of Green: The Role of Emotions and Temporal Distance in Sustainable Consumption

摘要

Companies have devoted much effort to creating and implementing green communication strategies to encourage consumers to buy environmentally friendly products.Given consumers’low adoption of environmentally friendly products(Bodur et al., 2014);extant research focuses on the communication of such products(Olsen et al., 2014).The time framing is particularly germane in the communication of environmentally friendly products because emphasized environmental benefits through communication are geared to either the future or present(Chang et al., 2015), which is also connected to the construal level(Trope and Liberman, 2003,2010).Moreover, emotion literature also demonstrates that temporal focus could affect people's affective state(Mogilner et al., 2012);therefore, temporal frame needs to be matched with the right emotional appraisal(Bulbul and Menon, 2010).However, how emotions in interaction with the temporal frame might be driving or hindering sustainable consumption through messaging is unknown.This raises the research question of this paper”how do message frame and temporal construal interact to elicit consumers’emotions in the context of sustainable consumption! This conceptual paper aims to answer this research question and extend the understanding of the communication of sustainable consumption by integrating different streams in the literature such as emotions and temporal construal.