Ngan Vo

How can marketers encourage consumers to choose sustainable apparel products? As consumer skepticism toward firms' sustainability efforts increases, it becomes increasingly important to understand the conditions under which consumers are more likely to purchase sustainable apparel products. Our research suggests that employing a simple, low-cost, and subtle nostalgia marketing intervention can offer a promising approach. A field study conducted with a genuinely sustainable activewear brand on social media platforms demonstrates that triggering nostalgic feelings can increase consumers' click-through rates. Four follow-up studies across various product categories, including jeans, running shoes, and activewear, show that nostalgia increases participants' purchase intention for sustainable apparel. Our findings also indicate that this nostalgia-evoked approach is especially effective among consumers with low levels of environmental consciousness, offering valuable insights for marketers seeking to deliver genuinely sustainable apparel products to the market.

This study investigated how goal frames (gain, non-loss, loss) either with or without efficacy statements affect consumers’ support for climate-change policy. Addressing the goal-framing literature’s difficulty in establishing a guiding theory with consistent findings, we (1) propose fear appeal theory as an alternative framework to guide goal-framing research; (2) test five fear appeal variables (fear, perceived threat, hope, perceived efficacy, and message processing) as mediators of goal-framing effects on policy support; and (3) highlight four common goal-framing confounds that may partly underlie the literature’s inconsistent findings. Aligning with fear appeal theory, results from a carefully controlled experiment revealed that a more threatening loss frame paired with an efficacy statement produced the strongest pro-policy attitudes and the greatest willingness-to-pay by successfully balancing fear/threat with hope/efficacy and by producing deeper message processing.