Fairtrade coffee consumption in Spain: Employing dual attitudes and construal level theory to draw insights on the ethical purchasing gap

Abstract

As a contribution to the debate about Fair Trade contributions to the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals, this article investigates Spanish shoppers' behaviour towards Fairtrade coffee. Although consumers generally state that they purchase fairly traded products, the market shares of most of them remain low, a phenomenon known as the ethical purchasing gap. Our review identifies a gap in extant literature to draw insights on the ethical purchasing gap, utilising two existing theories: attitudes and construal level as appropriate theoretical framework. The first theory highlights the duality of individuals' attitudes towards an object: explicit attitudes are accessible to the consumers, whereas implicit attitudes are the ones they cannot recall, but nonetheless affect behaviour. The second theory examines the influence of low-level construal (concrete, specific) or high-level construal (general) information on decision-making. A three-stage experiment took place in two sessions in a large university in Madrid in order to apply these two theories. It was based on an online survey on explicit attitudes and purchase intention, and an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to identify implicit attitudes. It was run two weeks apart to capture three points of time effects. The results reveal that, despite exposure to different stimuli, implicit attitudes remain stable along three points of time. The average difference in purchase intentions was positive for low-level construal and negative for high-level construal. Explicit attitudes were not influenced by the exposure to the stimuli. No correlation was found between purchase intentions and implicit or explicit attitudes. These findings have useful managerial implications for both Fair Trade practitioners and academics.