Sustainable Communication; Perceived Motivation and Nature of the Commitment

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the overlap between sustainable communication and business, as well as its impact on the consumer’s perception and the nature of the motivation. We attempted to create a synthesis of prior research based on a literature review to understand how consumers comprehend corporate sustainability communications. The selection of the articles and related works is based on the presence of the keywords in the Science Direct database. The results provided us with 15 results for the research papers with “sustainable communication” in the title and 46 results with the keyword “sustainable communication” in the title, abstract or author-specified keywords since the year 2000. We synthesized these works and major works in the field according to our model, based on the attribution theory frame. We have emphasized the effect of sustainable communication fit with the company on the consumer’s perception of internal motivation by mobilizing the attribution and congruence theories, while highlighting the importance of the company’s perceived effort and the moderating role of other situational variables.