Abstract
Most sustainability innovations are adapted to the needs of urban areas. These innovations are either not offered at all in rural areas (e.g., car sharing) or require massive effort and restrictions to be usable or effective (e.g., ride sharing). Delving deeper than the description scholarly research needs to clarify consumers' conceptualization of sustainability in urban and rural areas. Notably, the extent to which sustainable innovations are adopted and their associated adoption dynamics with the consequences for marketers, consumers and society differ between urban and rural. Two research questions are pressing: (i) How do conceptualizations of sustainability differ between rural and urban living consumers? (ii) Which consequences for sustainable marketing management arise from differences and similarities of upstream innovations with downstream dynamics in urban and rural areas? Despite the wide range of previous research, the question of whether consumers living in urban and rural areas have a similar understanding of “sustainability” has not been comprehensively addressed. We consider the literature on both the intention-action gap in sustainability and Value-Belief-Norm Theory. This provides researchers with guidance to reveal divergences in values, motives and enablers for sustainability among people in urban and rural areas. Studies that deepen the understanding of how innovative service and product offers need to be designed to the specificities of urban and rural environments, contribute to clarifying consumers' intention-action gap.
Highlights
Previous work has aptly outlined the steps marketers can take to identify, foster and evaluate sustainable consumer behavior (Peattie and Peattie, 2009; McKenzie-Mohr, 2011; White et al, 2019)
From a marketer’s innovation perspective, most platform-based services require a minimum density of consumers, which is rarely found in rural areas (Illgen and Höck, 2020)
The Urban Rural Marketing Environmental Lab (URMEL) framework developed here in contributes to a conceptual progress overcoming the limitations of the conventional marketing practice aiming to profile green consumers (Diamantopoulos et al, 2003)
Summary
The extent to which sustainable innovations are adopted and their associated adoption dynamics with the consequences for marketers, consumers and society differ between urban and rural. Two research questions are pressing: (i) How do conceptualizations of sustainability differ between rural and urban living consumers? (ii) Which consequences for sustainable marketing management arise from differences and similarities of upstream innovations with downstream dynamics in urban and rural areas? We consider the literature on both the intention-action gap in sustainability and Value-Belief-Norm Theory This provides researchers with guidance to reveal divergences in values, motives and enablers for sustainability among people in urban and rural areas. Studies that deepen the understanding of how innovative service and product offers need to be designed to the specificities of urban and rural environments, contribute to clarifying consumers’ intention-action gap
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