Will Enterprise Feedback Promote Green Repeated Consumption Intention? An Empirical Study on the Impact of Post-consumption Value Feedback on Consumers’ Green Repeated Consumption Intention

Abstract

How to stimulate consumers to sustain and repeat green consumption is not only a realistic problem for enterprises to carry out the all-round diversified green marketing and implement the environment-friendly development strategy, but also an important research field to be urgently promoted by academia. Previous studies have drawn on the relevant theories of environmental psychology and social psychology to deeply analyze consumers’ green consumption behavior. They have taken social psychological factors and their influence mechanism as the research perspective, which has initially formed the research paradigm that takes the three levels of individual psychology, group interaction and social influence as the logical main line to decode the password of green consumption behavior and interpret the attitude-behavior gap. But the existing research basically concentrates on the pre-consumption decision-making process and influencing factors by tacitly approving green consumption behavior as consumers’ first or single consumption behavior, and seldom discusses the post-consumption process and green repeated consumption behavior. In fact, green repeated consumption behavior is significantly different from the first or single green consumption behavior, and its formation mechanism and influencing factors are not clear. Whether and how consumers’ first or previous green consumption behavior affects their green repeated consumption behavior requires further discussion of academia. According to the feedback effect principle, the feedback of the positive result evaluation of individual behavior to the individual will promote and motivate the individual, and strengthen the repetition of individual behavior. The feedback of enterprises to consumers’ post-consumption behavior will affect consumers’ evaluation of the brand and consumption behavior. The positive post-consumption feedback of enterprises can significantly improve consumers’ sense of acquisition, achievement and happiness, and provide them extra meaning beyond benefit to encourage consumers to repeat consumption behavior. In view of the above, in the field of green consumption, whether enterprises’ post-consumption feedback strategies will also form the feedback effect on consumers’ green repurchasing behavior is the main focus of this study. Based on the social exchange theory, warm-glow theory and cognition-emotion theory, this study investigates the effects of different post-consumption value feedback strategies on green repeated consumption intention and verifies the mediating role of warm-glow in the influence mechanism above and the moderating role of feedback timing in the influence mechanism above through three experiments. ExperimentⅠ demonstrates that compared with the non-value feedback, the value feedback of green consumption can significantly enhance consumers’ repeated consumption intention; furthermore, social value feedback has a more positive effect than functional value feedback. ExperimentⅡ demonstrates that warm-glow plays a mediating role in the relationship between the value feedback of green consumption and green repeated consumption intention, and social value feedback can enhance consumers’ warm-glow more than functional value feedback. ExperimentⅢ demonstrates that the mediating effect of warm-glow is moderated by feedback timing, that is, for the instant feedback, the mediation effect of warm-glow does exist, but for the delayed feedback, the mediation effect of warm-glow does not exist. This study provides a new perspective for promoting green repeated consumption, and also provides theoretical basis for enterprises to develop efficient green post-consumption marketing strategies.