KOREASCHOLAR

As environmental pollution and natural resource depletion are seriously threatening human beings’ well-being, consumers’ concern about environmental issues has substantially increased. Accordingly, increasing consumers consider themselves to be environmentalists and support environmental protection by consuming green products. In response, more and more firms follow the popular trend by conducting green marketing practices. As a result, green markets are demonstrating greater growth compared to conventional markets these days. On the other hand, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are transforming the way of consumer-firm interactions in various industries including the green industry. More and more industries and firms adopt AI agents to replace or assist human employees. Deposit the pervasive and rapid nature of the transformation, however, we have limited knowledge of how the transformation of consumer-firm interaction influences green product marketing practices. Accordingly, the current research aims to investigate how the adoption of AI agents in green marketing strategies impacts consumers’ responses and further explore which mechanism underlying the process. To examine our hypotheses, we conducted a series of studies, and we collected the data through an online survey platform. Our findings demonstrated that consumers’ reaction was sufficiently different when they interact with AI agent compared to human agent in a green consumption context. Our findings contribute to enriching prior literature on green and AI by integrating each other and also provide practical implications for marketers in the related industries.

• Sunhwa Choi(China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
• Youjae Yi(Seoul National University)