As the general public’s awareness of the environmental problems associated with economic growth have increased, interests in eco-friendly products have also increased for the past few decades. However, many consumer surveys and sales data indicate that while many consumers believe that buying eco-friendly products is important for protection of environment, actual adoption of those products are far below what has been expected. This discrepancy between consumers’ beliefs and actions regarding eco-friendly products purchase suggests that consumers do not purchase eco-friendly products solely based on environmental concerns and environmental merits of products. Then, what is the decisive determinants of consumer’s decisions to buy of green products? Previous researches showed that many people usually are reluctant to buying green products because of high price compared to conventional products (Hopkins and Roche 2009; Thakur and Aurora 2015), but if people perceived additional value to self (e.g. functional value, social value, emotional value, economic value, epistemic value), people are willing to buy green product (Lin and Huang 2012; Jung and Kim 2014; Renfro 2010). In other words, the perceived personal value for money, associated price and benefits of product, can be importantly decisive determinants of eco-friendly buying decisions. Moreover, among many values or benefits, economic benefit such as monetary savings can be an effective factor to adaption of green product. This is because that many consumers are very sensitive to price of green products as many researchers argued, and economic benefit is so visible and computable that reduce consumer’s perceived cost. Therefore, for inducing the adaption of green product, the way of appealing and presenting product information about price premium and potential economic benefits is very important in marketing communication with consumers. However, the extant many researches have focused on highlighting that which benefits of product depending on individual difference is more attractive to people, rather than both price and benefit. There is a general lack of study on this issue in the extant literature. Furthermore, previous experiments about green products have another limitation that it is difficult to reflect the real choice of green product. Many empirical researches have focused on an attitude toward product or advertisement, a preference or a purchase intention as dependent variables, which are mostly used for predicting consumer’s choice of product. However, choice does not always and reflect the attitude toward product or advertisement, preference or purchase intention. Thus, the more research reflected actual choice of green product or conventional product is considerably needed. To fill the gap in the extant literature, this research develops and tests hypotheses on how different presentations of price premiums and monetary savings of eco-friendly products affect consumers’ choice of those product, based on extended Thaler (1985)’s Hedonic editing hypothesis of mental accounting theory, which this study proposed. In extended Thaler’s Hedonic editing hypothesis, alternative presentation (all of segregation) is added to original Thaler’s Hedonic editing hypothesis, to compensate for limitation of original hypothesis that most fragmentarily consider two attributes of product (e.g. one gain and one loss, one gain and one gain), even though attributes of products can be composed of several attributes. Therefore, this research investigates whether presenting price premiums and monetary savings in an integrated manner, a segregated manner or an all of segregated manner leads to differential choices, depending on the relative sizes of monetary gains and losses of various eco-friendly products. Additionally, this study also analyze the moderating effect of consumer’s product involvement. According to ELM model (Petty and Cacioppo 1979), the different methods of inducing persuasion may work in decision-making process, depending on level of involvement. To be specific, under high involvement, conditions the quality of the arguments contained in a message has had a greater impact on persuasion (central route). While, under low involvement conditions, peripheral cues such as attractiveness of a message source or the number of positive or negative messages have had a greater impact on persuasion (peripheral route). Therefore, this study suggests that consumers with low product involvement will more choose green product in message condition, which has the greatest number of positive information, while the consumers with low product involvement will have no difference in choice of green product, depending on different presentation. This study conducted an experiment about a choice between green product and non-green product on different presentation of monetary costs and benefits (integration, segregation, all of segregation), in each types of product (multiple gain product, mixed gain product, mixed loss product). We selected representative product for each type of product, after investigating market research (multiple gain product-washing machine; mixed gain product-LED bulb and rechargeable battery; mixed loss product-hybrid car) as shown in Table 1, and the price of each green and conventional product and cost saving amount of green product is based on real product’s attributes, in an experiment. In doing so, this study analyzed and compared the proportion of choice of green product in each conditions, by using omnibus chi-square test with SPSS 21.0 (Sharpe 2015). The findings of the empirical study shows that the effect of presentations of price and monetary savings is only significant to low product involvement consumer in all product categories, excepted for hybrid car. The results showed that low involvement consumers make many choices of green product in condition, which has the greatest number of positive information. Specifically all of segregation is the most persuasive than other presentation for LED bulb to low involvement consumer, but all of segregation is the less persuasive for rechargeable battery. This results indicate that the persuasive way of presentation is different depending on attributes of each product although LED bulb and rechargeable battery is classified as same types of product. The contribution of this study to the literature on choice of eco-friendly products in perspectives of mental accounting theory is four-fold. First of theoretical contribution, this study could extend and develop Thaler (1985)’s Hedonic editing hypothesis, by proposing alternative presentation (all of segregation). Additionally this study found that the proportion of choice of green product can be different in same type of product, depending on attribute of product. Third, this study reflected actual choice of green product by considering consumer’s choice as dependent variables, rather than attitude, preference or purchase intention. Finally, in managerial implication, this study provide managerial guidelines and strategy how to present the message about green product to increase consumer’s choice, depending on product type. Further research for extend and develop this study are currently underway.

For decades, marketing practitioners and scholars have envisioned that environmental characteristics of market offerings will become an important consumer concern (Grant 2007; Henion 1981; Kassarjian 1971; Kotler 2011; Ottmann 2011) and a myriad of consumer surveys indicated that consumers are willing to change their purchase and consumption habits for a better environment (Banikarim 2010; Ferguson and Goldman 2010; Imkamp 2000; Laroche, Bergeron and Barbaro-Forleo 2001). However, consumers’ actual adoption of environmental market offerings has been far below what had been expected and predicted so far (Connolly et al. 2006; Davis 1993; do Paço and Varejâo 2010; Kilbournes 1998; Horne 2009). To bridge the gap between consumers’ stated interests in and attitudes regarding adoption of eco-friendly market offerings and their actual adoption of eco-friendly market offerings, marketers need an accurate understanding of: 1) what determines consumers’ willingness and propensity to adopt eco-friendly market offerings and consumption behaviors, 2) how those individual, social, and marketing determinants of eco-friendly consumer behaviors are interrelated with each other, 3) where consumers stand currently in terms of those determinants, and 4) what needs to be done to remove the bottlenecks in the adoption and diffusion processes. To provide answers to above four aspects of eco-friendly consumer behaviors, this paper attempts to advance a more theoretically-based and comprehensive model of eco-friendly consumer behavior than extant models by incorporating recent findings of research on determinants of pro-environmental consumer behaviors and integrating various relevant theories of attitude-behavior links including the value-belief-norm theory, the theory of reasoned action, and the elaboration likelihood model. The structural validity and generalizability of the proposed model is tested based on two sets of survey data collected from consumers in the U.S. Midwest region and a metropolitan area surrounding Seoul, the capital city of Korea. The findings of the empirical study demonstrate that while the proposed model explains eco-friendly consumer behaviors by both the U.S. and Korean consumers, the relative importance of the predictors of eco-friendly consumer behaviors vary between the two groups of consumers. The analysis of the data also reveals that consumers in the two groups differ significantly from each other on many variables which are included as direct and indirect determinants of eco-friendly consumer behaviors in the proposed model. Together, the findings provide interesting and practical implications for strategies to facilitate consumer adoption of eco-friendly market offerings.

As cause-related marketing (CRM) is becoming an increasingly integral part of corporate social responsibility activities and promotion plans, many researchers have studied what determines the effectiveness of cause-related marketing activities. One of the factors past research paid much attention to in this regard is the fit between the brand and cause. Previous studies have demonstrated that a high brand-cause fit generally improves consumer attitude toward company, increases purchase intent and brand loyalty. However, few recent studies show that a high brand-cause fit may backfire in some circumstances. This research aims to investigate when and why a high brand-cause fit backfires. In this regard, this research focuses on the role of important but understudied concept of consumer-cause fit. Based on a multi-dimensional perspective of self-concept (Sirgy,1982), this research defines and measures consumer-cause fit with respect to multiple dimensions of a consumer’s self-concept. Then, a series of experiments shows how the congruence between images of a cause, a consumer’s ideal and actual self-concept, and images of a brand will interact to moderate, in some cases even reverse, the relationship between brand-cause fit and consumer responses to a cause-related marketing campaign.

The inseparability, one of service specific characteristics, often makes it necessary and possible for customers to participate in service production and delivery process as partial employees or contributors. As customer participation may enhance or degrade the quality of services and customers’ satisfaction, many researchers have paid much attention to the concept of customer participation. Analogous to the typical classification of service employee behaviors, previous research typically categorized customer participation behaviors into customer participation behaviors and citizenship behaviors. Furthermore, past research showed that both types of customer behaviors significantly affect perceived service quality and satisfaction. However, the many criteria past research has used to classify customer participation behaviors lack conceptual rigor and generalizability beyond the specific types of services for which the criteria have been developed. The lack of conceptual rigor and consistency in classification criteria caused much confusion and incongruencies in empirical findings reported in the current customer participation behavior literature, depending on which specific criteria the researcher choose and on the specific type of service studied. Thus, it is important to develop a classification system of customer participation behaviors which is solid and generalizable to many types of services. This study proposes a customer participation behavior classification system which categorizes customer participation behaviors depending on 1) whether a customer behavior is essential and indispensable in the service production process and/or not and 2) whether a customer behavior is conducted voluntarily or upon requests by service employees. Based on the two criteria, the proposed system identifies five types of customer participation behaviors. Furthermore, this study examines whether the five types of customer participation behaviors affect the two dimensions of perceived service quality - outcome quality and process quality (Grönroos1984) and customers’ satisfaction with service experiences. Data for this study are collected through a survey of adult Korean consumers. Major findings of the study can be summarized as follows. First, increasing the level of each of the five types of customer participation behaviors affects perceived service outcome quality, perceived service process quality, and satisfaction. Second, the relative impact of each type of customer participation behavior varies by the types of participating customer’s personality and depending on whether a service is outcome-oriented or process-oriented type. Finally, the actual impact of each type of participation behaviors on perceived service quality and satisfaction varies according to what customers expect when they perform the behaviors.