This study analyzed the effects of fashion consumers’ moral identity and empathy propensity on ethical consumption attitude and donation behavior, and the effect of ethical consumption attitude on donation behavior. The survey was conducted on consumers over the 20s who experienced the donation of fashion products, 384 responses were used for data analysis. The result showed that the internality and symbolism of moral identity had a positive effect on ethical consumption attitudes. The all factors of empathy propensity positively affected eco-friendly oriented consumption, and cognitive empathy and social empathy positively affected boycott oriented consumption. The cognitive empathy, social empathy and relational empathy positively affected community oriented consumption and practice oriented consumption. Furthermore, social empathy and relational empathy positively affected recycling oriented consumption. The eco-friendly, boycott, community, and recycling oriented consumption positively affected temporal donation. The all factors of ethical consumption attitude positively affected emotional donation, and eco-friendly, community, recycling, and practice oriented consumption positively affected material donations. The internality and symbolism of moral identity positively affected temporal and emotional donation, and the symbolism except internality positively affected material donation. The cognitive empathy, social empathy and relational empathy positively affected the temporal donation and material donation. In addition, the all factors of empathy propensity positively affected emotional donation. The results of this study will contribute to the ethical product strategy, marketing, and sustainable development of the fashion industry.

Upcycling is the process of repurposing abandoned resources or useless products into products of better quality or higher environmental value. Upcycling products are evaluated to be sustainable because they demonstrate environmental values. However, domestic upcycling companies are operating on a small scale with a slow growth rate. This study aims to examine the value and risk factors of upcycling products from previous literature and clarify the effect of these ambivalent characteristics on purchase intention. This provides direction regarding factors upcycling companies should focus on. The data were collected via an online experiment with women in their 20s and 30s residing in South Korea, nationwide. The data were statistically analyzed using SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 18.0. Analysis of this data suggests that environmental, design, and self-expression value positively affect purchase intention. This extends previous upcycling literature by identifying design and self-expression value as important antecedents of purchase intention. However, in contrast to previous literature, no significant effect of performance or diversity risk was found. These results indicate that ethical attitude has a moderating effect on the relationship between environmental value and purchase intention. This study confirms that consumers intend to purchase upcycling products when they possess not only environmental value but also design and self-expression value.

The literature on ethical consumption has expanded over time and has focused on studying the attitudes and behaviours of consumers with regards to different products and services, such as organic, Fair Trade, environmentally and social friendly products. In addition to this, some research has focused on studying consumers’ attitudes and behaviours towards pirated or counterfeited products. However, to the best of the author’s knowledge, so far research has not mapped the “objects” taken into account within ethical consumption research (i.e. the type of products or services bought by consumers). Hence, this research aims at mapping these elements in order to have a clear picture on what aspects the marketing literature on ethical consumption has focused on and, in this way, understand if there are products and services on which future research should focus on. In order to achieve this aim a scoping review has been carried out by analysing 195 papers published on ethical and unethical consumption. From the results achieved so far, it appears that research has mainly focused on environmental and social products and services, while limited research has been devoted to legally questionable objects (e.g. smuggled cigarettes, illegal drugs, etc.). It should be noted, however, that the analysis of collected papers is still on-going, thus the results here reported are incomplete.

In recent years, ethical consumption has been attracting attention in Japan. Ethical products cover various issues, such as protection of the global environment, sustainability of resources, and protection of producers. Because the specification of such issues is difficult, previous studies often analyzed only one phenomenon. Several studies have attempted to examine the buying behavior of consumers of organic food products, based on Ajzen’s (1991) theory of planned behavior (TPB) (Sparks and Shepherd, 1992; Arvola et al., 2007; Chen, 2007, Lodorfos and Dennis, 2008). The TPB considers intention as a function of three principle determinants: attitude toward behavior, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control. Regarding ethical food consumption, moral norms are individual value judgments connected to a specific behavior and its outcome (Manstead, 1999). A comprehensive model based on ethical issues for various products is required. Prior research highlights the consensus that targeting females in ethical consumption will have a greater chance of success (Roberts, 1996; Mainieri et al., 1997; De Pelsmacker et al., 2005). We propose three hypotheses to explain gender difference in consuming ethical food products. The aim of this study is to analyze the purchase behavior of consumers of ethical food products and to examine how consumers differ by gender in terms of the ethical issues. This study adopted organic vegetables, fair trade products, products certified by the Rainforest Alliance, free-range eggs, and fish certified by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council as ethical food products. These food products are associated with different ethical issues, and thus, we define ethical issues as “ethical attitude” for each product. For example, the ethical attitude of free-range eggs is included in the following categories (Table 1): environment, which means the protection of the global environment; health, which refers to the health of consumers; animal, which means the welfare of animals and the sustainability of resources; and farmer/aquaculturist, which means protecting farmers or aquaculturists

The coffee industry has grown very fast ever since international coffee brands were launched in the 1990's. Recently, consumers have begun to focus on coffee produced ethically. This phenomenon is due to ethical-consumption consciousness, which consists of three factors, emotional value, social value and function value. Most studies on this topic have focused on consumers who purchase fair-trade coffee. Thus, this study is novel in its focus on baristas who sell fairtrade coffee in their shops as well as differences from former studies. The three factors of ethical-consumption consciousness of baristas affected the sale of fair-trade coffee, except for the function value. Therefore, the sale of fair-trade coffee could be influenced by ethical-consumption consciousness of baristas. This study shows that education of baristas can promote the sale of fair-trade coffee. However, there are limitations as it only researched coffee brands ranked in the top 5, so further studies will be required in the future.