Clothing that Makes You Feel: The impact of anticipated emotions on purchase intention of sustainable clothing

Abstract

This study aims to shed light on the role of emotional aspects in sustainable clothing consumption in order to better predict and understand young consumers’ purchase intentions. It aims at contributing to the existing sustainable decision-making literature in the context of organic cotton clothing. In doing so, emotions of anticipated guilt and anticipated pride are studied within the conceptual framework of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). This is done quantitatively by collecting data through a survey among Swedish business students, and analyzing the results with a three-step multiple regression analysis. The results revealed that anticipated guilt, anticipated pride, attitude and subjective norm were all important factors in determining consumers’ intentions to purchase organic cotton clothing. Perceived behavioral control was reported as an insignificant predictor of behavioral intention. The originality and value of this study rely on the addition of anticipated emotions to the TPB framework. This paper is, as long as the authors are aware, one of the earliest quantitative endeavors to study anticipated guilt and anticipated pride in the context of sustainable fashion consumption. The findings of this study will benefit marketing professionals, enabling them to formulate more efficient strategies to communicate about sustainable fashion clothing.