Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 5762: Doing Good Better: Impure Altruism in Green Apparel Advertising (Sustainability)

In this study, we identify impure altruism as a duality of altruistic and egoistic warmth. We examine how these feelings motivate consumers to buy green apparel in response to advertisements. We test the effectiveness of the message orientation and its interactivity with a beneficiary and propose modeling impure altruism as the reason why consumers purchase green apparel. The study uses a quasi-experiment to estimate a comparison effect among advertising stimuli. We conduct an online survey among US consumers that garnered 586 responses for the main data analysis. The results indicate that egocentric appeals increase perceived uniqueness and that human beneficiary appeals lead to higher communal harmony. The findings show that communal harmony and global wellbeing prompt altruistic warmth and that uniqueness and product quality encourage egoistic warmth. Notably, altruistic warmth contributes to egoistic warmth, which indicates the existence of impurely altruistic consumers. Both altruistic and egoistic warmth lead to the intention of purchasing green apparel. We recommend “feel-good” marketing strategies to publicize the benefits of a sustainable lifestyle. The study contributes to the theoretical development of sustainability and can serve as an extension of a discrete model of altruism and egoism on consumers’ sustainable behavior.