This chapter presents the overview of consumer attitude; the aspects of consumer attitude, trust propensity, purchasing behavior, and consumer confidence; the perspectives of consumer attitude, social media, and online brand community; the facets of consumer attitude and technology adoption; the emerging trends of consumer attitude and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR); the concept of sustainable consumption; the characteristics of sustainable fashion consumption and sustainable apparel consumption; sustainable energy consumption; sustainable food consumption; the challenges of sustainable development; and the importance of sustainable consumption and sustainability. The chapter argues that mastering consumer attitude and sustainable consumption has the potential to enhance organizational performance and reach strategic goals in the digital age.
TopBackground
According to Fishbein and Ajzen (1975), attitudes are the learned disposition to respond to an object or behavior. Consumer attitude is one of the most important factors in explaining consumer behavior and it is one of the most studied concepts in marketing management (Jahng, Jain, & Ramamurthy, 2007). Attitude theory suggests that the counter-attitudinal information about a firm may or may not change consumer attitude depending upon the conditions surrounding the attitude and the nature of the information (Smith, Knuff, Sprott, & Spangenberg, 2013). Attitude is an evaluative judgment about objects, which represents a person’s enduring favorable or unfavorable evaluations and emotional feelings guiding action tendencies toward those objects (Kwun, 2011).
It is necessary for companies to develop new products and to offer new features and functions that fulfill consumers' needs (Jun, Park, & Yeom, 2015). Companies have been conducting consumer research, as they cannot afford to remain complacent about the technological achievements to be gained from their research and development (R&D) activities (Jun et al., 2015). The basic purpose of consumer research is to understand consumer attitude toward the new product and identify which product attributes are important in determining the consumer attitude (Orbach & Fruchter, 2011). Product attributes are categorized based on whether consumers can accurately evaluate a product’s performance (Lee & Yun, 2015).