What is an "ethical consumer?

When it comes to consumer psychology, what is the gap between intent and behavior?

• Follow-up question to Traditional approaches to consumer marketing and product innovation follow the cognitive progression of attitude-intent-behavior when it comes to consumer decision-making.  Some believe there is a gap between intent and behavior.  What is that gap? What are the reasons?

• Answer:

  At a conference on behavioral economics last year, I heard one of the speakers characterize the situation neatly when she said, "Translating consumer motivation into changes in consumer behavior is the holy grail of market research." Market researchers have tools for measuring consumer behavior. They have tools for researching consumer motivation. What market researchers lack is a comprehensive model through which they can translate consumer motivation into changes in behavior. The gap between consumer motivation and consumer behavior is a consequence of the cultural mismatch between business operations on the one hand and marketing on the other. Business operations thinks in terms of concrete, particular objects and actions. Marketing thinks in terms of communications and ideas, focusing on the art of persuasion. Professionals from the two areas frequently speak past one another. The trouble is that intention often doesn't translate into behavior. Quitting smoking is a classic example of this. Failed New Year's Day resolutions are another. People can sincerely want to do something, but find that to change their behavior in an ongoing way is difficult, because their intentions don't match the psychological and social identities that they currently occupy. A new model of marketing takes its inspiration from an old solution to this challenge. http://ritualmarketing.jimdo.com adapts the rite of passage model from Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner. In Ritual marketing the insights cultural anthropologists gathered from traditional societies are translated into a form that describes the psychological, cultural, and social means through which consumers make the leap from abstract motivation into concrete action. Ritual marketing addresses the gap between intention and behavior with an approach that integrates both, linking the two by provoking what's called a liminal experience - the creation of a threshold environment where ordinary perception is altered so that consumers can gain release from their current identities, becoming temporarily fluid in preparation for the acceptance of a new identity. During this experience, communication of powerful messages is combined with concrete guidance into specific new routines of behavior. At the end of a ritual marketing experience, a person behaves differently because they have taken on new identities. Rather than relying on the simple inside-out model of intention-based marketing, or the simple outside-in model of operational marketing, ritual marketing brings intrinsic and extrinsic factors into synch, through a more complex, but culturally authentic, outside-in-inside-out approach.