Reward and Punishment from Consumers Towards Ethical and Corrupt Companies: A study on price promotion and purchase intention

• Autor(a) principal: Hamza, Kavita Miadaira
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Nogami, Vitor Koki da Costa, Andrade, Josmar
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Consumer Behavior Review
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufpe.br/revistas/index.php/cbr/article/view/15036
• topic: Business Ethics; Ethical Consumer; Corruption.

Although many studies investigate if consumers punish or reward un/ethical products, there were not find researches specific on consumer behavior towards ethical and corrupt companies, so it is an important gap, which we intend to cover. The purpose of this study was to verify if price promotion and company profile (ethical or corrupt) influence purchase intentions. It was used an experiment using 2 (price promotion: discount vs. no discount) vs. 3 (company profile: corrupt vs. NCNE vs. ethical) groups, with a sample of 246 cases between subjects. Our findings show consumers do not value the ethical behavior of companies, but penalize corrupt behavior. The price promotion stimulus was also not effective, which means that price promotion does not affect the willingness to pay. The results suggest that companies should behave ethically, if not by the reward they could get for it, at least for the punishment consumers are willing to give them.