Author(s): Viral Bhatt, Twinkle Trivedi, Ritesh Patel, Harsha Jariwala and Sujo Thomas
Sustainable consumption behavior is diversely viewed by various researchers who either consider it as an act of voluntary simplicity or consider it as adoption of green practices. The consumption decision takes place increasingly in digital environments which makes it a complex phenomenon. Many scholars and practitioners have expressed their concern regarding the change in sustainable consumption behavior in social networking sites (SNS). It becomes imperative to investigate an individual’s personality traits to comprehend the consumer mind-set and attitude in the digital environment, while attempting to realize what drives sustainable consumption behavior. Past studies have acknowledged the decisive role of e-mavens and accordingly, e-mavenism has been associated with gathering information from social networks and influencing others in their decision making process. This study investigates the role of big five personality traits and e-mavenism to predict sustainable consumption behaviour from SNS perspective. Primary data has been collected from 480 SNS users and analysed by adopting the deep neural network architecture based on the innovative dual-stage PLS-SEM and ANN method to predict and rank the factors influencing the sustainable consumption behavior in SNS. The results revealed the normalized importance of the factors and found that agreeableness was the strongest predictor of sustainable consumption behavior followed by e-mavenism, openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. The results of our study provides ample opportunities for non-profit marketers and public policy makers to leverage and gain valuable insights on the pivotal role of big-five personality traits and e-mavenism in predicting the sustainable consumption behavior of SNS users.