Social Sustainability as Buying Local: Soft Policy, Meso Level Actors and Social Influences on Purchase Intentions

Recently issued United Nations Sustainable Development Goals call for people to make extensive behavioral changes, including consuming food more sustainably. The authors explore the role that meso-level retailers play in local purchasing, an activity that the United Nations recognizes as a contributor to sustainability. In so doing, the authors promote more balance within the marketing literature, which has focused more on the environmental component of products and purchasing and less on the local dimension. This article spotlights “soft” policies, those that use persuasion and encourage voluntary action, rather than direct methods, such as subsidies and regulations. The authors develop a core hypothesis about how social norm messages and attitudes toward local food affect consumer purchase intentions. They test this hypothesis across national contexts via online surveys of 316 Italian consumers (Study 1) and 186 U.S. consumers (Study 2). The analysis reveals that in both countries, the effectiveness of social norm messages increases with unfavorable attitudes toward local buying. The study concludes with thoughts for researchers and policy makers about how meso-level actors, such as retailers, can elicit more local purchasing.