Marketing campaigns of organic food emphasize utilitarian benefits and psychological benefits as well as consumer culture to enhance environmental sustainability. In order to study the purchase intention of organic food, the authors developed a model using antecedents like warm glow, subjective norm, attitude and perceived behavioral control. This study examines the model for the Indian and the USA samples and thus integrated using three theories: Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Pro-Social Behavior (PSB) Theory with the interaction of Consumer Culture Theory. The model is estimated using the multi-group Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) technique using R software with samples from India (n = 692) and the USA (n = 640). Results differ for Indian and USA samples. The expectation of the “warm glow” resulted from an environmentally friendly purchase as having a higher influence on Indian samples than that of the USA. Further, the attitude towards organic food purchase intention is stronger for US samples than the Indian, and the group difference is significant, while all the relationships that take warm glow as an antecedent have higher β for Indian samples. Moreover, the study found that attitude towards organic food is a major element for US subsamples, whereas subjective norm plays a major role in Indian samples to adopt organic food. Managerially, the present study suggests that a firm marketing its organic food must concentrate more on “warm glow” for Indian consumers in order to improve their market share.
The warm glow of recycling can make us more wasteful
