Abstract

In recent times, brand’s reputation and sales are significantly influenced by social-media-users’ opinion. This paper used ‘self-consumption-vision’ (SCV), theory of emotion, and social influence theory to explores how consumers’ sustainable product purchase intentions and other sustainable-behavioural intentions are influenced by the social-media-users’ positive/negative captions with a sustainability-ad. 279 respondents participated in a 2 (positive vs negative caption) x 2 (high vs low source expertise) between-subject experiment. The result shows that, consumers can visualise themselves consuming the advertised sustainable product more vividly for positive captions than negative captions. This higher level of consumption vision produces higher level of emotion and affect subsequent social-media-engagement with the sustainability-ad, purchase intentions and other sustainable-behavioural intentions. Types of captions and level of source-expertise have significant interaction effect on social-media-engagement. More specifically, the users will engage more for positively captioned sustainability-ad than the negative caption for low source-expertise, but people will engage more for negatively captioned sustainability-ad than positively captioned one, when source-expertise is high. Future research may assess the acceptability of sustainability-ad depending on social dynamics of the social-media platforms.