Cueing up! How other-oriented semantic cues in livestream shopping enable sustainable food consumption

This study investigates the semantic nuances food producers and livestream sellers use in livestream shopping to instigate sustainable food consumption. Guided by social conformity and self-construal theory, we suggest the community environment specific to livestream shopping over other shopping scenarios (e.g. in-store) enhances conformity among viewers. Thus, we theorize that semantic cues focusing on “other” are more influential than those focusing on “self” when it comes to sustainable food consumption. We analyzed 17,520 minutes of speech from livestream sellers selling food products to identify the top 20 keywords associated with sustainable food consumption. Using econometric modeling on 416 products using these keywords, we determined that other-oriented cues were more influential than self-orientation cues in stimulating sales of sustainable foods. Further, we showed the relationship between other-oriented cues and sales of sustainable food is amplified when more sellers promote the product. We provide both theoretical and managerial implications which are discussed.