Conveying conscientiousness: Exploring environmental images across servicescapes

• Conscientious corporate branding in a retail context requires long-term, comprehensive dedication.
• Each action taken by the company can have an effect, not just those that are environmentally oriented
• Conscientious retailer branding incorporates a nostalgic dimension that suggests the need to address the effects of the past.

The study explores how conscientiousness gets conveyed across servicescapes in two specific retail contexts: a supermarket and an organic food store, both of which claim an environmentally oriented branding strategy. Data collected from a qualitative approach and a photo elicitation technique consist of 20 semi-structured interviews with consumers of organic food products. The present study contributes to extant retailing literature by demonstrating that a conscientious corporate brand image requires long-term, comprehensive dedication by retailers. Moreover, this study contributes to research into retailer branding by uncovering a nostalgic dimension of conscientious branding, which in this setting means acknowledging the effects of the past.