Abstract: Sustainable consumption has become an increasingly important area of research in consumer behavior and marketing. A central question is how firms and policymakers can communicate products' sustainability attributes in ways that help consumers recognize environmental benefits without increasing the cognitive costs of decision making. Visual cues are particularly relevant to this question because they shape product impressions rapidly and intuitively, guiding consumers' attention, inferences, and evaluations before more deliberative processing takes place. A growing body of research has therefore examined how visual elements, including hue, saturation, brightness, typeface, logos, geometric features, and material cues, shape consumer responses to sustainable products and consumption practices.
Despite growing interest in visual marketing and sustainable consumption, existing research remains fragmented across discrete visual elements and isolated sustainable consumption behaviors, limiting understanding of how different types of visual cues shape sustainable consumption across contexts and behavioral stages and making it difficult to reconcile seemingly inconsistent findings. For example, although green color can signal environmental friendliness, it may also lead consumers to draw unfavorable inferences about product performance. Anthropomorphic design can encourage consumers to cherish and use products longer by imbuing them with a sense of life, but it may also reduce repair and maintenance intentions by suggesting that products can recover on their own. These mixed findings underscore the need for an integrative framework that explains when, why, and how visual cues shape sustainable consumption.
To address this gap, the present research reviews literature on visual cues in sustainable marketing and develops a conceptual framework for understanding how visual elements influence sustainable consumption. Drawing on Sample et al.'s (2020) classification of visual elements and recent work on visual cues in sustainable consumption, we organize color, imagery, typeface, logos, three-dimensional form, and material into two broad categories: graphic cues and structural cues. Graphic cues, such as color, imagery, typeface, and logos, primarily convey symbolic meaning, whereas structural cues, such as product form and material, communicate physical and functional information about an object. Building on this framework, we systematically review how graphic and structural cues influence sustainable consumption across three behavioral stages: green purchasing, sustainable use, and circular disposal. Further, to integrate the diverse mechanisms identified in prior research, we build on the literature on desirability and feasibility in sustainable consumption decision making to develop an explanatory framework organized around two fundamental judgments, value-meaning evaluation and implementation-feasibility assessment. Specifically, graphic cues primarily influence sustainable consumption through the desirability pathway, with conceptual metaphor and cognitive schema accounting for their effects. By contrast, structural cues primarily operate through the feasibility pathway, with affordance and automatic categorization explaining how these cues influence sustainable consumption decisions and behaviors. We further synthesize boundary conditions related to individual differences, product characteristics, and consumption contexts. Finally, we identify several directions for future research, including comparing the relative effects of graphic and structural cues, extending the classification of visual cues, examining a broader range of sustainable consumption behaviors, and advancing research on multisensory integration in digital contexts and interactive media.
This review makes three contributions to the literature. First, it advances research on visual cues in sustainable consumption by moving beyond aesthetic responses and drawing on a desirability-feasibility perspective to explain how graphic and structural cues operate through distinct psychological routes. Second, this review provides a structured account of the mechanisms through which visual cues influence sustainable consumption. Rather than treating visual elements such as color, typeface, logos, material, and shape as isolated cues, we distinguish between graphic cues and structural cues based on the primary information they convey. This distinction helps explain why some cues are more relevant to green purchasing, whereas others are more closely tied to sustainable use or circular disposal, and provides an organizing lens for integrating the psychological processes underlying their effects. Third, this review clarifies the boundary conditions under which visual cues shape sustainable consumption. By synthesizing individual differences, product characteristics, and contextual moderators across purchase, use, and disposal, we extend prior research beyond green purchasing and identify when different visual cues are more or less likely to promote sustainable behavior.

Key words: visual cues, green purchase, sustainable use, circular disposal