From Perceived Value to Advocacy: How Customer Experience, Loyalty, and Trust Shape Sustainable Mobile Payment Consumption

Mobile payment services are increasingly embedded in everyday digital consumption, yet their sustainability relevance should not be assumed solely from technological adoption. This study conceptualizes sustainable mobile payment consumption as a relational and digital sustainability issue, reflected in the continuity, trust, diffusion, and resilience of mobile payment ecosystems rather than as a direct measure of environmental sustainability. Drawing on perceived value theory, relationship marketing, social exchange theory, and trust-based consumption logic, this study examines how mobile payment perceived value (MPPV) is associated with customer advocacy through customer experience and customer loyalty, while considering customer trust as a boundary condition. Survey data collected from 382 mobile payment users in Lebanon were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings suggest that MPPV is positively associated with customer experience, customer loyalty, and customer advocacy. Customer experience is positively associated with loyalty while loyalty is positively associated with advocacy. The sequential mediation results are consistent with the proposed relational pathway in which holistic perceived value is linked to advocacy through experience and loyalty rather than through transactional evaluations alone. Customer trust strengthens the associations between MPPV and both loyalty and advocacy, suggesting that trust amplifies value-based relational outcomes in high-uncertainty financial environments. The central finding is that holistic perceived value becomes sustainability-relevant when channeled through accumulated experience and loyalty into advocacy, and that this relational pathway is contingent on trust, a mechanism particularly consequential in Lebanon’s high-uncertainty financial environment. By positioning advocacy as a sustainability-relevant relational outcome, this study clarifies how perceived value, experience, loyalty, and trust jointly contribute to sustainable digital consumption in an emerging economy.