Consumer purchase intention of green products

Abstract

With changing climate, daily news articles on global warming, and increased awareness among consumers towards practices that harm the environment, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to understand how green marketing practices impact the purchase intention of consumers and their affect for eco-friendly products. Green business practices and marketing may provide significant competitive advantage to the firms by providing value to the environmentally conscious consumer. Green marketing as a concept was popularized in 1970s. By 1990s, eco-friendly products had become popular and were demanded increasingly by environmentally conscious consumer (Laroche et al 2001) and in the 2000s, companies started actively marketing their products as “green” (Paettie & Crane, 2005). Today’s consumer is more concerned about the impact of his/her shopping choices on the environment. Recycled products are in great demand from consumers and consumers are also ready to pay more for ecofriendly products (Laroche et al, 2001). Apart from the consumer choices, regulations regarding waste generation and disposal have also become more stringent (Grant, 2008) which call for the need of green practices by companies with respect to products and services. Green marketing includes various activities such as production, pricing, packaging, and promotion of products in a manner which satiates a consumer’s environmental needs. Green marketing efforts have a positive influence on consumer’s purchase intentions (Chen & Chang, 2012) and to encourage the consumers to purchase green products, companies need to communicate the perceived green value to the consumers. Also, Environmental advertisements help the consumers in making informed choices regarding green purchase decisions (Akehurst et al, 2012). Today, Eco-friendly practices are limited not only to the manufacturers and marketers but also industrial suppliers, who need to provide ecological packaging to satisfy consumer’s need for green products and hence green marketing has become quite significant at both B2C and B2B level. Marketing Research Problem: To understand the relationship between Green Marketing and consumer purchase intention and to identify different factors that affect the purchase intention of consumers towards green products. Research Objectives: Based on secondary research and primary research (Focus Group Discussion) certain factors were identified that affect consumer purchase intention for green products (Exhibit 1 FGD Content Analysis). The aim of this study is to prove statistically whether these factors such as education, age, demographic profile, theme of advertisements, pricing, and ecological packaging affect green purchase intention or not. The consumers’ willingness to pay and environmental consciousness and whether green advertising contributes to green purchase intention will also be analyzed. The following are the key objectives of this study: i. To check whether socio-demographic background of customers affect consumer purchase intention for green products or not. ii. To check the relationship of product pricing on green purchase intention. iii. To check how influencers (WOM- friends, family, ADVERTISEMENT etc.) affect the green purchase intention. iv. To check how awareness regarding packaging affects green purchase intention.