Green retailing and consumer’s perception towards organic food retailing

Abstract

Green Retailing can be defined as using sustainable and environment-friendly measures throughout the supply chain to gain savings and competitive advantage by influencing consumers through communicating green values. This paper aims to study the consumer perception towards green retailing and particularly, organic food retailing. The study starts with generating hypothesis from literature study on green retailing practices and conducting various in-depth interviews to gain insights. The secondary research forms the basis for designing questionnaire to study consumer attitudes and perception along with their food purchase behavior. A survey is conducted in two organic food retailing stores based in Bangalore. Responses from 75 customers who visited the store over a period of two days have been taken for analysis. The obtained data is analyzed through SPSS to study the consumer perception. The hypotheses generated from the secondary research were tested using t-tests. Cluster analysis gives three different segments related to price consciousness, environment consciousness and status seeking behaviors. Discriminant analysis was used to find significant differences on customer attributes and perceptions between buyers and non-buyers. It shows that the groups differ mainly on the basis of income, age and price consciousness. Health remains equally important as a factor for both the groups and it doesn’t have significant difference on the buying behavior. One-way ANOVA is used to test the significance of store attributes on customer purchases. Store reputation along with cleanliness and store layout are found to be significant for status seekers and concerned affluent. The above analysis can be used to recommend strategies for green retailers. Information asymmetry is found to be very evident while considering purchase of organic products and it needs to be addressed by educating customers through advertisements and promotions. Proper store layouts and in-store promotions of organic food can also be helpful in driving sales. Building store reputation through collaboration with large companies as part of their CSR initiatives can be helpful for both the parties. The study has its limitations since it was conducted only in the city of Bangalore. The sample of respondents may not exactly mirror the behavior of all the customers in India and hence, the results may be different.