Sustainable consumption: green consumer behaviour when purchasing products

By W. Young, Kumju Hwang, Seonaidh McDonald, Caroline Oates. 2009

1,651 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The 'attitude-behaviour gap' or 'values-action gap' is where 30% of consumers report that they are very concerned about environmental issues but they are struggling to translate this into purchases. For example, the market share for ethical foods remains at 5 per cent of sales. This paper investigates the purchasing process for green consumers in relation to consumer technology products in the UK. Data were collected from 81 self-declared green consumers through in depth interviews on recent purchases of technology products. A green consumer purchasing model and success criteria for closing the gap between green consumers' values and their behaviour are developed. The paper concludes that incentives and single issue labels (like the current energy rating label) would help consumers concentrate their limited efforts. More fundamentally, 'being green' needs time and space in people's lives that is not available in increasingly busy lifestyles. Implications for policy and business are proposed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Marketing, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ee9b47fc0590d4834b01fcc0064274f035e6c556

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Citations in the corpus

The Influence of Environmental Friendliness on Green Trust: The Mediation Effects of Green Satisfaction and Green Perceived Quality (2015, background): “Green labels, such as those with the current energy-rating label, can help bridge the gap between green consumers’ values and behaviors [21].”
Green purchase behavior of undergraduate students in Hong Kong (2016, background): “…energy rating label for ocial Sci 74 C.K.M. Lai, E.W.L. Cheng / The S refrigerators and washing machines, to draw the consumers’ attention to the likelihood that negative consequences on the environment can be reduced after purchasing eco-friendly products (Testa et al., 2015; Young et al., 2010).”
Motivations for promoting the consumption of green products in an emerging country: exploring attitudes of Brazilian consumers (2015, methodology): “It had been applied in D0 Souza et al. (2007) Marchand and Walker (2008) Mostafa (2009) Smith and Paladino (2010) Young et al. (2010) Evans (2011) Koller et al. (2011) Lin and Huang (2012) Gleim et al. (2013) Lorek and Fuchs (2013) Paço et al. (2013) Tseng and Hung (2013) Vicente-Molina et al.…”
Changing Behaviour: Successful Environmental Programmes in the Workplace (2015, background): “In the domestic and consumer context strong environmental attitudes are generally needed before environmental behaviours to occur (Young et al., 2010).”