Environmentally Conscious Younger Consumers: A Study of Changing Shift in Green Attitude and Behaviour of Indian Car Consumers

Abstract

World today is facing a number of environmental challenges, rapidly increasing vehicular pollution is one of those. In last few years, total number of passenger cars has touched the sky which is the major source of vehicular pollution in metro cities worldwide. A ray of hope is the movement of environmental concerns from being a fringe issue to becoming a major social and political issue. There is a big role to be played by two segments i.e. the car consumers and the passenger car manufacturers. A growing awareness about the environmental challenges has lead Governments and societies, in many parts of the world, to coerce business organizations into being environmentally more responsive. Extant research suggests that an increasing number of businesses are responding to these challenges by investing in environmentally responsive processes and products. While the role of factors such as regulatory and societal pressure in driving organizations to be environmentally responsive is now well understood, the role of consumers however, is equally noticeable. It is important to understand consumer attitude because consumer attitude can potentially act as the critical missing link that can take organization from their current (largely) reactive stances (in response to regulatory compliance or societal pressures), to the next stage of proactive responsiveness. Regulatory pressures largely act as the push factors, but if environmentally responsive consumerism is a fact, it would be a crucial pull factor for organizations. The present empirical study recorded and measured consumer attitude towards green cars and green driving practices and also examined the consistency between green consumer attitude and green consumer behaviour. This study defines three aspects of consumer’s attitude, those are, Effective, Cognitive and Behavioural response of target consumers. After conducting a pilot study, a research instrument of eleven items was prepared to measure the strength of green attitude and behaviour relationship. The study concludes that young consumers of passenger cars carry a strong positive attitude for green practices and green cars for all three components those are perceptual, emotional and behavioural. Thus the study confirms a consistency in green consumer attitude and consumer behaviour of younger consumers while elder consumers were found to be aware of environmental problems caused by passenger cars thus scoring reasonably good on perceptual scale but less promising scores on emotional and behavioural scales.