Green product awareness effect on green purchase intentions of university students\u2019: an emerging market\u2019s perspective

Peter Ansu-Mensah

doi:10.1186/s43093-021-00094-5

Abstract

The indiscriminate consumption patterns worldwide have brought in its wake severe problems like pollution and global warming, and this has ultimately called for green products awareness and consumption. The main purpose of this study was to assess the effect of university students’ awareness of green products on their green purchasing intentions. The specific objectives were to identify whether awareness, price, availability, value and quality influence university students’ intention to purchase green products, and to investigate how awareness, price, availability, value and quality predict university students’ intention to purchase green products. A structural equation modeling was used to analyze data collected from an online survey of 478 students. Results show that green perceived quality has the utmost significant positive impact on university students’ green purchase intentions; however, green perceived availability had the slightest impact on university students’ intention to purchase green products. The study is the foremost to conclude that green product awareness impact on university students green purchase intentions is greatly driven by price, high value and extraordinary quality. However, availability is not a critical influencing factor when it comes to green purchase intentions of university students. The implications of study, limitations and further research are discussed.

Highlights

The unsustainable patterns of consumption in the world today have caused severe environmental problems such as pollution, natural resources depletion, growing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming [7, 66, 69]
The results showed that the average variance extracted (AVE) stretched from 0.597 to 0.736 and this meets the criterion for the convergent validity
While some studies have looked at the influencing factors that predict green purchase intentions [3, 9, 43, 52], the current study to the author’s knowledge is the first in an emerging economy, especially in a subSaharan African region, that examines the effect of green product awareness of university students’ on their green purchase intentions

Summary

Introduction

The unsustainable patterns of consumption in the world today have caused severe environmental problems such as pollution, natural resources depletion, growing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming [7, 66, 69]. These aforementioned difficulties have led to the process of going “green” and eventually created attention for green products awareness and consumption [15, 56, 71]. The concept “green” is often associated with terms such as responsible consumption, ecological marketing, ecologically concerned consumer, social responsibility, natural, sustainable and environmental-friendly or pro-environmental [56, 74, 78]. The goal 12 of the SDGs stipulates “responsible consumption and production patterns” by 2030 [69]

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion