How Chinese Consumers' Intentions for Purchasing Eco-Labeled Products Are Influenced by Psychological Factors.

Jie Jin,Qiuhong Zhao,Ernesto Dr Santibanez-Gonzalez

doi:10.3390/ijerph17010265

Abstract

This paper studies how consumers’ psychological factors influence their intentional purchasing behavior towards eco-labeled products and investigates why consumers choose eco-labeled products. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior, we develop an extended model including six constructs. Among these constructs, consumers’ intentional purchasing behavior, attitude towards the behavior, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control are applied from the original theoretical framework. Health consciousness and environmental awareness are integrated additionally to reflect consumers’ concerns about the natural environment and their health. Next, we conduct and analyze a survey-based empirical study with 336 samples using the Structural Equation Modeling. Our findings show that consumers’ attitude towards the behavior is positively influenced by environmental awareness, but the effects of it on intentional purchasing behavior are insignificant. Also, subjective norm has a positive influence on intentional purchasing behavior, but its effects on attitude towards the behavior are not significant. Moreover, the results also show that the total effects of health consciousness on intentional purchasing behavior are significantly higher than the effects of environmental awareness. Our results can provide a reference for business managers to attract consumers through eco-labeling as well as government policymaking.

Highlights

Several studies and researches have suggested that consumers prefer products produced under environmentally friendly practices [1,2,3]
D3 denotes the effect of health consciousness (HC) on ATB ( HC → ATB ), A0 denotes the effect of attitude towards the behavior on intentional purchasing behavior ( ATB → IPB ), D2 = A0 × D3
Let D0 = D1 + D2, D0 denote the total effects of HC on IPB

Summary

Introduction

Several studies and researches have suggested that consumers prefer products produced under environmentally friendly practices [1,2,3]. The eco-label is used to validate that a product is up to the corresponding environmental standards formulated by government agencies and other public service organizations [9]. Eco-labeling is viewed as a useful tool to promote the development of green consumption. As an important channel between manufacturers and consumers for the green information transmission, consumers could be informed about the environmental efforts of the producers through eco-labeling [14,36]. All incentive policies of the government and environmental efforts of enterprises are effective only when they factually promote consumers’ green purchasing behaviors [40]. It is necessary to analyze the influencing factors of consumers’ purchasing behaviors towards eco-labeling products and provide promotion measures

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion