The Green-Awakening Customer Attitudes towards Buying Green Products on an Online Platform in Thailand: The Multigroup Moderation Effects of Age, Gender, and Income

Abstract

In order to respond to sustainable consumption and production, customers today are more aware of how their actions affect the environment. As a result, customers are looking for products that use sustainable practices and are environmentally conscious; an online platform is viewed as a channel to approach such products in the digital era. To meet this demand, understanding how green customer attitudes play a critical role in changing consumer behavior is required. This new concept of "green-awakening" customer attitude encapsulates green positive feelings, green intent, green likeness, and green belief to overcome the limitations of measurements used previously. The objectives of this research were (1) to investigate and confirm the existence of green-awakening customer attitudes toward online platforms in the emerging economy and (3) to investigate differences in equivalent measurements across age, gender, and income properties in Thailand. Data on 348 Thai customers were collected from different parts of the country, including the Northeast, North, Central, East, and South. In addition, a multigroup moderation approach was employed to investigate differences among groups segmented by age, gender, and income. SPSS Amos was used on the basis of the composite-based model to analyze multigroup structural invariance among the segmented data. On the one hand, the findings showed that Thai customers’ attitudes toward purchasing green products on an online platform are more likely to be affected by perceived relative advantage, perceived online social norms, and perceived risk. On the other hand, perceived online compatibility did not have a statistically significant effect on how green customers felt at an aggregate level. According to the findings of the multigroup analysis, Thai customers with a mid-high income level perceived green products positively and appeared to be able to afford them on an online platform when compared to other groups, which suggests that an income-based segment could moderate Thai customers’ attitudes toward purchasing green products on an online platform. Marketers could use the concept and idea of “green-awakening” customer attitudes to strengthen how to decide the precise target segmentation of green consumers.