Why Do Consumers Make Green Purchase Decisions? Insights from a Systematic Review.

Xiaoyun Zhang,Feng Dong

doi:10.3390/ijerph17186607

Abstract

In order to achieve sustainable development to protect the environment and society, an increasing number of scholars have conducted in-depth research on green marketing and green purchases. Although great achievements have been made in this field, there still is room for further progress. This study reviews 97 papers providing empirical research on green purchase behavior from 2015 to 2020. First, we review the widely used consumer theory and its extended application in recent years. Second, we divide the influencing factors of green purchase behavior into the following three categories and discuss them in detail: individual factors, product attributes and marketing, and social factors. Finally, we put forward the following possible directions for future research. (1) The authors can consider adjustment to the survey objects to weaken the subjectivity of the data. (2) Longitudinal research can be used to assess the impact of education and policies with a lagging effect on consumers. (3) The authors can broaden the research direction towards a cross-cultural background. (4) The behavior of various green products (such as recyclable tires, recycled glass containers, recycled paper) could be explored to enrich the research content. (5) It will be beneficial to combine a variety of consumer theories to explore the green purchase behavior of consumers and break through the existing linear hypothesis path to explore new research methods.

Highlights

With increasing threats to the environment, an increasing number of people have started to pay attention to sustainable development to protect the environment and society
On the basis of the other related literature, we summarized the widely used consumer theories: Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Value–Attitude–Behavior Model (VAB), Value–Norm–Belief Theory of Environmentalism (VBN), the integrated model, the Attitude–Behavior–Conditions Model (ABC) and more comprehensive models
The 97 papers selected in this review are distributed from 2015 to 2020. They were published in various journals and involved various research types, such as energy, production, food, transportation, clothing, and management, which reflects the interdisciplinary nature and complexity of green purchase behavior

Summary

Introduction

With increasing threats to the environment, an increasing number of people have started to pay attention to sustainable development to protect the environment and society. Green marketing refers to the marketing activities (including price, plan, process, production, promotion, and personnel) designed by enterprises for all consumers. The purpose of these activities is to minimize the environmental impact of the company’s products and service [2]. Many companies have changed their production strategies to actively respond to environmental problems and changes in consumers’ environmental attitudes. They abandoned products that are relatively polluting to the environment or harmful to human health and turned to environmental protection products. It is of great practical significance to understand the influencing factors of consumers’ green product purchase behavior for green marketing

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion