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

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.

Do Health, Environmental and Ethical Concerns Affect Purchasing Behavior? A Meta-Analysis and Narrative Review

“…Some studies have reported that health, environmental and ethical concerns have a significant positive impact on purchasing behavior (Wang et al 2020;Yazar and Burucuoglu 2019;Magnusson et al 2003), whereas others find no association (Michaelidou and Hassan 2008;Jin et al 2020). One study found a significant negative impact of ethical concern on consumers' purchasing intention towards genetically modified food (Kimenju and Groote 2008).…”

“…Studies have investigated the effect of health, environmental and ethical concerns on consumer's purchase intention (Yogananda Auroomooga and Nair 2019), purchase attitude (Jin et al 2020), purchase decision (Tan et al 2019), purchase frequency (Kuhar and Juvancic 2010) and willingness to pay a premium price (Xu et al 2020). These studies have had mixed results.…”

“…Depending on the product category, consumers perceive different levels of health, environmental and ethical concerns when making their purchasing decision. For example, a number of studies have assessed the association between health, environmental and ethical concerns and purchase behavior for food products (Wang et al 2020) and non-food products (Xu et al 2020) as well as non-specific product "categories" including green products such as eco-friendly items (Jin et al 2020).…”

Edible Insects: How to Increase the Sustainable Consumption Behavior among Restaurant Consumers

“…Paul, Modi, and Patel [ 53 ] extended the TPB in order to predict the eco-friendly product purchase intentions of Indian consumers and they validated the significant role of attitude in generating individuals’ buying intentions. Jin, Zhao, and Santibanez-Gonzalez [ 54 ] examined why today’s consumers choose eco-labeled products, and their findings observed the significant role of attitude toward purchasing eco-labeled products on their intentional purchasing behavior. Similarly, Qi and Ploeger [ 44 ] tested individuals’ green food buying intentions using 300 data collected in China.…”

Validation and Test of Measurement Invariance of the Adapted Health Consciousness Scale (HCS-G)

“…Even though these outcomes were measured by self-reported questionnaires, relevant associations of health consciousness and health-associated outcomes were found. Furthermore, studies have shown that higher states of health consciousness are correlated with the likelihood of purchasing organic food and green furniture [ 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 ]. In this context, Shimoda and colleagues [ 28 ] additionally showed an association between health consciousness and pro-environmental behavior indicating that health consciousness is not only likely to promote one’s individual health but can also have positive environmental effects.…”