The Impact of Consumers’ Attitudes on Green Purchase Intention

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of consumers’ attitudes on green purchase intention in Sri Lanka, due to the lack of consensus exists in the causal ordering of either antecedent or mediating variables. Additionally, the literature provides mixed results for the effects of consumers’ intention on green purchase intention in the global context while there are few studies in the Sri Lankan context. Therefore, there is an empirical research gap to fulfil in Sri Lanka considering other countries and this study is an attempt to fill this research gap. Four hypotheses were developed based on the constructed conceptual framework derived from the consumer behavior literature. The data were collected over randomly administering structured questionnaires from 100 green product buyers in Galle district, Sri Lanka. The partial least square path modelling (PLS) was used to measure the impact of social influences, environmental consciousness, environmental responsibility and health consciousness, on green purchase intention. The tested hypothesis on purchase intention was not statistically significant with environmental responsibility and health consciousness and other two hypotheses on social influences and environmental consciousness were statistically significant. It suggested that social influence was the most significant variable towards purchase intention. The study unveiled that to enhance customers’ attitudes towards green products, government and organizations should take necessary actions by providing positive information about green products and advocating green lifestyles. The findings of the study provided new ways to develop green marketing strategies for organizations by considering environmental concern, environmental responsibilities, health consciousness and social influences. Hence, future study can be outlined to further examine the impact of consumers’ attitudes in different dimensions, especially including human variables. Moreover, this study was based on the consumers in the Galle district and sample was limited, the future research should focus on other districts in the country.