A study of the attitudes and purchasing behaviours towards environmentally friendly products

Abstract

In the present study, an effort was made to obtain an insight into the relationships between the environmentally friendly products purchase intentions of AFS customers and several variables such as: individual environmental attitudes: perceived knowledge on environmental issues; demographic characteristics, social pressure to act green; attitude towards purchase of environmentally friendly products: previous purchase; and accessibility of purchasing options. The study is organized in five main sections: introduction literature review. methodology, results analysis & discussion, and summary, conclusions & recommendations. Furthermore, references and appendixes supplement the main sections in order to grant the reader with further information on the research areas. A Positivist approach, or so called quantitative methods of research were used; eighty survey questionnaires were distributed to customers of AFS Campus store. Additionally, a modified version of Theory of Planned Behavior was used. The results show that, the intent of the AFS Campus store customers to purchase environmentally friendly products is related only with the social pressure to act green and the accessibility of purchase options, while the other variables didn't have a significant effect. Therefore, only two out of seven hypothesis of this study were accepted, which means that the model chosen for this research cannot be successfully applied at least on the specific geographical area of Thessaloniki. Several limitations of the research were identified such as the small sample size which means that the results cannot be generalized to a wider population group, rather than AFS customers; the use of only survey questionnaires which can lead to no flexibility of results; the use of only quantitative approach; and other limitations like time constraints and not having enough experience on using SPSS statistical tool. This study can offer to food marketers of Thessaloniki a direction to improve their strategies on marketing of green products.