Title: Demographic and psychographic antecedents of ecologically conscious consumer behaviour: an empirical investigation

Authors: Kavita Srivastava; Deepak Chawla

Addresses: Department of Management Studies Noida, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology Rae Bareli, OIDB Bawan, Second Floor, Sector-73, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, 201301, India ' International Management Institute, New Delhi, India

Abstract: Researchers have continued to study green consumers' characteristics, habits, and lifestyle, which significantly influence their buying behaviour. In the same vein, the present study aims to measure the role of consumer demographics, i.e., age, gender, education, income, and marital status and psychographic characteristics such as perceived consumer effectiveness, environmental concern, altruism and liberalism in predicting ecological conscious buying behaviour. The research employed a survey-based method to test at theoretically grounded set of hypotheses. A structured questionnaire of 32 items was administered on 306 respondents to collect the data. Three statistical models were tested using regression analyses to test the hypotheses. All three models were found significant. The results witnessed that psychographic characteristics of consumers are more important to predict ecologically conscious behaviour. The environmental concern is seen to be the most important variable followed by perceived consumer effectiveness and altruism. The implications of the findings and need for future research are discussed.

Keywords: altruism; biodegradable; environment concern; energy-efficient; green marketing; Greendex Survey; perceived consumer effectiveness; liberalism.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICBM.2017.084372

International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management, 2017 Vol.14 No.4, pp.480 - 496

Received: 12 Jan 2016
Accepted: 10 Jul 2016

Published online: 06 Jun 2017 *

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