Research On Chinese Consumers’ Purchase Intention Of Pro-environmental Products Based On The Norm Activation Theory

In recent years, along with the environmental deterioration in China as well asthe frequent fog and haze, environmental protection has become the inescapable topicin our daily life. Chinese government has paid great attention to environmentalprotection and made it as a strategic focus. Premier Li Keqiang referred to thesignificance of environmental protection in many occasions this year. Thegovernment decided to invest3400billion RMB on ecological environmentalprotection during the “Twelfth Five Year Plan” period, which not only showed thedetermination and courage of central government to improve the environment, butalso exposed that environment had become one of the imminent problems in China.With this trend, we can foresee that more and more local governments will call on thecivilians to participate in the environmental movement; meanwhile, more and moreenterprises will make effort to research, develop and promote pro-environmentalproducts. Thus, both of them need to answer the question-how to enhanceconsumers’ intention to participate in the environment movement or to purchasepro-environmentally products. The paper launches the research from this point.As one of the environment movements, consumers’ purchase behavior ofpro-environmental products plays an importance role in environmental protection.The paper combs the past researches, theories and literatures and finds out that theforeign scholars started the research on environment movement from the earlier timeand established several mature theories, which includes the norm-activation theoryproposed by Schwartz (1973). The theory posits that activated personal form canaffect others environmental movement. The domestic researches on environmentalprotection behavior starts comparatively late, meanwhile, the scholars mainly focuson the inner factors of consumers, such as value, belief and attitude instead ofexternal factors. Therefore, this paper aims at filling this gap through studying. Based on Carlson(1993)’s classification of the marketing information ofpro-environmental products as well as the past researches, this paper classifies themarketing information of pro-environmental products into three categories: theinformation of product and environment knowledge, the information of Corporatesocial responsibility (CSR) and the information of the descriptive norms. This paperaims to study the effect of these three kinds of information on the purchase intentionof pro-environmental products as well as the mediating effect of perceived value andpro-environmental personal norms between marketing information and purchaseintention, thus construct the action path from marketing information, throughperceived value and pro-environmental personal norms, and to the purchase intention.Meanwhile, the paper also introduces the social presence situation to the frameworkto make the research results more applicable and practically significant.With the above research purposes, the paper develops three experiments togradually and progressively verify the relationship between the variables. Theparticipants of the three experiments are the students and MBA students from severaluniversities in Changchun. The1stexperiment aims at verifying the relationshipbetween the marketing information and purchase intention. The results show thatproduct and environment knowledge, CSR information, descriptive normsinformation all have significantly positive effect on the purchase intention. The effectof product and environment knowledge is more significant than the other two. Butthere is no synergy between these three kinds of marketing information. The2ndexperiment aims at exploring the mediating effect of perceived value andpro-environmental personal norms between marketing information and purchaseintention. The results show that the external marketing information has significantlypositive effect on the perceived value and pro-environmental personal norms,meanwhile, the perceived value and pro-environmental personal norms both havesignificantly positive effect on purchase intention, the perceived value andpro-environmental personal norms played a meditating role between the marketinginformation and purchase intention. Thus, the research results verify the action pathfrom marketing information, through perceived value and pro-environmental personalnorms, and to the purchase intention. The3rdexperiment aims at studying the effect of social presence situation on the purchase as well as the synergy between the socialpresence and the marketing information. The results show that social presence hassignificantly positive effect on the purchase intention. Meanwhile, there is the reversesynergy between social presence and product and environment knowledge, corporatesocial responsibility, but there is no synergy between social presence and descriptivenorm information.The research conclusion has great theoretical significance and practicalsignificance. From the point of view of theory, research results enrich the existingstudy on environmental protection behavior; expand the new research direction aswell as introduce the CSR information into the mechanism of the purchase intentionof pro-environmental products which find a new breakthrough point for the futureresearch. The paper also applies the Norm-activation theory into the research. Theresults not only verify the theory, but also supplement and expand the theory.Meanwhile, the paper introduces the perceived value into the framework and exploresthe antecedent variables to the perceived value, which brings the new ideas for thefuture study. From a practical sense, the enterprises and government can also get theinspiration and guidance from the conclusion of this study when they are promotingthe pro-environmental products or promoting the environment movement. Both theenterprises and government need to pay attention to their public image, participateand support environment movement and sophisticatedly employ the marketinginformation to increase the consumers’ purchase intention of pro-environmentalproducts as well as their willingness to participate in the environment movement.The innovation of this study is mainly reflected in the following three points:firstly, this study launches the analysis from the external marketing information:product and environment knowledge, CSR information and descriptive norminformation; secondly, this study conducts the research through the experiment whichvirtualizes a company with the pro-environmental product and creates the virtualsituation for the consumers to make the purchase decision within the specific context;thirdly, this study applies the activation theory into the research framework as well asemploys the perceived value as the intermediary variable, builds an action path frommarketing information, through the perceive value and pro-environmental personal norms, to purchase intention; meanwhile, brings the social presence situation to theresearch framework. Of course, there are also some limitations in this research, whichmainly reflected in the product category selection and controlled variables setting.Meanwhile, the paper only studies on consumers’ purchase intention of thepro-environmental products, which may not reflect consumers’ purchase behavior.Thus, the future research will start from the above limitations with more variousproduct characteristics and other controlled variables to explore more influencingfactors, and extend the research from the purchase intention to the purchase behaviorwith the aim of providing more convincing and instructive results and conclusions.