Studies On Biodiesel Consumers’ Purchasing Intention, Behavior And Its Influencing Factors

As a kind of replaceable, energy-saving, and emerging biomass energy, bio-diesel is the alternative to fossil fuels. To ease the pressure on the current shortage of oil resources and play the role of reducing emissions, bio-diesel should be widely promoted and utilized. As for agriculture, the promotion and utilization of bio-diesel can be contributive to the develeopment of the planting industry, increase the demand for agricultural, and promote farmers’ income.Based on the Theory of Consumer Behavior, reviewed the literature, and integrated the economics and the statistics, this paper analyzes the influencing factors on consumers’ purchase intentions and actual behaviors through taking consumers in Fujian Province as samples. On the basis of empirical analysis, this paper will try to answer the following research questions:whether the degree of consumers’awareness and confidence towards bio-diesel products’attributes affects consumers’purchase intentions and behaviors, and how the degree of this influence? what are the influences of bio-diesel’s message framing and sources on consumers’purchase intentions and behaviors, and how the degree of this influence?This research can be constituted as the following parts:(1)based on the predecessors’ research results, this research applyes the theory of consumer behavior to analyse consumers’purchase intentions and actual behaviors and its influencing factors; then builds theoretical analysis framework of consumers’purchase intentions and actual behaviors, its influencing factors, finally chosing variables of consumers’ purchase intentions and actual behaviors, puts forward the research hypothesis;(2) according to the questionnaire survey for collecting data, this paper analyses the biodiesel purchase intention of Fujian Province and its influence factors by the Logit Model, and discussion the empirical results;(3) examines the factors affecting bio-diesel consumers’ purchase behaviors (purchase frequency and purchase amount) by Poisson Distribution Model and Tobit Model,then analyzes the empirical results basing on the questionnaire survey data;(4) Finally, this paper puts some countermeasures based on the above empirical analysis.By investigating the influencing factors of consumer purchase intention about bio-diesel, purchase frequency and the purchase amount, the conclusions are stated as following:First, whether professionals recommend buying bio-diesel, the use of bio-diesel could reduce the pollution of the environment, consumers consider whether bio-diesel has advantage to reduce emissions, bio-diesel has price advantage, whether friends and relatives using bio-diesel, whether having the sales promotion and consumers trust of bio-diesel have statistical and significant influence on consumer purchase intentionSecond, whether experts recommend buying bio-diesel, having the sales promotion of bio-diesel,and gas station providing bio-diesel,health hazard for the consumer, the consumer’s trust of bio-diesel, whether bio-diesel has price advantage, quality assessment of bio-diesel have significant influence on consumers’purchase frequency of bio-diesel.Third, consumer consumption amount of bio-diesel is affected by the price of bio-diesel, emission reduction, the influence of factors such as sale promotion, whether friendsand relatives using bio-diesel and expert’s recommendation on buying bio-diesel.Fourth, message framing has significantly positive effect on the consumers’ purchasing behavior. This indicates that expert’s recommendation on the bio-diesel properties including lower pollution emissions for the proper promotion and publicity, will strengthen consumer’s bio-diesel knowledge of the environmental protection, and will lead to increasing the use of bio-diesel and purchase, at the same time, develop new energy market.lt is a positive siginificance for achieving the object of balance between economic growth and environmental protection.Fifth, the variables including the family net income, the quality of biodiesel evaluation, whether biodiesel has reduction effect, hundreds of kilometers of biodiesel energy consumption, whether biodiesel has price advantage, consumer trust of biodiesel and whether the gas station offer biodiesel, have statistically significant impacts on consumer’s behavior deviation between the purchase intention and purchase behavior.The conclusions show that if consumer involvement of bio-diesel become higher, the awareness and knowledge of bio-diesel will be higher than before, the purchasing intention would be transferred into actual purchase behavior. Based on the theory of EKB consumer behavior, in order to improve the consumers’actual purchase behavior of bio-diesel, more and more consumers have to have better understanding to the attribute of bio-diesel. Although consumers may have relatively strong desire to purchase bio-diesel, imperfect existing markets and sales channels would affect consumers’real purchasing behavior of bio-diesel. This indicates that it enable consumers to purchase bio-diesel conveniently; and strengthen promotional activities, accelerate construction of the bio-diesel sales channels and market circulation, in order to transform purchase intention into actual purchase behavior effectively. More importantly, the expert’s promotion and publication on biodiesel positive attributes (including emissions reduction and other aspects) appropriately, will significantly lead consumers to increasing the utilization and purchasing of biodiesel.Therefore, it is essential to transfer consumers’ purchasing intention into actual purchase behavior effectively, improve the proportion of bio-diesel in China’s energy market structure. These means not only achieve rapid economic development, but also achieve the target of energy reduction, and realize the consistent of economic goals and ecological environmental protection goals, and ultimately realize sustainable development.