Study On Consumers' Buying Intention And Behavior Of Organic Vegetables

At present,the quality and safety situation of agricultural products in China is not optimistic.The media often reports that pesticide residues in various kinds of agricultural products,such as vegetables and fruits,are too high or even lead to mass poisoning incidents,resulting in a certain degree of panic among consumers.Consumer concerns about vegetable safety have been raised,with the 2017 central document making it clear that the quality of agricultural products and food safety should be improved across the board.At the same time,as China's annual food output has increased for 12 years,the country's economic strength has increased,the national consumption capacity has been upgraded,and the residents' awareness of environmental protection and health has increased,people are no longer worried about the quantity and insufficient supply of agricultural products.They pay more attention to agricultural products' quality and safety.Organic vegetables are more and more popular with the public because of their unique safety and health characteristics.However,despite of the huge potential demand for organic vegetables in China,the proportion of organic vegetables consumed by Chinese consumers is very low.Based on the relevant literature?interviews and Theoy of Planned Behavior,combined with the actual situation and consumer characteristics of Chinese,The theoretical model of buying intention and behavior of organic vegetables and the questionnaire of buying intention and buying behavior of organic vegetables were developed.The current situation of the influencing factors of organic vegetable buying intention,such as cognitive information?emotional beliefs,?attitudes? subjective norms?perceptual behavior control,and the main factors influencing consumers' buying intention and behavior of organic vegetables were studied,and the degree of each influencing factor was analyzed empirically.This paper explores the forming mechanism of consumers' buying intention and behavior of organic vegetables.In order to boost the development of organic vegetable industry and promote consumers' buying intention and behavior of organic vegetables,the countermeasures and suggestions are put forward.Through theoretical analysis and empirical research,this paper obtains the following main conclusions:(1)Consumers' cognition of organic vegetables is not high,and most consumers' cognition of organic vegetables is vague.There was no significant difference in the cognition of organic vegetable products among the consumers with different gender and education level.Whether the elderly or children living together,the city,age,occupation,family income,marital status have a significant impact on consumer cognition of organic vegetables.Consumers are highly aware of health and pay more attention to health than to food safety and environmental pollution.Consumers are worried about vegetable quality safety and agricultural ecological pollution.(2)Consumers have a general degree of trust in organic marking and organic codes.Consumers are not confident that production enterprises can strictly abide by organic production standards in the production process.Consumers have certain confidence in the technical aspects of the organic marking system that can be traced back to the source.Consumers prefer foreign organic certification agencies to domestic organic certification agencies.Consumer satisfaction with organic certification regulation is particularly low.Among them,consumers' satisfaction with social integrity environment is the lowest,the satisfaction of organic vegetable regulatory law and organic vegetable regulatory department is not high.(3)Although consumers prefer to buy organic vegetables,most consumers do not think buying organic vegetables is a wise choice.Consumer subjective norm level is general,that is to say,the evaluation and attitude of important groups around consumers on the behavior of buying organic vegetables are relatively neutral.Although relatives and friends agree with them to buy organic vegetables,in fact,The satisfaction and actual purchasing behavior of organic vegetables purchased by these relatives and friends were not very high.Consumer perceived behavior control is at a low level,indicating that consumers consider it difficult to buy organic vegetables.The biggest obstacle to buying organic vegetables is that the price is too high,followed by the few selling channel and limited varieties.(4)Consumers are willing to buy organic vegetables,59.02 percent of consumers clearly said they would like to buy organic vegetables.Only 14.29% of consumers explicitly indicated that they did not want to buy organic vegetables.In terms of frequency of buying,about 65 percent of consumers have never bought or rarely purchased organic vegetables,and about 35 percent of consumers say they regularly buy organic vegetables.Only about 10% of consumers whose proportion of buying organic vegetables in the total proportion of vegetables is more than 50%.(5)The descending order of influencing factors on consumers' buying intention of organic vegetables was: subjective norm?behavior attitude?affective belief?product cognition?perceived behavior control ? health and environmental protection consciousness.The factors that had significant influence on the buying behavior of organic vegetables in a descending order were as follows: buying intention?subjective norm?behavior attitude?affective belief?perceptual behavior control?product cognition?health and environmental protection consciousness.The influencing factors on buying intention of organic vegetables is basically the same as that on buying behavior,that is to say,consumers' cognition of organic vegetable products,awareness of health and environmental protection,emotional beliefs,behavioral attitudes,subjective norms,perceived behavior control all have an impact on consumers' buying intention and behavior of organic vegetables.The difference lies in the difference of the importance of the influencing factors and the different formation mechanism of the influence.Consumer perceived behavior control has more influence on the buying behavior of organic vegetables than on the buying intention.(6)In terms of the effect of demographic variables on buying intention and buying behavior,gender,occupation and annual income of the consumer had no significant influence on the buying behavior and buying intention of organic vegetables.Whether there are old people or children living together,the city,age,education,marital status all have a significant impact on the buying intention of organic vegetables,having an elderly or children living together> no elderly or children living together;First tier city > second line and second line developed city;41-55 years > 26-40 years >56 years old > 18-25 years old;senior high school and below =college > undergraduate > graduate student and above;married > unmarried > divorced or widowed.And the demographic variables affecting consumer organic vegetable buying behavior were education level and marital status,junior college > senior high school > undergraduate > graduate student;married > unmarried > divorced or widowed.Based on the above conclusions,this paper puts forward seven countermeasures and suggestions to improve the consumers' buying intention and behavior of organic vegetables:(1)carry out multi-level organic vegetable propaganda and experience activities to improve consumers' cognitive level;(2)strengthen the organic certification and organic supervision system to enhance the trust degree of organic vegetables,(3)strengthen the legislation and strictly enforce the law to enhance the satisfaction of consumers to the supervision;(4)establish public opinion supervision mechanism and set up reward reporting system to improve the credibility of supervision,(5)perfect food safety tractability system construction to reduce information asymmetry,(6)integrate resources and reduce organic vegetable cost;(7)implement brand strategy and improve sales channels to promote organic vegetable sales.