The Research On How The Human Values Influence Consumer's Preference Of Green Products

From the 1960's of 20th century, the western marketers began to research the environmental consumption behaviors in the consumer's daily life. And they proposed the concept-"green consumers". They used geography variables, cultural variables, personality variables and soci-demographic variables to describe green consumers, and explored environmental knowledge, personal values, environmental attitudes, personal characteristic and environmental behaviors how to influence the consumers as well. We use product meaning approach Allen (1997) and Allen and Ng (1999) proposed to explore the influence of human values on the preference on two kinds of green products, such as milk/milk power gotten the certificate of green symbol, one off environmental papery cup. This article has been divided into 5 chapters, the 1st chapter is relate to the introduction of research on green consumers; the 2nd chapter reviews the literature of the influence of human values on consumer's products choices; the 3rd chapter proposes tow hypotheses of the article; the 4th chapter details the research methods employed; in the last chapter, the results of the research are detailed.The 1st chapter is comprise of 4 parts, firstly introducing the definitions of green consumption and green consumers, and then indicating the differences of green consumers and common consumers, at last explaining the research on green consumers from the different aspects, such as the green consumers' soci-demographics, environmental knowledge, attitudes, environmental behaviors, personal characteristics and values. Values are closely relate to green consumers, but the present research only indicate certain values influence consumers' behaviors, all the research can't explain the natural process of how the values influence the preference on green products. For the reasons, the article will review the theory of values influences on product choice firstly, and then explore how their values influence on green products preferences.In the 2nd chapters, the author reviews the literature of consumer's values influence on their behavior, and this chapter is divided into two parts. The author just introduces two kinds of popular definitions. In the second parts of this chapter, the author delineates three approaches to research the influence of values on product choice, such as "Direct Influence Approach", "General Attitude-mediation Approach" and "Attribute- mediation Approach" ,The prior two approaches are limited to explain the values' influence on product choice. The 3rd approach is sound useful, but also has limitations, which is limited on certain context, there are 3 kinds of attribute-mediation approaches, which limitation are due to their rationale-expectation-value theory. The author details the threes' common advantages and their limitations, and then delineates a more comprehensive approach to solve the problems, which is called product meaning approach.In the 3rd chapter, two hypotheses are proposed after introducing three general meaning theory and a specific product meaning theory, Osgood's (1952) behaviorist approach, Saussure's(1974) semiotic perspective, Szalay and Deese's (1978) notion of psychological meaning, and Richins' (1994) models of product meanings. Utilitarian-symbolic dimension is employed in this article.The 4th chapter is comprised of 3 parts. The author details the design of the research in the 1st parts; and in the 2nd and 3rd parts separately introduce the configuration of the samples and questionnaires. Green milk/milk power and one off environmental papery cup to test the hypotheses. The product tangible attributes scales is developed by the author, the human values scales are adjusted from RVS and SVS, and meaning and judgment scales are adjusted from Allen and Ng's Scales.The results are reported in the 5th chapter. The 1 st section explores the important variables and receives useful information. In the 2nd sections, the research results are detailed, the hypotheses are refused according to the data analysis. And in the followi...