Examining the influence of consumers psychological factors on organic food purchase behaviour

Abstract

The growing share of weather change and other dangerous emissions is directly related to the consumption of polluting products. Meanwhile, the awareness towards the sustainable/green consumerism has been increasing over the years. The utmost for global marketers, promotors, and policymakers of eco-friendly products is to understand the drivers of consumer buying motives in developing economies, also how they differ from developed countries. In this regard, the green type of food products i.e. organic food was used in this study to capture the motivations behind green/eco-friendly consumerism. In addition to the above, this work has identified three novel constructs self-expressive benefits, warm glow, and response efficacy that could affect the consumers adoption of organic food. To confirm the significance of these psychological factors in the context of organic consumerism, three novel conceptual models (i.e. Model1: Response efficacy and TPB framework, Model2: Self-expressive benefits and TPB framework, and Model3: Warm glow and TPB framework) was framed using these three constructs by integrating three theories (i.e. 1. Protection motivation theory, 2. Signaling theory and 3. Pro-social behaviour theory) with the theory of planned behaviour. Generally, research in this domain has estimated the assumptions using collected data from either developed or developing countries. To increase the generalizability of the results, the effect of these variables in both USA and India have been studied in this research using a survey of 1300 (i.e. 750 from India and 750 from USA) respondents which were collected by using a crowdsourcing platform called Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Through the use of structural equation modeling (SEM) and Multi-group moderation technique by AMOS 21 software, this study finds that warm glow, self-expressive benefits, and response efficacy are the significant drivers of the adoption of organic food by consumers in both the countries (i.e. India and USA) newline