KOREASCHOLAR

For decades, marketing practitioners and scholars have envisioned that environmental characteristics of market offerings will become an important consumer concern (Grant 2007; Henion 1981; Kassarjian 1971; Kotler 2011; Ottmann 2011) and a myriad of consumer surveys indicated that consumers are willing to change their purchase and consumption habits for a better environment (Banikarim 2010; Ferguson and Goldman 2010; Imkamp 2000; Laroche, Bergeron and Barbaro-Forleo 2001). However, consumers’ actual adoption of environmental market offerings has been far below what had been expected and predicted so far (Connolly et al. 2006; Davis 1993; do Paço and Varejâo 2010; Kilbournes 1998; Horne 2009). To bridge the gap between consumers’ stated interests in and attitudes regarding adoption of eco-friendly market offerings and their actual adoption of eco-friendly market offerings, marketers need an accurate understanding of: 1) what determines consumers’ willingness and propensity to adopt eco-friendly market offerings and consumption behaviors, 2) how those individual, social, and marketing determinants of eco-friendly consumer behaviors are interrelated with each other, 3) where consumers stand currently in terms of those determinants, and 4) what needs to be done to remove the bottlenecks in the adoption and diffusion processes. To provide answers to above four aspects of eco-friendly consumer behaviors, this paper attempts to advance a more theoretically-based and comprehensive model of eco-friendly consumer behavior than extant models by incorporating recent findings of research on determinants of pro-environmental consumer behaviors and integrating various relevant theories of attitude-behavior links including the value-belief-norm theory, the theory of reasoned action, and the elaboration likelihood model. The structural validity and generalizability of the proposed model is tested based on two sets of survey data collected from consumers in the U.S. Midwest region and a metropolitan area surrounding Seoul, the capital city of Korea. The findings of the empirical study demonstrate that while the proposed model explains eco-friendly consumer behaviors by both the U.S. and Korean consumers, the relative importance of the predictors of eco-friendly consumer behaviors vary between the two groups of consumers. The analysis of the data also reveals that consumers in the two groups differ significantly from each other on many variables which are included as direct and indirect determinants of eco-friendly consumer behaviors in the proposed model. Together, the findings provide interesting and practical implications for strategies to facilitate consumer adoption of eco-friendly market offerings.

• Junyong Kim(Hanyang University)