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How can we motivate consumers to purchase environmentally friendly products? Evidence from a laboratory randomized experiment usig eye-trackers

Year: 2016
Type: report
Abstract: By conducting a laboratory experiment, we investigate how consumers' purchasing behavior for certified environmentally friendly forest coffee is affected by their interest in environmental issues, provision of information, and product labels. We contribute to the literature in the following three ways. First, we conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to provide exogeneity to typically endogenous variables, most notably, knowledge of forest coffee. Second, we utilize eye-tracking devices to examine how different product labels result in different visual attention. The combination of an RCT and eye-tracking techniques is new in the literature on purchasing behavior for environmentally friendly products. Third, our experiment measures participants’ purchasing behavior that incurs actual costs rather than examining their willingness-to-pay (WTP) based on hypothetical questions. We find that concerns regarding environmental issues do not promote purchases of certified forest coffee. Information about certification systems does not do so unless information is provided to prior purchasers of certified coffee. By contrast, illustrations of forests on certified coffee products’ labels attracts participants' visual attention and further stimulates actual purchases of certified coffee, suggesting that a 1-second increase in visual attention increases the likelihood of purchasing certified coffee by 16 percent. Our results suggest that, to increase demand for environmentally friendly coffee, sustainable provision of information and visual marketing strategies are more influential than the promotion of interests in environmental issues.
Language: English
Subfield: Marketing
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2558086793
Cites: 55
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Related to: 10