IMPACT OF GREEN APPAREL KNOWLEDGE, GREEN TRUST, ECO LABELLING, GREEN APPAREL PERCIEVED EFFECTIVENESS & CONSUMER’S ATTITUDE ON GREEN APPAREL PURCHASE INTENTION

Abstract

Purpose - Green apparel/ sustainable apparel is an emerging phenomenon in today’s era. The environmental degradation and increasing environmental concern is influencing consumers to indulge in green consumption. Famous brands are taking green initiatives and moving away from traditional practices to save the environment. Being a relatively newer term in Pakistan, there hasn’t been much research done on green apparel marketing and how it affects a consumer’s purchase intention. The organic cotton and sustainable apparel sounds odd to public. This problem has evoked this study to investigate the drivers ofconsumer green purchase intention. In this regards, we built an integrated conceptual model to test major drivers of green apparel buying intentions taking into account different variables and testing its relationship with consumer’s attitude towards green apparel and consumer’s green purchase intention respectively. Methodology & Design - The study focused on a conceptual model and to examine this model, data was collected from 244 retail apparel consumers, including both male and female from different urban areas ofPakistan. Subsequently, the data was analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Findings - the findings ofthis study supported the relation between both green trust and eco labeling with consumer’s attitude towards green apparel. It also supported the influence of consumer’s attitude with green purchase intention for the determinants (green trust and eco labelling) while green apparel knowledge and green apparel perceived effectiveness were not supported by the findings ofthis research. In addition, consumer’s attitude towards green apparel was amongst the major contributor of green purchase intention followed by green trust and eco labeling. Limitations - The insufficient time in the collection the data, the geographical limitation in terms ofthe use ofonly selective locations like Karachi, Lahore & Islamabad were amongst the major limitations ofthis research. Due to selection of limited locations, the research cannot be generalized country-wide. Moreover limitation of using mediation and moderation effect was also faced in this research. The use ofonline questionnaire as the tool ofdata collection, ignoring other data collection methods like surveys, interviews, observations was also a limitation in this study Recommendations - Marketers and companies associated with green and sustainable apparel businesses are recommended to work on those attributes that have shown to have major impact on consumer’s attitude towards green product to influence their purchase intention. Hence, the brands are recommended to focus on characteristics like building green trust through their marketing actions, use of eco-labels in their packaging and work on influencing consumer’s attitude towards green apparel so that more people will be aware ofsustainable apparel and move from traditional to eco-friendly practices. Factors such as Green trust and eco-labeling are significant because the study showed a positive relation between attitude towards green apparel and the consumer’s green purchase intention.