The more I care, the less I will listen to you: How information, environmental concern and ethical production influence consumers' attitudes and the purchasing of sustainable products

摘要

Providing information to consumers is crucial to foster pro-environmental attitudes and the purchasing of green products. To date few studies explored the interplay between information, pre-existing environmental concern and barriers to the purchase of green products. By analyzing the data from a survey to a large sample of Italian consumers (n = 8001), we advanced 6 hypotheses to explain the main drivers behind consumers' selection of sustainable products. Attitudes towards green products were the main predictors of green product purchasing and were influenced by consumer's attitudes towards ecolabels, whose marginal effect varied according to the level of individual environmental concern. Our study provides evidence that ecolabels can play a significant role in attitude formation about green products, interacting with environmental concern. Therefore, we suggest future studies about green consumer profiling based on how consumers access and integrate information in decision-making, to improve green marketing campaigns.