Examining purchase intention of eco-friendly products: A comparative study

This is a comparative study to examine the process toward purchase intention of eco-friendly products with Korean and Chinese. This study extended the theory of planned behavior that explains men and women behavior also intention to performance the behavior. Furthermore, it established a conceptual framework in which environmental knowledge exerts an effect on attitude, perceived behavioral control and subjective norm, toward eco-friendly products, which in turn lead to the dependent variable, purchase intention of eco-friendly products. The results with 236 Korean and 315 Chinese college students showed that environmental knowledge positively affected eco-friendly subjective norm and attitude. Furthermore, subjective norm turned out to have the strongest influence on purchase intention of eco-friendly products in both the countries. On the other hand, although the two countries are similar oriental cultures, in the Korean case the path from perceived behavioral control to purchase intention was rejected but in the Chinese case a path from environmental knowledge to perceived behavioral control was so. That is, this research also found such differences in the paths toward purchase intention. These findings suggest the importance of environmental knowledge education to induce purchasing of eco-friendly products, and have practical implications, based on the differences between the two countries.