Factors influencing green energy purchase intention and behaviour: an empirical study

Factors influencing green energy purchase intention and behaviour: an empirical study

This research examines the factors influencing consumers' purchase intentions and actual behaviours concerning green energy. Although consumers are indicating much more interest in green energy, not enough research has been done on this topic. This thesis employed the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB, Ajzen, 1991) to understand and examine the factors influencing green energy purchase intention and behaviour. Most of the studies that have used TPB as the theoretical framework concluded that there is always a gap between purchase intention and actual behaviour. The present thesis addresses this gap. Although consumers express concern about the environment and have positive attitudes and intentions to respect and purchase greenenergy, they do not actually buy green energy despite wanting to (Hobman & Fredrick, 2014; Palandino & Pandit, 2019). Yet, the ways to minimise or explain this gap or that can reduce the intention-behaviour gap and its magnitude are poorly understood. In order to push the understanding of the intention-behaviour gap from the social psychology and consumer behaviour literature, this research endeavoured to answer the call from researchers to investigate such a gap. In line with that, this research aims to examine reciprocal determinism and view several factors as determinants of green energy purchase intention and behaviour (GPIB). This is done to generate a better understanding of green energy consumption behaviour, explore intention-behaviour relationships, and understand their respective structure and relative importance in an Australian setting. The research framework devised for this PhD thesis has a two-fold aim:1. To investigate the factors influencing consumers' purchase intention and purchase behaviour of green energy.2. To reduce the gap between purchase intention and actual behaviour. In line with the above research aims, the researcher puts forth two specific research questions, which are: a) What factors determine green energy purchase intention and behaviour? b) What can reduce the gap between purchase intention and actual behaviour? The research model for this study was conceptualised by considering environmental concern, moral norm, green brand perception, retail service quality and green promotion in addition to the core variables of TPB, including attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control, intention and actual behaviour. Thus, the extended TPB model was developed for further empirical examination. A postal survey was employed in this study to examine the hypothesised associations. The postal survey was administered using a self-addressed prepaid envelope which was mailed randomly to 1200 residential consumers across Sydney, NSW. Respondents were randomly selected using the White Pages telephone directory for multiple suburbs of NSW. A total of 386 responses were collected in Sydney, NSW as data input. Data were analysed using a partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique. The study results indicated that the modified TPB model had a satisfactory fit to the data and the inclusion of these constructs significantly enhanced the predictive power of Australian household consumers' intention to buy green energy: R2 = 0.521 from i.e., R2 = 0.420 as well as green energy buying behaviour R2 = 0.570 from i.e., R2 = 0.259. This indicates the increased predictive power of the added constructs (environmental concern, moral norm, perceived green brand, moral norm, retail service quality and green promotion) in the modified TPB framework. Established here is the practicality and applicability of the proposed model to generate a decent overall data fit for predicting consumers' purchase intention and behaviour. Thus, results show that this thesis's extended TPB model has a strong predictive power compared to the original TPB model with the same set of data. It emerged that 'green promotion' had a significant mediational effect between intention and behaviour, and additionally, reduced the gap between purchase intention and actual behaviour. Therefore, the novel theoretical contributions include the predictive ability of the extended TPB model relative to the original TPB model with the same dataset, and an explanation about how 'green promotion' can address the intention-behaviour gap. This is the first study that measures five novel constructs, i.e., perceived behavioural control, moral norm, green energy brand, service quality and green promotion. They are validated as the antecedents of GPIB for a sustainable green energy product. This study is also one of the first to attempt a comprehensive study of GPIB using the TPB framework, combining both behavioural intention and behaviour so that it can be employed in an Australian context and thus expand the marketing literature on this topic. By understanding the relationships between future behavioural intentions and their determinants, policy makers and energy marketers preferably should know how to strengthen an attractive image towards green energy consumption and improve their marketing efforts in order to maximize the market share of green energy. The researcher suggests that the Australian government should strengthen the marketing of green energy and promote effective communication strategies to improve the environmental value of green energy to consumers.

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