Environmental Concern, Attitude toward Green Corporate Practices, and Green Consumer Behavior in the United States and Canada

ABSTRACTThis paper examines environmental concern, attitude toward green corporate practices, and green consumer behavior in the United States and Canada and reports the results of mall-intercept studies conducted in the two countries. Consistent with prior research, in the Canadian sample, environmental concern was significantly related to measures of green consumer attitudes and behaviors, and green attitudes mediated the effect of environmental concern on willingness to pay more for ecologically friendly products. However, contrary to predictions, the US sample scored higher than the Canadian sample on measures of environmental concern and attitude toward green corporate practices and evidenced weak relationships between environmental concern and green consumer attitudes and price premiums.INTRODUCTIONEnvironmentalism is perhaps one of the most global sociocultural trends impacting marketing. A recent international survey by BBC World News and Synovate, carried out across 22 markets on six continents, found 72% of the respondents were concerned about climate change and 61% had purchased green products within the last year (BBC World News, 2008). In spite of concern by many environmentalists over the possible impact of the recession on green marketing, it seems to have defied the economic downturn (Neff, 2009), with companies such as Procter and Gamble continuing to announce new green marketing initiatives (Alexander, 2010). Although considerable public opinion and academic research has been conducted to aid our knowledge and understanding of environmentalism and consumer behavior, surprisingly few studies have compared green consumerism across countries. The purpose of this study is to confirm prior findings regarding environmental concern and consumer attitudes and behavior across two countries, and to compare environmental attitudes and behaviors, and their relationships, in the two countries.LITERATURE REVIEWEnvironmental concern has proven to be an important construct in the study of environmental attitudes and behavior. Early influential work on environmental concern was published by Dunlap and his colleagues (Dunlap and Van Liere, 1978; Catton and Dunlap, 1980) in establishing the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) to reflect an emerging ecoconsciousness. Although the NEP scale was conceived as a measure of beliefs indicating adherence to a particular worldview, and not as an attitudinal measure per se (Dunlap et al., 2000), research utilizing the NEP and other measures of environmental concern have typically viewed it as an attitudinal construct, i.e., as an overall evaluation of the object environmental protection (Schultz and Zelezny, 1999; Bamberg, 2003; Kim and Choi 2005; AbdulMuhmin, 2007). Therefore, applying attitudinal models such as Fishbein and Azjen's Theory of Reasoned Action (1975) and Homer and Kahle's value-attitude-behavior model (1988), research has investigated values as antecedents to environmental concern and behaviors as consequences.Several studies have supported a value basis for environmental concern. Stem and Dietz (1994) found environmental concern was related to egoistic, social altruistic, and biospheric value orientations; Shultz and Zelezny (1999) found that the NEP was predicted by universalism, power and tradition; and McCartny and Shrum (2001) supported a model in which individualism and collectivism were related to environmental beliefs. Although conceptualized and measured in different ways, all of these studies support a negative relationship between an individualistic value orientation and environmental concern.On the other end of the value-attitude-behavior chain, environmental concern has been shown to be predictive of environmental behaviors including recycling (Schultz and Oskamp, 1996), willingness to pay more for green products (Loureiro et al., 2002), and a variety of other buying behaviors (Chan, 1996; Kim and Choi, 2005). Clark and Stewart (1997) found that perceived environmental dangers were related to three participation factors-economic sacrifice, personal activities, and political activities, in both the US and Canada. …