Exploring consumers' green purchase intention for a packaged food product with regard to eco-friendly packaging: the case of packaged instant noodles in Vietnam
Creators: name: Nguyen, Thu
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 350602
subject: Consumer-oriented product or service development

description: This PhD thesis explores the impacts of internal psychological and external contextual social factors on Vietnamese consumers’ green purchase intention for an everyday food product in eco-friendly packaging. In practice, consumers’ buying behaviours, particularly in everyday buying decision making, is very important to building and developing a green consumption culture. This thesis proposes and explores an integrative model of green purchase intention relating to packaged instant noodles with regard to eco-friendly packaging. Prior studies in the same field have not yet examined green purchase intention for a specific food product in terms of eco-friendly packaging, especially in the context of an emerging market facing critical issues of packaging disposal and pollution. This research demonstrates that environmental self-identity and environmental involvement are significant predictors of Vietnamese consumers’ green purchase intention which leads to positive impacts on willingness to pay and shopping effort for eco-friendly packaging. The developed research model interrogated an integrative model based on the Motivation-Ability-Opportunity (MAO) approach and social norms theory to explore green purchase intention. Following the MAO approach combined with social descriptive norms, this research examined antecedent variables of green purchase intention in the direction of motivation, ability and opportunity. The examined antecedents in the research model were environmental involvement, environmental self-identity, subjective environmental knowledge, product involvement, perceived time pressure, perceived availability of alternatives, perceived descriptive norms and the dependent variable was green purchase intention. This research also investigated green purchase intention in association with willingness to pay and shopping effort. This research proposed that a precise understanding of Vietnamese consumers’ green purchase intention for eco-friendly packaged instant noodles provides input to develop relevant strategies to change everyday consumer buying behaviours towards a more sustainable manner. This is the first research to apply an integrative model that incorporates both internal psychological and external contextual social factors to predict green purchase intention for an eco-friendly packaged food product. This research used a sequential mixed methods design with two phases. Accordingly, phase one of this research was of a qualitative nature, using focus group interviews with 36 participants in the two largest cities of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. This qualitative phase was to explore consumer perceptions of eco-friendly packaging. In addition, phase one was to validate antecedent factors which were pre-determined from a literature review as being potentially associated with green purchase intention. In particular, phase one identified three major dimensions of eco-friendly packaging in consumer perceptions (namely, packaging materials, manufacturing technology and market appeal). Consumers want eco-friendly packages which satisfy not only the environmental characteristics of packaging materials and an eco-friendly manufacturing process but also the market appealing characteristics of being aesthetic and reasonably priced. In addition, antecedents potentially influencing green purchase intention were validated for further testing in phase two of this research. Based on the findings of phase one, the research model and hypotheses were further developed for testing in phase two. In the quantitative research of phase two, an online survey was conducted to collect quantitative data to empirically examine the research model. There were three hundred and eight (308) usable responses. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was the statistical data analysis method. The results from the data analysis partly supported the research model. To elaborate, the analysis showed that two factors relating to consumers’ motivation in the research model, environmental self-identity and environmental involvement, have significant impacts on green purchase intention and indirect effects on willingness to pay and shopping effort for eco-friendly packaged instant noodles. Moreover, the results demonstrated that green purchase intention significantly affects willingness to pay and shopping effort with regard to eco-friendly packaging. The research findings provide theoretical implications for green consumption research in emerging markets. This research offers empirical support for the relationships of green purchase intention with willingness to pay and shopping effort for instant noodles in eco-friendly packaging. The results also show that environmental self-identity and environmental involvement are significant antecedents leading to a higher level of green purchase intention, especially in everyday green consumption activities such as buying an eco-friendly packaged food product. Furthermore, practical implications are given for the government and business sectors to develop more effective strategies to encourage consumers to make everyday green purchase decisions. For the government sector, to reduce the consumption of non-eco-friendly packaging, social marketing campaigns should be regularly run to raise consumers’ involvements with environmental issues. Policy-makers could emphasise environmental self-identities in social campaigns to gradually change consumers’ consumption practices for packaging. In the matter of industry practices, businesses should apply environmental self-identity and environmental involvement in their marketing communications to enhance public images of green consumers. In this way, businesses could improve consumers’ green purchase intention. Simultaneously, consumers will increase their willingness to pay and shopping effort for packaged instant noodles that offer eco-friendly packaging options.