소비자의 환경관심과 환경마크 제품 구매의도

초록

Many advanced countries around the world pursue the green policy as a new paradigm of economies. As part of such an effort the government and the environmental organizations are actively enforcing Eco-mark’s introduction to encourage consumers to buy environmental products more and to enforce encourage manufacturers to improve product’s environmental aspects. Also in environmental labelling (Type III) which is prescribed in ISO14020 series, it became com- pulsory to indicate the products’ whole process of inventory information. In this movement, the com- pany's main task is how they quantify the stewardship of the environment. There is an increasing awareness that the natural environment is being harmed by human actions. Polling data suggest that high percentages of people around the world believe that environmental problems are among the most important social problems of the day. Other recent findings have differ- entiated between environmental attitudes based on concern for self (egoistic) and concern for plants and animals (biospheric). In recent years, as consumers have been particularly concerned about the purchase of environ- ment-friendly products, the confusion issue with regard to eco-labelling began to emerge. Eco-labelling systems having too many ambiguous and similar eco-labels are blamed for creating confusions among the consumers and undermine the credibility of the eco-labelling systems. This study attempts to examine how consumers perceive the Eco-mark in their purchase situation, and how their perception influence their product evaluation. In this study, we classified the consum- er’s perception of Eco-mark into two dimensions and examined the effect of consumer related factors on each dimension. We administerd a survey with consumer attending a located in the metropolitan area. The research used a survey questionnaire to validate the proposed research hypotheses and the questionnaire is structured in a self-report way to investigate the perceptions of the respondents. The data for the re- search were collected from consumers. 200 copies of the questionnaires were returned by respondents. The hypotheses proposed in the research were analyzed by using Path Analysis with SPSS 21.0 and Amos 18.0 program. Structural equation modeling was used to explicitly model sources of error in the dataset, thereby providing more accurate estimates of the true relationships between the variables of interest. The results of this study are as follows. First, biospheric environmental concerns had a positive effect on the perceived importance of Eco-mark, while egoistic environmental concerns had no effect. Second, the familarity of Eco-mark had a positive effect on the perceived credibility of Eco-mark. the availability of Eco-mark had no effect. And finally, two dimensions of consumer’s perception of Eco-mark had significant effects on the willingness-to-pay a premium for environmentally products and the Eco-mark product purchasing intention. That is, consumers seem to use Eco-mark as an im- portant extrinsic cue in addition to environmental information when they evaluate the products. This study examines the necessity and applications of Eco-mark, and the results of this empirical study suggest some important implications for the marketer of companies.

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