REMark: Revista Brasileira de Marketing (Sep 2013)
Green Consumption: A Cross Cultural Study about Environmental Beliefs, Concerns, and Attitudes
Abstract
Even though young college students, from different countries, have ever growing access to information about environmental practices, this does not mean that they develop an awareness that leads to good practices of green consumption. Using a new scale, applied to 2372 college students from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain, it was verified whether the perception of the environment of those youngsters is expressed by a construct which is reasonably structured by beliefs, concerns, and environment-friendly attitudes, through the analysis of the impacts caused by those dimensions onto their consumption practices. As a strategy for data analysis, was used exploratory factor analysis, with the use of the Mann-Whitney test on factors scores and Spearman correlation between the mean values of the factors. It was possible to conclude that, although there are similarities between the youngsters from Latin America and the group from Iberia (Spain and Portugal), there are significant differences on how such a perception is structured. The Iberians have an anthropocentric motivation, linked to the idea of preserving resources for the future, while the Latin Americans have a more holistic vision, in which the environmental beliefs play a role of an important background. Between the two groups there are also differences regarding the possibility to conciliate economical development with environmental conservation. It was noted that the green consumption is an answer to the environmental concerns for both groups, which are less influenced by other dimensions, and this fact could impact the marketing strategies towards those groups.
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