The role of cultural values in green purchasing intention: Empirical evidence from Chinese consumers

Environmental problems, especially in the case of water and air pollution, are the harmful result of the overconsumption of fossil fuels as well as various forms of industrial sewage water discharge. Recently, growing environmentally friendly purchasing behaviour of consumers has become regarded as an effective method for alleviating such environmental problems. Due to concerns regarding the natural environment, consumers have increasingly begun to exhibit favourable attitudes towards environmentally friendly products, and as a result, are more likely to purchase “green” products. However, green purchasing behaviour of consumers varies across different nations and cultures. This study aims to reveal how Chinese cultural values (specifically, the Doctrine of the Mean) influence green purchasing intention of Chinese consumers. As the lifestyles of consumers will be deeply affected by their cultural values, this study examines the mediating effects of the four dimensions of Chinese lifestyle have on consumers. At the same time, environmental knowledge is considered as a moderating variable in order to investigate the relationship between the Doctrine of the Mean and green purchasing intention. The study’s data were collected from Chinese consumers. Empirical results reveal that such Chinese cultural values are positively associated with green purchasing intention, and that three dimensions of consumer lifestyle (namely leadership, cost consciousness and development consciousness), are all found to play mediating roles in the relationship between the Doctrine of the Mean and green purchasing intention in Chinese consumers. The moderating effects of environmental knowledge are exhibited in the influence of leadership as well as development consciousness on green purchasing intention. The study’s findings have theoretical implications for understanding green purchasing intention as well as behaviour of Chinese consumers further. The study’s findings also present practical implications for how to promote green purchasing intention in Chinese consumers better.     

Factors affecting consumers’ purchase intention of eco‐friendly food in China: The evidence from respondents in Beijing

The purpose aims to examine the key factors influencing Chinese consumer’s purchasing behaviour of eco‐friendly food in China giving its context as an emerging economy and its rapidly rising importance in the world eco‐friendly food market. This paper adopts and extends the Responsible Environmental Behaviour (REB) theory by empirically testing key psychosocial factors influencing the purchase intention of eco‐friendly food and the moderating effects of consumers’ demographic characteristics on the relationship between the key psychosocial factors and the purchase intention. A number of hypotheses are proposed. A questionnaire was designed and distributed via online survey in Beijing, China. A total of 239 valid responses were received. The empirical data were used to test the research hypotheses using the hierarchical multiple regression analysis. The research finds that the personality factors in the REB model (i.e., pro‐environmental attitudes, the internal locus of control and personal responsibly) have significant positive effects on the consumers’ eco‐friendly food purchase intention. Such effect is stable across consumers with different income levels. On the other hand, the knowledge–skill factors in the REB model do not have significant effect on the purchase intention of consumers. This study contributes to a better understanding of factors affecting eco‐friendly food consumption intention in China and the behavioural characteristics of consumers in developing countries. Moreover, the findings also shed light on the applicability of the REB theory in emerging economies and a specific industrial context.     

My style,my food,my waste! Consumer food waste-related lifestyle segments

Adapting responsible food marketing practices to different customer types can make a valuable contribution to reducing food waste. The current study investigated the relation between food (waste)-related lifestyle patterns and self-reported food waste, choices for suboptimal food, and food waste awareness using a survey with 4214 consumers across five Northern and Western European countries. Results show differences in food wastage, suboptimal choices, and awareness for five clusters of consumers identified on the basis of food (waste)-related lifestyle patterns. Findings of commonalities allow deriving food marketing actions targeted to these different consumer lifestyles.     

Optimal targeting of latent tourism demand segments

This paper identifies for the first time the optimal target markets employing the latent tourism demand expenditure, a novel concept in tourism literature. The study quantifies latent tourism demand between each pair of origin-destination through distinguishing by type of tourism and seasonality. It works with market shares that are estimated via a fractional regression model. Moreover, latent demand is clustered using a market segmentation approach based on a latent class regression. Finally, the optimal target markets are chosen depending on the expected latent tourism expenditure. The result has clear policy implications in terms of which markets are promoted, the optimal channels of communication and the maximum budget for each marketing campaign.     

Away from home: How young Chinese consumers travel with global brands?

This interpretive study investigates how a group of young Chinese students consume global brands of American origins, in China and in the UK. More specifically, this research examines how meanings attached to global food brands travel abroad with consumers and investigates the relationship between brand consistency and brand meanings across national boundaries. Findings from a thematic analysis of focus group interviews conducted over a nine-month period, reveal that some brand meanings are context and culture specific (contextual meanings) while other meanings travel with consumers across borders (core meanings). Theoretically, this study shows how global brands provide a platform of structural meanings, ideas and practices that are global and globalising in themselves, allowing a degree of fluidity and adaptation in relation to the local context of consumption.     

Copyright: a systemic marketplace icon

This article argues that copyright is a systemic marketplace icon because of the breadth of its effects on market operations. Copyright determines how intellectual property rights for creative work are allocated between the different actors involved in production and consumption, and must balance the civic priority of public access to creative work with the market-driven principle of rewarding private interests for their effort. This duality tends to polarise opinion about its implementation by rights holders, because very different ideological assumptions underpin civic and market objectives. Copyright discourses reveal how these ideological struggles play out among interested parties, who use the concept of copyright to make arguments about how markets should be structured, how creative work should be exchanged, and how consumers should behave. In the process, copyright is constructed, explained, branded and promoted as an object to which market actors must orient themselves if they wish to conduct themselves appropriately, and as a rationale for material changes to market structures. At the same time, copyright discourses reveal the implications of copyright, which invoke both the market and democracy, for the quality of democracy, the circulation of creativity, and the availability of public knowledge, and help explain why ideological struggles over copyright are so difficult to resolve.     

An Investigation into Restaurant Attributes: A Basis for a Typology

This article has the aim of presenting the basis for a new, clearer classification of restaurant attributes. The research followed an interpretive approach with a systematic review of the literature, compared and contrasted with the findings of six focus group interviews. A new model was devised with seven categories of restaurant attributes. This article presents a model that needs to be tested. Also, follow-up articles with more detail about the attributes under each category will be presented. This article organizes the disparate literature on restaurant attributes and looks into the relationship between attributes, particularly its influence on perceived consumer value.     

Beyond symbolic and substantive: Strategic disclosure of corporate environmental information in China

Under increasing regulatory pressure to disclose environmental impacts, corporate environmental information disclosure (EID) is becoming more prevalent. However, the motives for EID and disclosure approaches (i.e., symbolic or substantive) remain controversial. Using a sample of data for 742 listed manufacturing firms in China across 3 years, we provide evidence to show that the level of EID is significantly positively associated with a firm's advertising intensity and that firms in moderately competitive industries have a higher propensity for adopting an EID‐based differentiated strategy than firms in stronger or weaker competitive industries. We also find that firms that are more sensitive to environmental issues strategically understate their environmental impact when directly facing consumers. Our results suggest that the implementation of corporate EID is strategic and that firms have strong market motives, even under regulatory pressure to demonstrate legitimacy. We discuss this study's contributions to research on EID theory and implications for strategic EID management.     

What retailers need to understand about website inaccessibility and disabled consumers: Challenges and opportunities

This research uniquely contributes to the marketing policy literature by illuminating the widespread yet seldom studied problem of online inaccessibility of retail websites affecting approximately 30 million disabled Americans. When a website is not designed to be navigated easily or is not compatible with assistive technology such as a screen-reader, these potential customers are not able to independently search for information and conduct transactions. Blind and low vision participants in an empirical study provide their opinions regarding accessibility policy issues and reveal that their frustrations with inaccessible retail websites may result, not only in avoidance of the retailer in its different sales channels but also in antifirm behaviors driven by negative attitudes toward perceived retailer accessibility/disability policy that spur feelings of online marketplace discrimination. Using two different evaluation tools, the top 100 retailers in the United States were evaluated on the accessibility of their websites over the past 4 years (2015–2018). Results show that most websites contain many design errors making navigation very difficult or even impossible for vision impaired consumers. The argument is made that online retailers who proactively address these inaccessibility issues on their websites may significantly increase their customer base and profitability.     

A Novel Compact Cat Swarm Optimization Based on Differential Method

ABSTRACT

A compact cat swarm optimization scheme (cCSO) is proposed in this paper, which is designed to solve application domains plagued with limited memory and less-computation power, as a member of cat swarm optimization algorithms (CSO), it composes of two sub-modes, i.e., tracing and seeking modes, so it keeps the same search logic of CSO. On the other hand, cCSO inherits the main feature of compact algorithms, a normal probabilistic model is used to represent the population of solutions instead of processing an actual population, which ensures the cCSO to have the modest memory requirement. The updating vector for the probabilistic model provides a clear moving direction for cats in next step. A cat without historical position and velocity is applied in the algorithm. When the cat is in seeking mode, it employs a differential operator to update the cat’s position, which makes it possible for the cat to have multiple searching directions. Experimental results show that cCSO has pretty performance compared with respect to some population-based testing benchmarks. And it also shows superior performance in convergence rate to some compact optimization algorithms. The case study of gray image segmentation proves that it suits for solving the optimization problem by limited hardware.