Zheng Yong, Business School 

Abstract: With worsening environmental issues in the world mounting with time, the ecological civilization reveals a new concept of harmonious coexistence between man and nature. Green development is a brand-new concept of development which integrates ecological civilization construction into every aspect and whole process of economic, political, cultural, and social development. With the continuous attention on the construction of ecological civilization, green development is deeply rooted among people, because of which, green products are greatly favored by consumers. Against such a backdrop, enterprises are placing more and more attention on green development, and much more deeply aware that implementing green marketing is an important measure for enterprises to obtain more economic and social benefits. At present, there is little research on the effectiveness of green marketing implemented by enterprises and whether consumer perceptions of green marketing will lead to consumer emotional and behavioral responses. This paper studies consumer perceptions of green development, ecological protection, green production, and green consumption through green marketing strategies of enterprises, thereby affecting consumer responses. The research specifically includes the influence of the characteristics of green marketing on consumer perception, and the influence of consumer perceptions of green marketing on consumer responses, including the mediating role of consumer trust in the relationship between consumer perceptions of green marketing and consumer responses, and the moderating role of consumer self-improvement in the relationship between consumer perception and consumer trust.

This thesis builds a conceptual model that integrates consumer responses to consumer perceptions of green marketing based on the “S-O-R” theoretical research paradigm, through the review of the characteristics of green marketing, consumer perception, consumer response, consumer trust, consumer self-improvement. The research adopts the form of the questionnaire survey, and an empirical analysis on the collected and sorted 729 survey data. SPSS and AMOS software are used to analyze the data and test the research hypotheses. The conclusions are as follows:

Firstly, green marketing has a significant positive effect on consumer perception. Except that the ecological concept of green marketing has no significant impact on the consumer perceptions of corporate motivation, the other four characteristics of green marketing, which are ecological view, quality, responsibility, and matching, all have significant influence on the three dimensions of consumer perception.

Secondly, consumer perceptions green marketing has a significantly positive effect on consumer responses. In this thesis, consumer responses include two dimensions: emotional response and behavioral response. It takes three dimensions of consumer perception of enterprise capability, enterprise motivation and corporate ethics generated by green marketing as the research object, and then examines the correlation between the

independent variables of the three dimensions and the two dimensions of consumer response. And it concludes that consumer perception has a significantly positive effect on consumer emotional response and behavior response. However, the influence of corporate moral perception on consumer emotional response and behavioral response is

not significant.

Thirdly, consumer trust plays a mediating role in the relationship between consumer perception and consumer response. According to the findings, after considering consumer

trust, the effect of consumer perception on consumer responses is weakened. It shows that consumer trust has a partial mediating role in the relationship between consumer perception and consumer responses.

Fourthly, consumer self-improvement moderates the effect of consumer perception on consumer trust. The indirect effect of high consumer self-improvement is higher than

that of low consumer self-improvement. The findings show that consumer

self-improvement has a moderating effect on consumer perception and consumer trust.

This thesis provides the following contributions:

Firstly, this thesis discusses the characteristics of green marketing. In the past decades, there are more research on consumer willingness or purchase behavior, but less on the concepts and characteristics of green marketing. This thesis focuses on the concepts and characteristics of green marketing, and further explores the influence of green marketing characteristics on consumer perception, which is a supplement to the development of green marketing theory. Secondly, this study adds a new perspective to green marketing. This thesis focuses on consumers, explores the dimensions of consumer green marketing perception, studies the influence of consumer perceptions of green marketing on consumer responses and enriches the perspective of green marketing research.

Thirdly, this study introduces both consumer trust and consumer self-improvement into the study of consumer perceptions of green marketing and consumer responses and constructs a conceptual model of consumer perceptions of green marketing on consumer responses. The “S-O-R” theory is extended to the field of green marketing, which helps to reveal the effect of consumer perceptions of green marketing on consumer responses and is a beneficial supplement to green marketing theory.

Read the full article here:              消费者绿色营销感知对消费者响应的影响研究.pdf