What Will Drive Consumers To Buy Green Products: A Study Of Reinforcement Schedules To Be Applied In Marketing

Author: 
Dr. Shilpa Jain, Ms. Nitya Khurana and Ms. Deepakshi Chaudhary

Background: Worldwide consumer’s consumption patterns are one of the prime cause of environmental deterioration. It is a threat to social and economic stability and sustainable human existence. As the environment continues to worsen, it has become a crucial concern across the globe for environmentalists, organizations, governments and people in general to encourage and adopt green behavior. Much has been done in this direction starting from national level policies to organizations making green products. Eco-conscious business leaves no stone unturned in providing eco-information to the prospective customers through ad-campaigns, usage of various eco-labels. Yet literature suggests that it seems to hardly affect consumer’s purchase decision. Eco-information is considered to be a definite concern but purchase is guided by personal interest. This situation is a call for now applying behavior modification techniques to pull customer towards purchase of environment friendly products. Objective: This study is an attempt to understand how reinforcement schedules can be used by marketers to modify consumer behavior towards green products. The study aims at using empirical methodology in identifying pull factors to motivate green behavior through reinforcement schedules. Method: For this study, A self administered questionnaire with 15 items was developed to collect data from 184 respondents to analyse the different reinforcement schedules with respect to green products.Results: The results of our study reveal that although it is only the customer’s psyche that makes him switch to green products, but there are a few reinforcement schedules that can be used to induce the same. Conclusion: Companies should advertise their green products to not only increase awareness, but also to make the product familiar to customers and also provide discounts to induce the sale of green products. Also, government should support the companies producing green products and should positively and negatively motivate customers to purchase green products.

Paper No: 
2552