Green marketing, environmental awareness, and innovation as factors for the purchase of green products

Abstract

This chapter analyses the importance of Portuguese consumers’ degree of environmental awareness when faced with the decision to purchase sustainable products, with the purpose of helping to better understand the ecologically aware consumer profile. It was applied an online questionnaire survey to collect the data, and 269 answers were obtained. The authors followed recommendations of scales proposed by authors such as Straughan and Roberts; Chan; and Panucci-Filho, Rossato, and Henkes. The results highlight environmental awareness as a relevant factor for the purchase of sustainable products, and the variables age and gender were the ones that proved to be most significant to describe the profile of the ecologically concerned consumer because it denotes more accentuated levels in the female gender as well as in a younger age group. Another conclusion to be drawn is that the level of environmental awareness and purchase intention and actual purchase are positively related, that is, an ecologically aware consumer more easily considers the purchase of sustainable products.