The Effect of Skepticism on Attitude and Purchase Intention of Green Products

Abstract

Continually consumers are sought to alleviate its impacts on environmental problems of society. However, often the existence of a green market it is not align with customer expectations, which may be them skeptical toward advertising offered. Under this context, the paper aims at investigating the effect of skepticism toward advertising on the attitude and purchase intention of green products. Hence, a survey with 508 consumers was carried out. Through a structured equation modeling, the tested model consisted of two phases - (1) the impact of environmental knowledge and environmental values on the skepticism toward advertising, and (2) the effect of skepticism toward advertising on attitude and purchase intention. The results indicate that the environmental values do not influence skepticism. In turn, the skepticism toward advertising negatively affects the environmental attitude, which is insufficient to generate negative effect on the purchase intention of green products, that is positive. The central contribution is the use of the antecedent environmental values, as well as the use of the attitude variable observed in few studies until here.