Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction
Green consumption has emerged as an important topic in marketing (Semprebon et al., 2019). Multiple research has been carried out to explain the behaviors among consumers for different types of green products in various contexts (Narula and Desore, 2016; Dangelico and Vocalelli, 2017; Kumar and Polonsky, 2017). The scope of research of green consumption behavior seemed to continue to expand toward different large groups or segments of consumers in different countries who are considered homogeneous (Liu et al., 2017). Such expanded knowledge will definitely be beneficial to marketers in formulating and carrying out effective green marketing strategies (Huang et al., 2014; Narula and Desore, 2016).
However, research in the field may have relied on an invalid assumption of a common behavior framework for different generations. In fact, while the geographical expansion in research reflected the globalization of environmental concern and the consumption trend (Peattie, 2010; Narula and Desore, 2016; Kumar and Polonsky, 2017), existing studies of green consumption behaviors seemed to take the common perspective of attitude–behavioral intention/behavior with the often-employed theory of planned behavior (Liu et al., 2017; Nguyen et al., 2019). As a result, most of the studies seemed to assume no differences in the behavior model among different generational groups. This assumption, however, may not be valid because different generations born and grown up under different socioeconomic environments may have some common but other distinctive purchasing or consumption behavior patterns (Young and Hinesly, 2012).
This paper thus attempts to fill the gap by examining the key antecedents to green consumption behaviors among millennials – an answer to the call for further segmentation and consumer-profiling studies in various recent reviews (e.g.: Narula and Desore, 2016; Dangelico and Vocalelli, 2017). In particular, we challenge the assumption of a common green purchase behavior framework for different generations by theorizing and testing a model for millennials. We argue that this important generational group who were born and have grown up in the era of information technology development (Sullivan and Heitmeyer, 2008; Valentine and Powers, 2013) should be featured accordingly and therefore behave in a distinctive manner for their green consumption. Under this environment, as millennials have usually been featured as “technologically savvy and connected” and “confident and self-reliant” (Young...