THE IMPACT OF GREENWASH ON CONSUMER GREEN PURCHASE BEHAVIOR: MODERATING ROLE OF GREEN BRAND LOYALTY

Abstract

Greenwash is an action of misleading consumers with reference to a firm’s environmental behavior and benefits of products or services to the ecosystems. It corresponds to the advertisements and promotions of products which lead to cheating on consumers about the environmental attributes and features of products or services. While, customers’ intention of buying a product is the awareness of a consumer to make an effort to buy a specific brand. It also tells the feeling or perceived behavior of buying a product which is advertised and shows the level of loyalty. Consumer buying behavior plays a vital role while buying any product. Consumer behavior tells about the individuals’ decision what, when, where, how and from whom to buy goods and services. A consumer’s preference/ commitment to purchase a product, service or brand in the market repeatedly represents the loyalty of the consumer. The current study is carried out to explore the moderating effects of consumer brand loyalty between greenwash of firms and consumers’ purchase behavior. The design of the study was causal-comparative and a cross-sectional survey method was opted to collect the data. The population in this study was all customers of hypermarkets like Carrefour, Hyper Star, Metro Cash and carry in Lahore. Whereas the researcher used convenient sampling technique to selected the sample of 250 participants. To measure the greenwash, brand loyalty and purchase behavior questionnaire was adapted from previous researches of Chen and Chang (2013), Chaudhari & Holbrook (2001), andChang, Chen, Yeh, and Li (2021). The findings helped to conclude that there is significant but negative impact of greenwash on consumer purchase behavior while brand loyalty plays moderating role between these variables. It is suggested that companies plan to advertise different opportunities through their advertisement to propagate brand loyalty among their customers, which is why they increase customer purchase behavior. By considering this research as reference, researchers may conduct future researches in different localities of Pakistan to identify the trend of impact of greenwash on consumer purchase behavior by utilizing different research methodologies.