Are Green Products Surely More Popular: The Impact of Consumer's Self-construal on Green Products Purchase Intention

Recent years, problems of environmental pollution and energy crisis have attracted the public's attention about environmental protection. Green consumption has become a popular trend, and brings important influence for the healthy development of the environment. Existing research has mainly focused on the green marketing and green consumption, and rarely pays attention to the interaction effects of consumer characteristics and green product characteristics on purchase intention. And most of the existing research claims that compared with ordinary products, consumers generally prefer green product. This does not consist with the practical sales performance of green products. Therefore, based on goal systems theory, this paper investigates the moderating role of consumer's self-construal characteristics on green products purchase intention. The internal mechanism and boundary conditions of this process are also investigated. The paper concludes that consumers of independent self-construal tend to buy ordinary products, and consumers of interdependent self-construal prefer green products. Perceived effectiveness and prosocial behavior tendency each respectively mediates the green product's impact on consumer purchase intention of different self-construal characteristics. Besides, when the green centrality is low, consumers of independent self-construal prefer ordinary products; and when the green centrality is high, both types of consumers would prefer green products. Finally managerial implications and future research directions are discussed according to our results.