THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VALUES AND GENERAL ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOUR

Abstract

Growing global social and environmental problems draw attention to rethinking traditional marketing approaches. There are many signs of social and environmentally conscious marketing being now rediscovered. The main objectives of our comprehensive research project on social marketing were to find out how values influence general environmental behaviour. In order to achieve our objectives, we conducted a questionnaire survey with a representative sample of 501 respondents in 2011 in Hungary. Security proved to be the most important, extremely important value, which supports pro-environmental behaviour. Excitement, followed by being well respected and fun and enjoyment in life, all of which are negatively correlated by proenvironmental behaviour, are the least important values in Hungary. Additionally, we found that more than the half of the Hungarian population usually lived green. However, only weak correlations were found between environmentally conscious behaviour and value items. Since the direct influence of values on GEB is only weak, more variables (e.g. attitudes) are needed when modelling someone’s pro-environmental behaviour.