Exploring Millennial’s Buying Motives through Needs Hierarchy and Situational Barriers Influencing Green Purchase Behaviour

Abstract

With ever rising need to showcase behaviour that is sustainable not only for the present but the generations to come, there is an ardent need to understand what possibly might stop them for not doing so. The blame of the likely deviation from being environment friendly in choice of green substitutes could be charged on various situational factors, which in this paper has been termed as A’s (Affordability, Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability, Awareness, Apprehension) – the moderators in the process of intents converting in to acts. The relevant literature mentions a lot in terms of what forms the basis for the intentions to shape up, however the paper proposes the use of Maslow’s needs hierarchy model to delve into the driving motives to buy a certain product or service deemed to be GREEN. This paper also proposes a conceptual framework which weaves in the flow of the likely intention-action gap right from the motives that may shape the attitude to buy green products/service to situational roadblocks that may not allow to do so. The proposed model can be extended and thereby validated with empirical work as part of the future scope of study.