Green Marketing: A customers perspective on eco-friendly cars in

Pakistan
Purpose of Study
In recent decades, the concern for saving the environment and earth as a whole has grown
and with it rose the concept of green marketing around the world. People have realized that
many products are harming the natural environment in some way whether it is during the
manufacturing process of the products or during the use of the product. To face this challenge
many organizations have started to adopt green marketing strategies. This research will be
focusing on green marketing in the automobile industry.
Green marketing (often called as eco marketing or environmental marketing) is basically the
marketing of products or companies that help or promote the environment in some substantial
way.
The purpose of this research is to understand the perspective of people in Pakistan regarding
eco-friendly cars and how much they support this idea. It will explore whether people are
aware of eco-friendly cars and do they see them as a step towards saving their environment.
This study will also examine the customer buying behavior towards eco-friendly cars. As
green marketing and eco-friendly cars are a popular concept in mostly developed countries
and the underdeveloped countries like Pakistan have yet to consider it as an important issue
so this represents a gap for us to conduct a research which will show us the mindset of the
people of Pakistan regarding this concept.
Keywords: Green Marketing, Automobiles, Eco-Friendly Cars, Customer Behavior

Aims and Objectives

To explore the environmental awareness of the customers in Pakistan.

To study the availability of eco-friendly cars in Pakistan and its effect on consumer

buying behavior.
To study the role of altruism in customer buying behavior towards eco-friendly cars.
To assess the environmental concern and attitude in customers and how it impacts
their purchase decisions.

Literature Review
Environmental Awareness and Customer Buying Behavior for Eco-Friendly Cars:
Environmental Knowledge is usually defined as a broad understanding of concepts, facts and
relationships that are concerned with the natural environment and the key ecosystems it
comprises of (Fryxell & Lo, 2003). Environmental awareness can be described as having
knowledge about the consequences of human behavior on that of the environment. It has both
a rational, knowledge based element and an emotional, perceptive based element (Kollmuss
and Agyeman, 2002). Environmental knowledge involves the information that people have
about the environment, gratitude related to the whole systems, major relationships which
lead to environmental impacts or aspects and the responsibility of the society as a whole
which is required for the sustainable development. According to Panni (2006), as the
awareness amongst the consumers is increased regarding the environmental and societal
issues there is a greater likelihood of them being involved in the pro-environmental and prosocial behavior.
It is noted that a major portion of the world are not aware about the issues related to the
environment, therefore, they do not have the proper knowledge of behaving in a responsible
way. It was observed that if a person has a better environmental knowledge, the proenvironmental behavior as a result becomes improved as well. Similarly, this environment
awareness also results in an increase in the purchase of green products (Mostafa, 2009).
H1: Environmental awareness has a positive effect on customer buying behavior for ecofriendly cars

Effect of Availability of Eco-Friendly Cars on Customer Buying Behavior for Eco-Friendly

Cars
Availability means the level of difficulty or ease a customer goes through to gain or use a
specific product. Vermeir and Verbeke (2004) claimed that most of the time even though
many of the consumers do have the intention of buying green products, their intention does
not result in the purchasing behavior because the availability of the desired product is very
low.
Mainieri et al. (1997) also says that due to the lack of availability of eco-friendly products the
consumers environmental awareness lags even behind the pro-environmental behavior.

Moreover, it can also be said that for working towards making the consumers more
environmentally friendly, green products availability should increase and more socially
responsible and environmentally friendly companies should exist.
H2: Availability of eco-friendly cars has a positive impact on customer buying behavior for
eco-friendly cars
Effect of Altruism on Customer Buying Behavior for Eco-Friendly Cars
Keeping the view in mind that altruism is a subcategory of pro-social behavior, according to
the theory of altruism a person becomes more knowledgeable about the negative impacts on
that of the society resulting in an increase in the responsible behavior of that person so as to
take care of that undesirable environmental condition and hence, the probability of that proenvironmental behavior is increased (Shwartz, 1977).
Similarly, keeping the harmful impact of individualism in this perspective, it has been
hypothesized by Borden and Francis (1978) that there is a less likelihood of ecological
behavior if a person acts selfishly and with a competitive orientation. Also, there is a strong
likelihood of a person to act ecologically if their needs are met as they have more resources
such as money, time and energy and therefore exhibit a desire to care about less proenvironmental and personal social issues.
H3: Altruism has a positive effect on customer buying behavior for eco-friendly cars
Effect of Environmental Concern and Attitude on Customer Buying Behavior for EcoFriendly Cars
As according to the research conducted by Dunlap and Van Liere (2000), environmental
concern can be defined as the universal attitude which indirectly affects the behavior as per
the behavioral intention. If the environment is to be preserved, environmental concern is the
fundamental factor that shapes the attitude of the people accordingly. An individuals concern
for its environment is essential for any research that is conducted on environment.
Attitude can be described as lasting perspective of a person that may be positive or negative
about some issue, object or a person. Attitudes have been described by social psychology
literature as to be significant predictors of behavioral factors, behavior itself and descriptive
factors of variations in individual behavior (Kotchen & Reiling, 2000). These factors have
been found to be significant predictors and of useful importance of that of the pro-

environmental behavior of the consumer in many of the researches that have been conducted.
For instance, individuals concern level in relation to the environmental issues has been
observed to be a beneficial predictor of that of the environmentally conscious behavior that is
the recycling behavior as well as the buying behavior related to green products (Chan, 1996).
Laroche et al. (2001) identified one behavior that has a positive impact on consumers
willingness to spend more on environmentally friendly products and that behavior was the
consumers concern of environmental issues while making buying decisions. They measured
consumers concern for environmental issues by asking them if they avoided companies
which were not socially or environmentally responsible while making purchase decisions.
Since hybrid cars are more eco-friendly cars so a similar measure can be made with customer
buying behavior of hybrid cars.
H4: Environmental concern and attitude have a positive effect on customer buying behavior
for eco-friendly cars

Proposed Analysis

Research Design
Environmental
awareness
Availability of
eco-friendly
cars
Altruism
Environmental
concern and
Attitude

Customer
Buying
Behavior for
Eco-Friendly

Methodology
This research paper is an empirical study. Data will be collected through surveys. The sample
size will be 200. The age bracket of the respondents will be 18 and above. The respondents
will consist of people who own a car. The mode of language for the survey is English.
Structured questionnaire will be used with a likert scale of 5. The limitation of this study is
that the data will only be collected from Islamabad/Rawalpindi region due to lack of
resources.

Timeline

Deliverables

FYP Timeline
Project Brief to FYP Coordinator
Project proposal to Supervisor
Project proposal to FYP Coordinator
Proposal Defense
Completion of Data Collection
Findings and Analysis Completion
Final Project Report
Viva/Final Presentation

30-08-2016
16-09-2016
22-09-2016
28-09-2016
13-10-2016
4-11-2016
5-11-2016
29/30-12-16

Bibliography
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Mainieri, T., Barnett, E.G., Unipan, J.B. and Oskamp, S., 1977. Green buying: The
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http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/36283958/OliverJCM_Hybrid_cross-cultural.pdf?
AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1474037938&Signature
=PTO8KCCZEE4odLUCHnq2lMWrzQU%3D&response-content-disposition=inline
%3B%20filename%3DHybrid_Car_Purchase_Intentions_A_Cross-C.pdf
http://www.amfiteatrueconomic.ro/temp/Article_1100.pdf

Appendix A CV of the researcher