Consumer eco-innovation adoption and curtailment behaviors

130 Pages·2009·0.61 MB·English

Car(ing) for our environment?

Consumer eco-innovation adoption and
curtailment behaviors: The case of the
alternative fuel vehicle
Johan Jansson
Umeå School of Business
Umeå University
Umeå 2009
SW-COC-002570
The mark of responsible forestry
The Forest Stewardship Council
Copyright: Johan Jansson
ISBN: 978-91-7264-877-7
ISSN: 0346-8291
Studies in Business Administration, Series B, No. 71

Cover photos used with copyright permissions:
Front: “Like roaches in the woodwork” by Chris Diers.
Back: “To the future along the Ume River” by Susanne Nilsson

Printed by: Print & Media, Umeå University
Umeå, Sweden 2009
ABSTRACT
Determinants influencing consumer eco-innovation adoption and green curtailment behaviors
in a travel context are at the center of this thesis. Previous research on green consumer behavior
has uncovered that internalized personal attitudinal factors such as values, beliefs, and norms
are influential in determining mainly non-consumption and post-purchase behaviors. This
thesis extends the understanding of a moral basis of green consumer behavior by exploring the
influences of attitudinal factors on both car curtailment behaviors, and on consumer adoption of
a high involvement eco-innovation – the alternative fuel vehicle. The integrated influences of
innovation specific characteristics, car habits, knowledge and social norms, are also examined.
Furthermore, differences between AFV adopters and non-adopters are explored, and the notion
of consumers performing purchase and curtailment behaviors for different reasons is utilized in
the development of nuanced profiles of three distinct consumer groups. Four studies, which
build on two quantitative data collections on adopters and non-adopters of AFVs in Sweden, are
included in this thesis.
In the first study, similarities and differences among adopters and non-adopters of AFVs,
and the effects of attitudinal factors (values, beliefs, and norms), knowledge, and sociodemo-
graphics on the adoption decision are analyzed. The results show that knowledge and personal
norms are strong predictors of AFV adoption and that the VBN theory is applicable in this
context. The main implication from the study is that high-involvement green purchase deci-
sions, such as eco-innovation adoption, can be viewed as morally based.
In the second study, a set of determinants influencing both curtailment of car use and will-
ingness to adopt a less environmentally harmful vehicle are analyzed. Biospheric values, per-
sonal proenvironmental norms, and car habit strength are found to influence both types of
behaviors in different ways. The main implication from this study is that green purchase deci-
sions and curtailment behaviors within a specific context are determined by partly different
factors but personal norm is a strong predictor of both types of behaviors.
The third study extends the findings from the previous one in segmenting consumers on
curtailment behaviors and proenvironmental purchases. Three distinct types of consumers
emerge from the data. The Non-greens are found to exhibit the lowest levels of green attitudes
and behaviors, and the strongest car habits. The Curtailers are distinguished by performing
primarily reductionist behaviors, and by being the most willing to reduce negative environ-
mental impact of car use. The Ecovators are found to be the most inclined to purchase eco-inno-
vations and also display the greenest values. The study shows that green consumers are a het-
erogeneous group that can be separated on the basis of green curtailment behaviors and
proenvironmental purchase decisions, and that there seems to be no inherent contradiction in
being an early adopter of new green technology (such as the AFV) and also having high levels of
proenvironmental values, beliefs, and norms.
In the final study, innovation specific characteristics and consumer innovativeness factors
are integrated with normative and attitudinal determinants influencing AFV adoption. The re-
sults show that personal and social norms, consumer novelty seeking, and four perceived
innovation characteristics influence the adoption decision. Differences between AFV adopters’
and non-adopters’ ratings of AFV specific attributes are also analyzed. The contribution of this
study is the integration of VBN theory and the DOI framework and the empirical conclusion that
eco-innovations need to deliver on both traditional and proenvironmental attributes in order to
be perceived as attractive by consumers.
In sum, this thesis demonstrates the importance of proenvironmental personal norms for
consumer adoption of a high involvement eco-innovation such as the AFV.

Keywords: Diffusion of innovations (DOI), value-belief-norm (VBN) theory, alternative fuel
vehicles (AFV), eco-innovation, early adoption, curtailment behaviors, proenvironmental atti-
tudes, innovation characteristics
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Getting a license – be it a driver’s license or a license to do research – is not the work of
the final cardholder alone. Although I have had the pleasure of steering, many researchers,
colleagues, friends, and loved ones have been there with advice and pats on my back,
making it possible for me to pull this dissertation thing across the finishing line.

My advisors on this journey have helped me in staying clear of ditches and in guiding
me to the best routes. Agneta Marell secured the financing for this dissertation and pro-
vided expert advice and loads of motivating exuberance all along the way. Annika Nord-
lund contributed with valuable direction on the psychological theories of this thesis and on
the ins and outs of writing papers and publishing. It has been a privilege working with,
and learning from, you both!

In the beginning, Kiflemariam Hamde provided helpful suggestions on improving the
research by carefully examining the research proposal. Treasured comments from, and
discussions with, Tommy Gärling on some of the analyses and papers helped in developing
them for publication. Jan Bodin and Erika Knutsson offered much appreciated feedback at
the final seminar. For vital comments at the very end and for many rewarding discussions
throughout, appreciative thoughts also go to Jonas Nilsson. Vladimir Vanyushyn has been
kindly supportive concerning statistical matters. For helpful assistance on survey admini-
stration, I am indebted to Fredrik Gärling and the team of research assistants who made
the data collections much more than just a routine task: Frida Byrsten, Andreas Eliasson,
Anja Hansen, Milad Houssein-Becky, Anton Magnusson, Johannes Stjernström, Malin
Stjernström, and Lina Vincent. Thanks to you all, and of course, to all the respondents
who filled out the questionnaires!

Many colleagues and friends have made research, teaching, and all other daily
activities at the business school memorable. For thought-proving discussions and new per-
spectives on vital matters, I am especially grateful to Karl Johan Bonnedahl. Special
thanks for big things and for small also go to Sofia Isberg, Jan-Erik Jaensson, Helena Ren-
ström, Jessica Eriksson, Tim Wilson, George Tesar, Margareta Gällstedt, Pontus Bergh,
Maria Bengtsson, Galina Biedenbach, Owe Hedström, and Ann-Christin Häggqvist. Inger
Granberg, Katarina Pousette, Susanne Nilsson, Anna-Lisa Forsman, Lennart Widmark,
Johan Tufberg, Bo Segerstedt, and Mattias Jonsson have all provided important, skillful
administrative support which is too often overlooked, but very hard to be without.

This dissertation was made possible through a EU project on alternative motor fuels
(TREN/05/FP6EN/S07.53807/019854) managed by the Environment and Health Ad-
ministration of the city of Stockholm, and professionally coordinated at the regional level
by Mikael Brändström and Michael Jalmby at Esam in Umeå. Thank you!

On a final personal note, thankful thoughts go to my father, Görn and to Elisabeth
Remkéus for being there, for listening, and … for proofreading questionnaires! My sister
Petronella and her family with Fredrik, Amanda, David, and – at the last minute – Simon,
have helped me in getting my mind off work worries every once in awhile. For Sunday
dinners and all other happy moments, I’m also grateful to Curt, Vivi-Anne, Elisabeth, Elin,
and Tobias. Thanks also to all other friends – near and far!

Susanne! You and I know – and now the rest of the world knows – that without your
loving, cheerful support in every imaginable and unimaginable way, I wouldn’t have come
this far. Thank you! Now, let’s do all those things postponed for way too long!

Behind the heavenly blue door
Umeå, November 2009
Johan Jansson
PREFACE
This thesis contains four studies. The following roman numerals will be used
to refer to each study in the text:

I. Jansson, Johan, Agneta Marell, Annika Nordlund (forthcoming),
Exploring early adopters of an eco-innovation: The case of the
alternative fuel vehicle, Manuscript in review for publication.

II. Jansson, Johan, Agneta Marell, Annika Nordlund (in press), Green
consumer behavior: Determinants of curtailment and eco-
innovation adoption, Journal of Consumer Marketing, (slated for
publication in volume 27).

III. Jansson, Johan, Agneta Marell, Annika Nordlund (2009),
Elucidating green consumers: A cluster analytic approach on
proenvironmental purchase and curtailment behaviors, Journal of
Euromarketing, 18 (4).

IV. Jansson, Johan (forthcoming), Consumer adoption of an eco-
innovation: The effects of norms, attitudes, innovativeness, and
perceived innovation characteristics, Manuscript in review for
publication.

Reproduction permissions from the copyright holders for studies II and III
are thankfully acknowledged.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................1
The problems of car use.........................................................................................4
Green consumer behaviors: Perspectives and types...............................................6
Curtailment behaviors......................................................................................................8
Technology choices and eco-innovations.........................................................................9
Determinants of curtailment and eco-innovation adoption..................................13
General aim and disposition.................................................................................15
THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS: CONSUMER INNOVATION
ADOPTION AND GREEN BEHAVIORS ..........................................................17
Diffusion of innovations and consumer adoption................................................18
Adopter categories and general innovativeness..............................................................20
Determinants of consumer innovation adoption.............................................................24
Green consumer behaviors and their determinants..............................................35
Green consumer behavior as a social dilemma...............................................................36
The case of travel behaviors...........................................................................................37
A general framework of green consumer behavior determinants...................................38
Attitudinal factors and value-belief-norm (VBN) theory................................................41
Habitual behaviors and routines.....................................................................................48
INTEGRATION AND RESEARCH OBJECTIVES..........................................50
Strengths and weakness of the DOI framework...................................................51
Strengths and weaknesses of the VBN theory......................................................53
An integrated perspective on determinants of eco-innovation adoption..............54
Research objectives..............................................................................................55
RESEARCH METHOD........................................................................................57
Travel behavior, cars and fuels in Sweden...........................................................57
Sales of AFVs.................................................................................................................59
Definitions and incentives..............................................................................................62
Sales of alternative fuels and environmental impact.......................................................64
Sweden as a lead market?...............................................................................................67
The research setting.............................................................................................68
Studying consumer eco-innovation adoption.......................................................69
Population and samples........................................................................................71
Data collection procedures...................................................................................72
Data preparation and questionnaires....................................................................73
OVERVIEW OF STUDIES...................................................................................75
Study I: Exploring the AFV adopter.....................................................................77
Study II: Eco-innovation adoption and curtailment..............................................78
Study III: Clustering car owners – Meet the Ecovator..........................................80
Study IV: Norms and perceived innovation characteristics..................................82
DISCUSSION AND CONTEXTUALIZATION OF FINDINGS.......................85
Norms and eco-innovation adoption.....................................................................89
Spillover of curtailment and technology choices?................................................92
The importance of sociodemographics?...............................................................94
Limitations and further research...........................................................................94
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS............................................................98
Implications for policy and society.....................................................................100
Implications for marketers of eco-innovations...................................................102
Closing words and possible answers to the title questions.................................103
REFERENCES.....................................................................................................106

FIGURES
Figure 1: The stylized diffusion curve......................................................................21
Figure 2: Schematic of the variables in the VBN-theory..........................................44
Figure 3: Overview of determinants for AFV adoption and car use curtailment......54
Figure 4: Percentage of journeys for travel mode by men and women in Sweden...58
Figure 5: Cars sold per quarter and fuel type, 2006 - 2009.......................................63
Figure 6: Sales of flexifuel/ethanol vehicles and of ethanol, 2005-2008..................65
Figure 7: Diffusion on lead and lag markets.............................................................67
Figure 8: Main discriminant factors between the three groups.................................81

TABLES
Table 1: Published empirical studies on consumer adoption of eco-innovations.....33
Table 2: Swedish car fleet distributed on fuel type, end of year 2000 - 2008...........60
Table 3: Response rates for 2006 and 2008 data collection......................................74
Table 4: Determinants and green behaviors studied in this thesis............................76
We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert
Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long
been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we
progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of
the road – the one “less traveled by” – offers our last, our only chance to
reach a destination that assures the preservation of our Earth.
The choice, after all, is ours to make.

Rachel Carson, 1962 (2002: 277)

INTRODUCTION
At present, the nearly seven billion human inhabitants of planet Earth are
consuming natural resources in the form of raw materials and energy at an
unprecedented rate. Each individual’s consumption choice has negligible
effects alone, but in aggregation, the effects on the natural environment and
the atmosphere are unfathomable. Understanding consumer behavior at the
individual level is one of the key issues in any attempt at a transition toward
a future more in line with the resource constraints of the planet. However,
consumer behaviors are complex, change over time, and are influenced by a
multitude of factors. Consequently, as environmental problems become ever
more acute, research has sought to further increase the understanding of
consumer behavior with environmental impact. In the consumer research
literature these behaviors are frequently referred to using names such as
environmentally significant behaviors (Stern, 2000), proenvironmental be-
haviors (Cleveland, Kalamas, and Laroche, 2005), ecologically and environ-
mentally conscious behaviors (Roberts and Bacon, 1997; Stanley and
Lasonde, 1996), and green consumer behaviors (Schlegelmilch, Bohlen, and
Diamantopoulos, 1996)1. Although carried out in several disciplines, two es-
sential limitations in environmental consumer research are currently being
discussed.

Firstly, much early research on green consumer behavior treated it as one
type of behavior, supposing similar drivers and barriers, for what was in fact
different types of green behaviors (Stern, 2000). Problems occurred when
attempting to encourage and discourage different types of behaviors and for
developing the understanding of related attitudes (cf. Gardner and Stern,
2002). The second issue is the predominant focus on non-consumption and
post-purchase behaviors, rather than research investigating specific buying

1
In this thesis, I use the term green consumer behavior synonymously with proenvironmental consumer
behavior, denoting consumer behavior that is less harmful for the environment than ordinary consumer
behavior.
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behaviors with environmental impact (Follows and Jobber, 2000; Lehman
and Geller, 2004). Consequently, non-consumption behaviors such as citi-
zenship (e.g., voting), environmental activism, and willingness to accept
green policy measures, are frequently empirically investigated. Furthermore,
much attention has focused on consumer behaviors carried out at the end-
stages of the consumption process, i.e. after a product has already been pur-
chased. Behaviors examined in this post-purchase category include litter
reduction, waste separation/recycling, energy conservation, and car use
reduction. Although both these streams of research are important for our
understanding of green consumer behavior, there is also a need for research
focusing specifically on consumer purchases of products with significant
environmental impact (Stern, 2000).

Constructing the comprehension of green consumers mainly on non-con-
sumption and post-purchase behaviors might hinder theory development
and efforts to encourage greener consumer behaviors. For example, personal
values and attitudes important in guiding recycling behavior, might have
different influence, or have no influence at all, on purchase decisions of
green products. Specifically, empirical evidence, primarily from non-con-
sumption and post-purchase contexts, show that green behaviors are morally
based (Black, Stern, and Elworth, 1985; Guagnano, Stern, and Dietz, 1995;
Stern et al., 1999; Thøgersen, 1996). However, few studies have investigated
the possibility that green purchase behaviors share these types of norm-
based attitudinal determinants. Furthermore, the emergent understanding
of the normative influence on green purchase behaviors is largely built on
studies investigating relatively low involvement products (Lam and Chen,
2006; Minton and Rose, 1997; Thøgersen, 2002). Given that involvement is
linked to variations in consumer decision making (Laurent and Kapferer,
1985), research results concerning normative influence on low involvement
purchases are not necessarily transferable to high involvement situations.
Moreover, since high involvement products such as cars (Lapersonne,
Laurent, and Le Goff, 1995), tend to have significant environmental impact,
it becomes important to understand how personal moral norms might be in-
fluential in these types of purchases as well. In fact, Thøgersen (1999) calls
for research that investigates the effects of norms on green consumer be-
haviors in high involvement purchase situations.

In a time when new green products increasingly are being developed and
marketed to consumers, the lack of research investigating consumer pur-
chases of these is especially problematic. Green products, often referred to as
environmental innovations or eco-innovations (cf. Beise and Rennings,
2005), are frequently marketed to consumers using proenvironmental argu-
ments, purporting that they are better for the environment than ordinary
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products. However, little is understood about the consumers that adopt
these innovations and what factors determine adoption and non-adoption.
From an environmental perspective, the scarcity of research focusing on
purchases with the aim of reducing environmental harm is also a serious
limitation. Especially since the purchasing of products, and not primarily the
use of them, is one of the types of consumer behaviors with the greatest
environmental impact (Black, Stern, and Elworth, 1985; Gardner and Stern,
2002). Thøgersen (1999) accordingly argues that the right buying decision
can potentially reduce, and even eliminate, the risk of environmental
damage in the post-purchase stage of the consumption cycle. On the other
hand, this does not necessarily mean that post-purchase behaviors are
environmentally unimportant. Rather, the argument is that by increasing the
understanding of green consumer purchase behaviors, a more nuanced pic-
ture of green consumer behavior, and green consumers as a whole, can be
achieved. In a context of eco-innovations continuously becoming available to
consumers, but being selectively adopted, this understanding is valuable for
marketers of these innovations and for policymakers wishing to influence the
development toward a more environmentally sound future. In addition, im-
proved knowledge on consumer adoption of eco-innovations in relation to
other types of green behaviors is valuable for furthering theory development
on green consumer behavior in general.

The focus of this thesis is on consumer adoption of eco-innovations. As such,
this research builds on the developing notion that there are both similarities
and differences between different types of green behaviors and that it is
meaningful to study them separately, but within a particular context. Specifi-
cally, travel behavior and consumer purchases of alternative fuel vehicles
(AFVs) are at the heart of this thesis.

In this introductory section, I begin by illustrating the general empirical
background with the environmental problems of transportation and cars in
order to set the scene for the thesis. Thereafter, I discuss two broad solution
strategies to these problems termed curtailment behaviors and technology
choices. A specific consumer technology choice is eco-innovation adoption,
and therefore eco-innovations are presented in general and AFVs, used as
the example focused in this thesis, are discussed in particular. The section
ends with a presentation of the general aim and disposition of the thesis.
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