Opportunities for green marketing: young consumers

The purpose of this paper is to identify important factors that affect Hong Kong adolescent consumers' green purchasing behaviour.

A total of 6,010 (2,975 males and 3,035 females) adolescents in Hong Kong were recruited through multi‐staged random sampling. They were surveyed on their green purchasing behaviour, environmental attitude, environmental concern, perceived seriousness of environmental problems, perceived environmental responsibility, perceived effectiveness of environmental behaviour, social influence and concern for self‐image in environmental protection.

Multiple regression analysis showed that social influence was the top predictor of Hong Kong adolescents' green purchasing behaviour, followed by environmental concern as the second, concern for self‐image in environmental protection as the third, and perceived environmental responsibility as the fourth top predictor.

A major limitation of this study lies in the self‐reported nature of the survey used. Future study should include some objective assessments (such as observations or other‐reported survey) of the subjects' green purchasing behaviour.

This paper is a useful source of information for international green marketers about what works and what does not in appealing to the young consumers in Hong Kong.

This paper serves as a pioneer study to identify important factors in affecting young consumers' green purchasing behaviour in the Hong Kong context. It offers practical guidelines to international green marketers planning to target the Asian markets.