| dc.description.abstract | On the 26th of February 2020, the first Norwegian citizen infected with COVID-19 was confirmed (Kolberg et al., 2020), and only a few days later, in March 2020, the Norwegian government introduced the most intrusive measures in peacetime. The pandemic first and foremost brought a lot of uncertainty, fear, and unanswered questions, but gradually some positive effects were discovered, especially regarding the environment (Venter et al., 2020). The purpose of this study was thus to see how Norwegian consumers have been affected by the pandemic, the impact of their environmental awareness, how important the customer experience is on their environmental behavior, and how their purchase intention of environmentally friendly, green, sustainable products has changed. With the intention to look at it from a consumer perspective, and a business perspective, the following research question was composed:
How has fear of COVID-19 influenced consumers' purchase intention of green products during the pandemic?
We conducted a quantitative survey, in order to collect data from the Norwegian adult population, and our findings suggest that peoples’ fear of COVID has a significantly positive effect on both purchase intention of green products, and on peoples’ environmental awareness. In addition, we found out that fear of COVID had a significantly negative effect on customer experience. The analysis further indicated a positive mediation effect for both environmental awareness and customer experience on their purchase intention of green products. Further, we investigated if the same effects occurred for four product categories of Green Products: Clothes, Food, Cosmetics, and Transportation.
Hence, this study contributes to the understanding of consumers’ behavior during the pandemic and works as a guidance for the development of future strategic business decisions. | en_US |
