Scholarly record

BUYING MOTIVES OF GREEN CUSTOMER IN AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

J. Pekarek, D. Schuller

Abstract

This paper deals with the nature of understanding the term green customer in automotive industry. There has been confusion between purported meanings of this term by different groups of people. The green customer shall be defined on the basis of his motivation that ultimately drives his purchasing behaviour. However, this term is often misinterpreted. The definitions of different groups of people are developed in this paper. Logical implications together with empirical validation are applied to test their validity. The qualitative research method is used in the form of structured interview. The situation is modelled by using the terminology of mathematical sets. The customers of electric vehicle market are not exclusively green. Also, environmentally aware people, who are potential customers of electric vehicles, do not necessarily need to be called green customers, because their major buying motives can be non-environmental. Environmentally educated people tend not to buy electric vehicles, because they either do not consider CO2 emissions to be the most significant ecology issue, or they dislike PEVsВ’ high ecological footprint. Customers, who are labelled as green, do not have the uniform set of buying motives. It has been found that this confusion does not occur because of the nature of customers, but because of ambiguous definition of term green customer, hence a redefinition of this term was proposed.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2017/52/S19.009

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