A Study on Consumer's Conceptual Image for an Environmentally Conscious Product

According to the increasing concern on environmental-conscious goods, a diffusion of these eco-friendly goods became very important in global scale. There were many researches on the consumer's attitude toward the environmentally conscious product. However, these researches were not necessarily sufficient, because almost surveys did not include the environmental factors that were consistent with consumer's needs. The purpose of this study was to investigate the consumer's image and its evaluation of environmentally conscious products by the questionnaire survey. About 300 respondents were asked to evaluate 16 items for the image of so-called environmentally conscious products measured by interval scale. Base on the statistical analysis of these answers, it was found that the image of environmentally conscious products was "low performance", "inconvenience", and "high price". The factor analysis was also carried out base on the same questionnaire data, and three factors were extracted. These factors obtained by Varimax rotation were interpreted as "global environment", "convenience", and "high quality" respectively. Next, problem of what was a key factor for the ideal environmentally conscious products, was investigated. As a result, it was found that many consumers expected the goods friendly to not only global environmental, but also healthy and safety.