Do you care, men? Examining the factors that influence men’s attitude towards natural personal care products in Germany and attitude’s impact on purchase intention.

Abstract: The growing consciousness of consumers towards buying products that contain mainly natural ingredients and do not harm the health and the environment drives the growth of the natural personal care market. Additionally, men nowadays care more about their image and self-presentation which lead to an increase of the natural personal care products offered for men. As the drug store market in Germany is highly competitive, marketers need to understand the factors influencing men’s purchase decision. The attitude of consumers is an elemental influence factor on purchase intention that could lead to the actual behaviour as it predicts the intention to purchase a product. Therefore, this thesis investigates the factors influencing men’s attitude towards natural personal care products and attitude’s impact on purchase intention, particularly in the German market. This has been done through the development of an own theoretical model whereas the main idea was taken from the TPB model. Afterwards, it was extended by factors that influence attitude which were identified through literature review. To meet the purpose of this study, data were collected through a quantitative online survey which generated 207 valuable responses. In order to analyse the relationships between the different variables, descriptive statistics, factor analyses, Pearson correlation analyses as well as linear and multiple regression analyses were used. The findings of this study provide new insights about the predictors of attitude: German male consumers’ attitude towards natural personal care products is mainly predicted by their consciousness about the environment and subjective norms whereas health consciousness and product knowledge were identified to be no predictors. Moreover, the study confirmed attitude as a strong predictor for intention which is supported by the idea of the TPB model and findings in previous literature. The respondents of this study are environmentally conscious and are influenceable by others. Furthermore, they have an overall positive attitude towards natural personal care products and intent to some extent to purchase these products in the future. The study’s results provide a variety of theoretical and managerial implications as well as opportunities for future research.