What drives you sustainable? - A quantitative study about purchasing motivations towards utilitarian and hedonic products with regards to influence of materialism

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate and explain the difference in motives and barriers that arise within purchasing behavior of sustainable products with utilitarian and hedonic product attributes, and whether materialism demonstrates a moderating effect towards these motives. Product attributes implies different buying motivations, nonetheless, surprisingly, this problem has not been addressed yet. The academic interest in the topic was stipulated by the existent attitude-behavior gap in sustainable consumption and inability of previous research to come to satisfying results. To address this research gap, we conducted an empirical study by surveying 171 Swedish residents on the topics of materialism level, social and ethical consumption behavior with the connection to purchasing incentives. We find that motives differ significantly; however, it is possible to distinguish factors uniform for both types of products. Moreover, materialism has no significant influence on the behavior, despite the negative correlation with environmentally friendly behavior patterns.