Marketing Research Report Essay

Irresponsible human behaviours are impacting the environment. Therefore, environmental concern groups and also the governments around the world are trying to do something hoping to change people’s attitude towards environmentally friendly issues. This report aims at predicting the factors that motivate consumers to engage in environmentally friendly purchase behaviours. Convenience sampling of non-probability techniques was used to collect data. The data collected was then analysed by regression analysis, t-test and ANOVA. It was found out that political and technological factors have a positive relationship with environmental concern while success or anthropocentric have a negative relationship with environmental concern. Furthermore, environmental concern has a positive relationship with direct and indirect environmentally friendly behaviour and willingness to pay for environmentally friendly purchase behaviour. However, the relationships were not strong. Therefore, it is re commended that a further, more in-depth research should be conducted to find out the substantial factors that affect consumers’ environmentally friendly purchase behaviour. 1. Introduction and Background 1.1 Importance of the research In recent years, there were one after another blockbusting environmental related movie, for instances, The Day After Tomorrow in 2004, An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and 2012 in 2009. These popular movies have undoubtedly increase people’s awareness towards climate change issues. According to World Wide Fund for Nature (2010), the average temperatures on earth have warmed by about 0.76 degree Celsius over the past 2 centuries (WWF, 2010). The increases in temperature make huge changes for the world’s climate even thought the temperature rise seems insignificantly small. Researches after researches show that this environmental problem is primarily caused by irresponsible human activities like private consumption. As a result, it is necessary for us to educate and raise the awareness of the publics so that environmental problems will not be worsening. This  quantitative research is based on the collective findings of the qualitative exploratory research conducted earlier to investigate whether or not consumers engage in environmental consideration when making consumption decisions more thoroughly. 1.2 Scope The scope of the report is to find out the factors that may affect consumers’ environmentally friendly behaviour through the qualitative research, so that marketers may make meaningful decisions based on the data collected. This research will also provide recommendations to green organisations and the federal government on how to address the environmentally unfriendly purchase behaviour. 1.3 Research problem A research problem should feasible and clear. The research problem of this research is to predict motivations that may affect consumers’ environmentally friendly purchase behaviour. 1.4 Aims and Objectives The aim and objective of this research is to look for differences between samples and come up with a conclusion. This research also aims at testing two main groups of hypotheses. 1) Social beliefs, materialism will have a negative relationship with environmental concern * The social beliefs include technological belief, political belief, economy belief, anthropocentric belief and competition belief. * Materialism includes success, centrality and happiness. 2) Environmental concern has positive indirect behaviour, willingness to pay, direct behaviour 2. Methodology 2.1 Methodological considerations and assumptions This research, quantitative research, was based on the data gather from a qualitative exploratory research which was carried out previously. The purpose of qualitative exploratory research is to narrow and clarify the scope and nature of the research problem. Exploratory research helps researchers understand the research problem and then transform ambiguous problem into well-defined ones. From the quantitative research, two groups of variables, namely materialism and social values, were identified. This  quantitative research was conducted to find out which variables may have a stronger relationship with the dependent variables which are mentioned in section 1.4. 2.2 Sample considerations The target audiences of this research are any people live in Australia and are accountable for making purchase decisions. Respondents should understand English and be 18 years old or above. However, gender, marital status and educational level of respondents are not restricted in this research. 2.3 Data collection and framework, and analytical considerations Research was conducted through survey as a follow on from exploratory research conducted by face-to-face interview. This research was conducted by using a written questionnaire on a convenience sample. Convenience sampling, which is one of the non-probability techniques, â€Å"refers to sampling by obtaining the people or units that are most conveniently available† (Zikmund, Ward, Lowe & Winzar, 2007). Convenience sampling is inexpensive and quick. 1022 surveys were collected, 449 male and 573 female respondents. Since this research was trying to find out relationships between factors rather than analysing changes in a sam e sample, cross-sectional analysis was used. 3. Ethical Considerations In a research, ethic is one of the very important items that could not be missed. Ethics in researches are important because it supports the objective of a research, such as knowledge, truth and avoidance of error (Rensnik, 2010). Rensnik (2010) continues that ethics in a research is important also because it involves public privacy. As a result, ethical consideration has to treat carefully in a research so that the research is ethical and considerable. There are six ethical principles that have to be considered in a research according to American Marketing Association (2010), and they are responsibility, fairness, respect, transparency and citizenship. In other words, researchers have to be responsible for the consequences of their marketing decision; they also have to judge a fair balance between consumers and sellers. Furthermore, researchers have to respect human rights of all respondents involving in the research process. Researchers also have to make every effort to communicate clearly with all respondents so to strive for a high transparency of the research. Last but not least,  contributing to the community such as providing good recommendations is also considered as ethical in a research. To address all the ethical considerations above, each respondent would be asked to sign an interview consent form (see Appendix A) before the start of the survey, indicating that the interviewees do not only understands the purpose and risk of this research, but also know where to go when they have any concerns or complaints regarding the conduct of the research.