Consumer Behavior- Opinion Leadership in Marketing

Environmental Concern and Leadership Opinion

Theoretical part

To begin, opinion leadership is an important and powerful value in marketing. It can be compared to influencers in marketing. Opinion leaders can be defined by being a person with a good knowledge expertise who is still active and visible for the rest of the people and the ones to give advice about something because people ask them. There are two types of experts that are monomorphic and polymorphic. Also, opinion leaders can be responsible for a successful marketing strategy and it takes part in models of consumer decision-making. An opinion leader is a person who can influence the decisions of others. There are three types of influence. The first one is informational and it’s about recognized and expertise. The people who are most likely to be influencer are nutrition special are  pediatricians, trip planner and specialist. The second one is expressive or identity and it’s about the self-expression to feel like part of a group. The potential influencer are sports figures, celebrities, successful businessman or artists. The third one is normative and it’s about reward or sanction. The family members and co-workers are the most influential people. Overall,  influencers can be friends, unknowns, celebrities or organizations. We have to keep in mind that opinion leadership cannot exist without opinion seeking who study more about the motivation.

Afterwards, we did a survey on the internet created with Google Form. We have written twenty-four questions to find the propensity to opinion leadership in green products and environmental concern. The first three questions were about demographic aspects, the next fifteen questions is about the environmental concern and the last six questions is about the opinion leadership in green products. Except for the first three questions, the answers to the questions were ranked on a scale of 1 to 5. Actually, the multiple choice was based according to the Lickert Scale that’s meant strongly disagree (1), disagree (2), neutral(3), agree (4) to strongly disagree (5). We posted the survey on a Facebook group of ISM students and we asked our friends and our family to fill the survey. We have collected 40 responses.

Results’ Analysis

At this point, we are going to analyze the results obtained, but we have to consider that almost  90% of our respondents are comprised between 18 and 27 years old, so all of them are considered young adults. On the other hand, 26 respondents are women (65%)  and 14 are men (35%). In addition, more than half of our respondents come from Western Europe more particularly 23 respondents (57.50%), 8 respondents from Eastern Europe( 20%), 6 respondents from America( 15%), 3 respondents from Asia(7,5%) and nobody from Oceania.  

Determine the level of their environmental concern using NEP scale.

First of all, we determine the level of their environment concern using NEP scale. As we read in the text Roberts, J.A., Bacon D. R. (1997) Exploring the subtle relationships between environmental concern and ecologically conscious consumer behaviour. Journal of business research, 40, 79-89., the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale measures the environmental concern of the group by asking them to fill out a survey with twelve or fifteen statements about environment and nature. If the respondent got a high score on the survey that means that he is a pro-environmental attitude. In fact, the respondent with a pro-environmental attitude would be more likely to be part of an ecologically conscious consumer behaviour (ECCB). Also, in the case of the statements of NEP scale some of them are asking in a ″ Anti-Nep direction″ and this is why we have to reserve the results to make the comparison and have the good mean average.

After computing all the responses for each respondent and each question (see Annexe 2) we found a mean average of 3.57 based on the NEP scale and a standard deviation of 0.4629 (51.88%). These numbers explain that the average respondents are neutral but more inclined to be in agreement with the sentences of the NEP scale than to disagree. We can see that the average respondents do not adopt a pro-environmental attitude but rather a normal-good environmental attitude.  Actually, 27,50% of our respondents got a score of 4 and higher, 20% got a score between 2 and 3 and the rest 52,50% got a score between 3 and 4. From an environmental point of view it is a correct score and percentages given because the average is neutral or attempted towards the agreement. This is a good start to try to influence people for more eco-friendly products and increase their level of environmental concern by trying to make them get a higher score on the NEP scale after.

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As mentioned above 26 women and 14 men responded to our survey. We found out that the NEP score for women is 3.57and for men 3.70. Namely it seems that the men are a little bit more pro-environmental concern than women since their NEP scale score is a little higher. Now, we can see with the scatterplot below that the correlation for the average value for NEP Scale between women and men is negative. There is no relation between women and men in the case of Nep scale. Since the points are very distributed in the graph and not close to the trendline in any case the relationship will be considered strong. Actually, this means that the dependence between the variables is low or zero

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Moreover, since the NEP scale is multidimensional there are three dimensions/factors that can be analyzed with the NEP scale according to research Albrecht et al., 1982; Noeand Snow, 1990; Shetzer et al., 1991 explain in the text by Roberts 1997. The first one is  the balance of nature. We think that the statements  6, 7, 8 and 16 in our survey ( see annexe 1) describe this dimension. We calculate the average of the four questions to get the average for this dimension and we found a number of 3.49. It’s acceptable to say that our respondents understand that nature has to be a well-balanced entity with mankind but they aren’t sure that the ingenuity of humans will always be able to balance the nature correctly. Between these four statements, the number 8, humans abuse the environment, got the highest score with a score of 3.9 from all respondents with 77,50% agree or strongly agree.

The second one is limits to growth. We compare the statements 11(  The earth is like a spaceship with only limited room and resources) and 14( There are limits to growth beyond which our industrialized society cannot expand) in our survey. We found at an important correlation between those two. The statement 11 got a score of 3.77 average and the statement 14 a score of 3.73. Nobody was strongly disagree or disagree about theses questions. Those responses about this two Nep Scale statement seemed to demonstrate that the people are concerned about the limits to growth of the earth and that the society has to be careful with the availability of resources. Also, the statement number 4 (We are approaching the limit of the number of people the earth can support) can be part of this dimension. For this one the average score is more neutral about 3.02. Indeed, our respondent doesn’t think that the number of people on the earth is the most important environmental concern for the moment.

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