What Drives Green Food Consumption in the ICT Era? Exploring the Role of Family Decision-Making

Despite growing consumer awareness driven by advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT) and increased government efforts toward environmental protection, firms are still struggling in implementing effective marketing strategies for eco-friendly organic food. In fact, firms’ marketing efforts tend to focus heavily on in-store marketing activities targeting the main purchaser in the household (e.g., housewife). Also, typically ignored in the literature on the determinants of organic food consumption are (i) the potential indirect influence of family members on the main purchaser’s decision and (ii) the credence characteristics of organic food, which require external cues to assess quality. Therefore, we address these gaps by investigating how family dynamics influence organic food purchasing decisions. Using a unique dataset which includes household purchasing behavior and detailed family member information, we build an empirical model to reveal indirect family influence in organic food purchases. We adopted the zero inflated negative binomial (ZINB) model to handle the large proportion of households that have not purchased organic food, ensuring that both non-buyers and buyers are appropriately considered in the analysis at the same time. We find that the presence of a spouse and children have a significant positive effect on the frequency of organic food purchases, while there is no family effect on the non-buyer group. To induce the first purchase of organic food by a member of the non-buyer group, a channel strategy increasing the accessibility of organic food appears more effective than promotional strategies to stimulate family member influence. Hence, we provide managerial implications that firms should adopt dual strategies: enhancing the accessibility of organic products to attract new buyers, and developing targeted marketing efforts for frequent shoppers that account for the family members influencing purchase frequency. Utilizing distinct characteristics of both non-buyers and frequent shoppers, firms can better align their marketing strategies with consumer decision-making in the growing organic food market.