Understanding consumer attitude and purchase intention of organic food products

Purpose The organic food market is gaining momentum in advanced and developing economies. This study aims to unfold the determinants explicitly associated with consumers and organic food products (OFPs) that influence consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions in a developing economy. Design/methodology/approach The stimulus–organism–response (SOR) is modified to examine the reasons behind the consumers’ purchase intentions of OFPs. Consumer-specific and product-specific stimuli are considered to find their influence on the orgasmic state of the consumers in the form of attitude and, finally, their purchase intentions in the form of response. A simple random sampling procedure was used during January and February 2024 to obtain the study-related responses from the participants from six major cities in India. Three hundred eighty-two questionnaires were deemed suitable for the study after excluding any outliers and incomplete responses from the completed survey. After screening and validating the collected data in IBM SPSS statistics 23, Amos version 23.0 was used to analyze the study’s hypotheses. Findings The findings showed that consumers’ specific stimuli, such as environmental concern, health consciousness and food safety concerns, positively motivate consumers’ attitudes. Also, product-specific stimuli such as nutritional content and awareness of OFPs positively affect the attitude of the consumers. Surprisingly, price fairness is revealed to have no substantial impact on the consumers’ attitudes. Finally, it is revealed that the consumers’ attitude positively impacts their purchase intentions of OFPs. Practical implications The study’s findings will assist OFP marketing professionals in comprehending the significant impact of consumer-specific and product-specific aspects of the products in shaping consumers’ attitude towards OFPs. The research discoveries are expected to offer valuable insights to aid decision makers in marketing OFPs to consumers in developing economies like India. Originality/value The present work has uniquely modified the SOR model by considering the consumer-specific and product-specific aspects of OFPs and empirically validated that both aspects are significant in shaping consumer attitudes, especially in developing economies like India.