| dc.description.abstract | This study will study the complex psychological and behavioral processes in terms of
which perceived greenwashing will have an impact on consumer purchasing decisions in
Bangladesh. With environmental degradation taking a critical turn, green marketing has
been a very crucial approach that firms have adopted in order to create competitive
services but along the same turn, emergence of deceptive practices known collectively
as greenwashing has presented a paradoxical issue of a Greenwashing Paradox to the
consumer decision-making process. Basing on the Signaling Theory and Attribution
Theory, this research forms a synthesized model to examine the role mediating effects
of green trust, perceived risk and the moderated effect of environmental knowledge. The
sample size consisting of 256 respondents was used, with the main aim of entering the
fast-growing young consumer group of the population. Partial Least Squares Structural
Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze the conceptual framework, which is
the SEMinR package of R version 4.5.1. The empirical results indicate that, although
perceived greenwashing causes the reduction of green trust and perception of risk, it
does not significantly affect buying behavior, thus embracing the occurrence of
Greenwashing Paradox in the local market. The mediation analysis shows that the
perceived risk is an essential channel where greenwashing prevents the purchase
decision, and green trust does not play an important role in the given connection.
Moreover, the findings show that environmental knowledge is a powerful moderator in
between perceived risk and purchase decisions to alleviate the adverse effects of the
former. The insights also offer the critical practical implications to green marketers and
policy makers in the emerging economies of substantive sustainability and open
communication coupled with empowering consumers by ensuring that they are
environmentally literate to counter the adverse impacts of the perceived deception. | en_US |
