| Abstract [eng] |
Sustainability is recently gaining momentum in all industries globally. Clothing industry is one of the areas which experiences a variety of problems connected to sustainability from pollution of natural surroundings to unfair use of manufacturing workers. Governments, scientists and companies are trying to achieve sustainability goals in a variety of ways. One of the ways is to increase consumers’ awareness of these problems and increase their purchase intention towards sustainable apparel. Therefore, companies are trying to achieve this goal by adding eco-labels on their products. For this reason there is a variety of different eco-labels with cues on them some of which may be important for consumer and some of them may not be important or not displayed. Moreover cues such as apparel durability that are relevant for consumers are not displayed on eco-labels which could increase consumers’ purchase intention towards sustainable apparel. Therefore, the focus of this thesis is on purchase intention of consumers towards sustainable apparel. Furthermore, this thesis aims to research the impact of durability cue, environmental and ethical cues of eco-labels on consumers’ purchase intention towards sustainable apparel in Lithuanian market. In order to achieve this aim a literature analysis of previous discoveries was done, which led to theoretical model and suggested a quantitative research approach. Then methodology of how to empirically test the hypotheses raised from this model was created and empirical results were obtained. Empirical research results showed that consumers have favourable attitudes and purchase intentions towards sustainable apparel. Moreover, correlation analysis showed that all three researched cues had positive relationships with attitudes and purchase intention. However, analysis with demographics questions showed that only gender, how often consumers purchase apparel and sustainable products had a significant relationship with attitudes and purchase intention. Furthermore, results suggested that there is statistically significant direct impact between environmental, ethical and durability cues of eco-labels on purchase intention. However, this impact was stronger indirectly with mediating variable – attitudes. This suggested that cues firstly have an impact on consumers‘ attitudes towards sustainable apparel and then on purchase intention. Therefore companies that seek to increase purchase intention with either of these cues should firstly focus on forming strong favourable attitudes of consumers. Additionally the strongest impact was observed with environmental cues on eco-labels and the least strong with durability cues, although all of them were significant. |
