Search Results (75)

The efficacy of coated fertilizers in enhancing nutrient use efficiency and reducing environmental impacts depends on their coating properties. This study developed three biodegradable, waterborne polyacrylate latexes (A, B, and C) as eco-friendly coatings for controlled-release fertilizers (CRFs) using the Wurster fluidized bed process. The latexes were synthesized with varying hard-to-soft monomer ratios and cross-linked with 2 wt% aziridine to investigate how monomer composition affects coating properties and nutrient release. The results showed that coating B, which had an intermediate hard-to-soft monomer ratio, demonstrated optimal properties. It exhibited the lowest swelling capacity (2.54% at 60 °C), a suitable glass transition temperature (15.34 °C), and the slowest nutrient release, with cumulative nitrogen release remaining below 60% after 11 days in water at 40 °C. In field trials, the fertilizer coated with material B produced the highest rice yield among tested domestic CRF brands. It also achieved a significant 19.1% yield increase compared to a single basal application of conventional compound fertilizer. These findings confirm that this modified latex provides an effective and environmentally friendly solvent-free coating strategy for high-performance CRFs. Full article

New energy vehicles (NEVs) have gained increasing favor among NEV consumers due to their dual advantages of “low cost” and “environmental friendliness.” In recent years, the share of NEVs in the global automotive market has been steadily rising. For instance, in the Chinese market, the sales of new energy vehicles in 2024 increased by 35.5% year-on-year, accounting for 70.5% of global NEV sales. However, as the diversity of NEV brands and models expands, selecting the most suitable model from a vast amount of information has become the primary challenge for NEV consumers. Although online service platforms offer extensive user reviews and rating data, the uncertainty, inconsistent quality, and sheer volume of this information pose significant challenges to decision-making for NEV consumers. Against this backdrop, leveraging the strengths of the quasi OWA (QOWA) operator in information aggregation and interval basic uncertain linguistic information (IBULI) information aggregation and two-dimensional information representation of “information + quality”, this study proposes a large-scale group data aggregation method for decision support based on the IBULIQOWA operator. This approach aims to assist consumers of new energy vehicles in making informed decisions from the perspective of information quality. Firstly, the quasi ordered weighted averaging (QOWA) operator on the unit interval is extended to the closed interval $\left[0,\tau \right]$, and the extended basic uncertain information quasi ordered weighted averaging (EBUIQOWA) operator is defined. Secondly, in order to aggregate groups of IBULI, based on the EBUIQOWA operator, the basic uncertain linguistic information QOWA (BULIQOWA) operator and the IBULIQOWA operator are proposed, and the monotonicity and degeneracy of the proposed operators are discussed. Finally, for the problem of product decision making in online service platforms, considering the credibility of information, a product decision-making method based on the IBULIQOWA operator is proposed, and its effectiveness and applicability are verified through a case study of NEV product decision making in a car online service platform, providing a reference for decision support in product ranking of online service platforms. Full article

Sustainability has become a key focus in the hospitality industry, with travelers increasingly seeking accommodations with strong environmental commitments. As part of this trend, many hotels are adopting green marketing strategies to improve their brand image and appeal to eco-conscious consumers. However, the challenge lies in ensuring that these strategies are perceived as genuine rather than as “greenwashing,” which undermines their effectiveness and harms the brand’s credibility. This study examines the impact of green marketing strategies on the brand image of 5-star hotels in Lima, Peru. A survey of 206 hotel clients reveals that the implementation of green marketing positively influences the perceived benefits, corporate image, trust, and loyalty associated with these establishments. The results highlight that younger generations, particularly Millennials and Generation Z, are more likely to value sustainability initiatives, making them an important target for hotels seeking to enhance their brand image through eco-friendly practices. The findings suggest that effective communication of sustainable practices and transparency are essential to avoid greenwashing and build customer loyalty. This research contributes to the limited knowledge on green marketing in the Peruvian hotel sector and provides insights for both hotel managers and researchers on the importance of integrating genuine sustainability efforts into their marketing strategies. Full article

The present study investigates consumer preferences for eco-friendly practices implemented by outdoor sport brands, identifying which practices are perceived as most significant among the overall consumer group and within consumer segments differentiated by ecological consciousness. This study targeted consumers who had purchased outdoor sport brand products within the past one to two years. The results indicated that overall consumers regarded ‘Materials usage’, particularly ‘100% organic materials’, as the most critical eco-friendly attribute. The second most significant attribute identified was the ‘Type of campaign’, specifically ‘Consumer behavioral engagement campaigns’. ‘Carbon footprint reduction’, notably ‘Reducing 50% by 2030’, ranked third, while ‘Implementation of donations’ was considered the least important. Segment-specific analysis revealed that high-ecological-conscious consumers prioritized carbon footprint reduction more than other groups. Furthermore, the optimal combination of eco-friendly practices identified for overall and low-ecological-consciousness consumers consisted of using 100% organic materials, implementing consumer behavioral engagement campaigns, reducing carbon footprint by 50%, and actively participating in environmental conservation donations. Highly ecological-conscious consumers preferred a slightly adjusted combination, emphasizing 100% organic materials, followed by reducing carbon footprint by 50%, implementing consumer behavioral engagement campaigns, and actively participating in environmental conservation donations. These findings suggest that outdoor sport brands can strengthen their competitive advantage and sustainability by aligning eco-friendly practices with consumer preferences segmented by ecological consciousness. Full article

Generation Z is emerging as a powerful force in shaping global consumer behavior, particularly in the market of digital and technological products. This study examines how specific branding dimensions, such as online brand experience, engagement, image, trust, loyalty, awareness, behavioral intention, and brand knowledge, influence Gen Z’s purchase intention, emphasizing sustainable consumption. Sustainable consumption, in this context, refers to the preference for tech products that minimize the environmental impact through eco-friendly design, energy efficiency, and responsible sourcing. Using a quantitative approach, this cross-sectional research explores the effects of online brand experience, engagement, image, trust, loyalty, awareness, behavioral intention, and knowledge on purchasing newly launched technological products that align with sustainability. Data were collected from a Gen Z sample using a combination of convenience and systematic sampling, and multiple regression analysis identified the most significant predictors of purchase intention. The results indicate that online brand experience, brand image, brand trust, and brand loyalty play the most crucial roles, having a greater effects on Gen Z’s purchase intention, while brand awareness and knowledge also contribute. However, brand engagement and behavioral intention have weaker effects. These findings suggest that brands targeting Gen Z should prioritize building a strong, trustworthy, and engaging online presence while highlighting their sustainability efforts, and when Gen Z consumers have favorable digital interactions with a brand, perceive its image positively, trust it, and feel loyal to it, they are more likely to consider purchasing its sustainable offerings. This study enhances the understanding of Gen Z’s consumer behavior and offers insights for businesses seeking to foster sustainable consumption by highlighting the importance of developing marketing strategies that strengthen online brand experience, cultivate trust and loyalty, and clearly communicate sustainability values, such as through engaging digital content, transparent messaging, and eco-conscious branding, to effectively foster sustainable consumption among this environmentally conscious and digitally driven generation. Full article

This study explores how the green marketing mix affects customer green brand trust, customer green buying behavior, and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). A total of 990 fast-food customers participated in this study. Structural equation modelling (SEM) and mediation analysis were applied to validate the research hypotheses. As customer demand for environmentally sustainable products grows, green marketing mix has a positive and significant effect on customer green brand trust. Furthermore, customer green brand trust also significantly influences customer green buying behavior and eWOM as a predictor and mediator. It means that customer green brand trust is a fundamental effect of eWOM, with trust fostering positive online reviews, recommendations, and advocacy from customers. Businesses can also make the most of eWOM by developing feedback-friendly channels, such as product review pages and social media campaigns, and rewarding consumers who post about their satisfying online experiences. The companies should not only concentrate on increasing sales through environmentally sustainable product purchasing practices, but also on giving clients a feeling of community and integrating them into a larger sustainability movement. It will offer useful advice for marketers looking to improve their green marketing tactics and promote sustainable consumption by successfully gaining the trust of their target audience and using eWOM as a tactical instrument for brand advocacy. Full article

As environmental issues become increasingly important to consumers, integrating green marketing strategies into corporate promotional efforts is essential. However, limited research has examined cultural differences in consumer responses to green marketing content. This study addresses this gap by exploring how eco-friendly social media posts influence consumer perceptions and behaviors, specifically regarding informativeness, entertainment, perceived relevance, brand attitude, purchase intention, and word of mouth (WOM). This research employs an experimental study with a sample of 2035 participants from Poland and the United States to examine cross-cultural differences in responses to green marketing content. The findings revealed that eco-friendly posts significantly enhance informativeness, entertainment, and relevance, leading to higher levels of brand attitude, purchase intention, and WOM compared to non-green content. Furthermore, the effects of eco-friendly messaging on consumer engagement differ between Polish and US participants, underscoring the importance of culturally tailored green marketing strategies. These results provide valuable insights for marketers aiming to develop effective and culturally responsive sustainable marketing campaigns that resonate with diverse consumer groups. This study extends the green marketing literature by examining how informativeness, entertainment, and perceived relevance affect consumer behavioral intentions, such as purchase intention and WOM. Full article

As the complexity of modern-day retailing currently complicates businesses, a very key study area that has emerged is how sustainability initiatives can be complemented with brand equity and omnichannel operations. The specific purpose of this study is to investigate how brand equity mediates the relationship between sustainability practices and omnichannel operations—the focus being effective retail tactics in the current market. Sustainability, which includes social responsibility, environmental management, and moral business conduct, has become a key component of corporate strategy. In order to achieve operational efficiency and long-term profitability, businesses attempt to align with consumer values and address urgent societal issues through eco-friendly production methods, community participation, and sustainable sourcing. The study employs a quantitative research approach and uses the survey method to collect data from retail end users. This structured questionnaire was distributed to 474 adult consumers in Turkey and Cyprus, ensuring that the sample is representative at a 95% confidence level and a 5% margin of error. A simple mediation analysis was thus performed through ordinary least squares (OLS) path analysis to test the hypothesized mediating effect of brand equity. The result shows that brand equity partially mediates the relationship between sustainability and omnichannel performance, thus indicating that sustainability initiatives improve omnichannel effectiveness, both directly and indirectly, through strengthened brand perception. By demonstrating how multidimensional brand equity—which encompasses perceived quality, brand loyalty, brand awareness, and brand associations—influences customer behavior, the study adds something special to the body of current work. Full article

E-commerce sites have generated large amounts of unstructured data as they allow millions of users to generate product reviews. Thus, although there have been significant improvements in the characteristics of big data, such as speed and volume, developing various analysis techniques to monitor, understand, and extract useful information from this web-based data has become challenging. This study aims to analyze cosmetic products on a Turkish-based e-commerce website with sentiment analysis and to create a new domain-specific Turkish sentiment dictionary model with manual labeling. In the study, a Turkish sentiment dictionary consisting of 65,378 words was created by manually labeling 875,455 product reviews for 24 cosmetic brands sold on the Turkey-based trendyol e-commerce site, and sentiment analysis was performed using this dictionary. The dataset, divided into seven product groups, was analyzed using K-NN, SVM, DT, RF, and LR algorithms to address three classification problems. The algorithms were evaluated with comparative analysis using accuracy, precision, recall, and f-1 score metrics. SVM gave the highest performance result with over 93% accuracy, 92% precision, 93% recall, and a 91% f-1 score in all product groups. The dictionary model created for the cosmetics industry in the study helps businesses and researchers to use their resources more efficiently and save time by performing fast and low-cost analyses on large datasets of product reviews. Moreover, by analyzing customer feedback, brands can offer long-lasting and environmentally friendly products that align with customers’ feelings. Thus, businesses have the opportunity to develop or improve products. Full article

The main objective of this paper is to assess the influence of claims suggesting the eco-friendly nature of products present on food product packaging, consumers’ purchase intentions, and brand image. To achieve this, an experimental study was conducted in which participants were presented with packaging prototypes to explore their purchase preferences and attitudes toward the brand. The study involved two types of food products—apple juice and a box of chocolates. Some packaging prototypes featured pro-environmental attributes, while others did not. The results confirm the positive impact of pro-environmental packaging elements on consumers’ purchase intentions and brand perception. “Eco-friendly” brands were perceived as high-quality and more appealing. In both product categories, the majority of respondents preferred brands incorporating pro-environmental elements on packaging. These findings highlight the potential benefits for brand owners of integrating sustainability-focused content into packaging, which can serve as a competitive advantage in the food market. Full article

Societies across the globe are growing increasingly environmentally aware, resulting in more and more consumers demanding eco-friendly product alternatives. This phenomenon is also evident in the beauty industry, with many beauty brands striving to add green beauty products to their range and new green beauty product brands continuously emerging in markets. Despite the increased popularity of green beauty products, there is a paucity of published research concerning the antecedents of consumers’ green beauty product brand purchase intentions. As such, the goal of this study was to apply an extended version of the theory of planned behavior to ascertain the factors that predict consumers’ green beauty product brand purchase intentions. Following an explanatory research design, data were gathered from 500 consumers in South Africa. Data analysis comprised structural equation modeling. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed a reliable and valid seven-factor measurement model with good model fit. The path analysis results indicate that collectively perceived environmental knowledge, perceived behavior control, green beauty product ethicality beliefs, green beauty product attitudes, socio-altruistic values, and subjective norms account for 77 percent of the variance in consumers’ purchase intentions toward green beauty product brands. The findings of this study provide a comprehensive view of the antecedents of consumers’ green beauty product brand purchase intentions, which will be of significant value to beauty product marketers in or seeking to enter the green product market. In addition, the psychometric properties and strong predictive power of this model reflect a research instrument that can be used in future research into consumers’ purchase intentions toward green beauty products. Full article

In recent years, increased environmental awareness has led consumers to adopt more eco-friendly lifestyles, including choosing green products to reduce their impact on the environment. With a particular focus on the green consumption behavior with regard to battery electric vehicles (BEVs) from two leading brands, Tesla (automotive) and Gogoro (scooter), in Taiwan, this study investigated the relationships among green perceived quality (GPQ), green perceived value (GPV), green brand image (GBI), green trust (GTR), and green purchase intention (GPI). After collecting 203 environmentally conscious respondents who are familiar with Tesla and Gogoro BEVs, the PLS-SEM was used to verify the research framework. The findings demonstrate that GPQ significantly impacts GBI and GPV; GBI significantly impacts GPV and GTR; and GPV significantly impacts GTR. As the key determinants of purchasing BEVs, GPQ, GBI, and GTR have significant effects on GPI, whereas the effect of GPV on GPI is not significant. In addition, this study also explored the moderation effect on green purchase behavior, revealing that the brand-specific cognition of Tesla and Gogoro moderates the relationships between green attributes (such as GPQ, GBI, and GTR) and GPI. This study contributes a more comprehensive understanding of the psychological and behavioral drivers behind green consumption behavior within the context of BEVs. This study not only sheds light on consumer behavior within dual-market dynamics in Taiwan but also offers a framework for other markets with similar environmental and infrastructural challenges. These insights can assist BEV companies to develop their sustainable marketing strategies, emphasizing the importance of developing a strong green brand image and green trust to boost BEV sales from the perspective of green perceived quality. Full article

In the age where environmental sustainability issues are progressively prioritized, green demarketing has risen as a strategic choice for organizations aiming to decrease customer demand for unsustainable services/products and stimulate more eco-friendly substitutes. This paper investigates the impact of green demarketing on brand credibility, green authenticity, and perceptions of greenwashing. This paper examines how restaurants that are engaged in green demarketing practices are perceived with regard to their commitment toward the environment and whether such practices improve or reduce a brand’s credibility. Moreover, this study explores green authenticity and explores how an organization’s brand looks in its sustainability practices when employing demarketing activities. The proper consequences of greenwashing, where customers might perceive these tactics as insincere or misleading, are also significantly explored. By employing a survey research method, 414 restaurant customers were targeted, and the gathered data were analyzed employing partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). This study’s results might contribute to the increasing interest in sustainable marketing activities and deliver practical implications for restaurants aiming to navigate the complex multi-dynamics of ecofriendly responsibility and consumer credibility. Full article

(1) Background: A strategic approach to managing and evolving the bus fleet is essential for optimizing public transportation, improving service efficiency, meeting future demands, and incorporating environmentally friendly technologies. However, country-specific data on fleet composition and evolution are often lacking despite their importance in evaluating technological impacts on the environment, passenger comfort, and driver working conditions. This report describes the creation of the inventory of the Swiss bus fleet and analyzes technological developments in bus vehicles from 1940 to 2022. (2) Methods: We collected the data through a comprehensive mapping study and validated it with Swiss bus companies and experts from the Federal Office of Transport. Vehicle approval forms were used to extract technical data. Buses were sorted by brand and model. For each bus model, 58 technical characteristics were documented in a database. A latent class analysis (LCA) was conducted to classify the buses according to their technological characteristics. (3) Results: The inventory comprises 891 bus models, classified into four groups representing different generations. The predominance of thermal buses and the emergence of hybrid and electric buses since 2010 were noticed. (4) Conclusion: This inventory tracks bus technology evolution and highlights potential implications for driver occupational exposure and environmental impact assessment. Full article

This paper examines the impact of introducing a green own-brand product on an e-commerce platform, the incumbent competing sellers, and the environment. We develop a stylized model wherein a green seller and a non-green seller directly sell products to consumers through an e-commerce platform. The platform has the option to introduce its own-brand product and sell it within its marketplace. In scenarios where no brand introduction occurs, only two incumbents compete in the marketplace. However, with the introduction of the platform’s own brand, three products compete in the marketplace. Our findings reveal several noteworthy results. Firstly, the introduction of the platform’s own brand may diminish its profit, even when there are no development costs associated with the brand. Particularly intriguing is the observation that the platform’s profit may decrease as the product greenness of its own brand increases. Secondly, under certain conditions, both incumbent sellers can experience improved outcomes with the introduction of the platform’s green brand. Thirdly, while the platform’s green brand introduction does not invariably enhance the supply chain’s environmental performance, it may diminish it in instances where the base demand for the platform’s own brand is substantial and the eco-friendliness of the brand falls within a mid-range spectrum. Full article