Impact of opportunity and ability to translate environmental attitude into ecologically conscious consumer behavior

Purpose: Despite all the environmental concerns and positive attitudes of customers toward sustainability and green products, market share of green products remains confined to just 1-3 percent of the entire market. This discrepancy or gap between consumers' favorable attitude toward environment and actual purchase behavior of green products is referred to as "green purchasing inconsistency" or "green attitude-behavior gap." The purpose of this article is to explain why this gap still exists and to investigate whether the influence of moderator variables (i.e. ability and opportunity) can minimize this gap. Design/methodology/approach: A survey was conducted with 450 consumers in Dhaka City (capital of Bangladesh) and items were adopted from different literatures. Structural equation modeling was applied using STATA 14 software. Findings: The findings suggest that ability can play a key role in motivating the consumers toward more green purchase behavior along with eco-label knowledge, but not with general knowledge of environment. Also, the findings indicate that opportunity was not a moderating factor in the expected way. The article ends with actionable strategies for practitioner managers who are interested in expanding green product market. Originality/Values: The authors incorporated the motivation-ability-opportunity (MAO) model by Olander and Thogersen in their study to understand consumer behavior in the Bangladeshi context. Two moderating variables (i.e. ability and opportunity) were derived from the MAO model to study the link between attitude toward environment and ecologically conscious consumer behavior in the context of a developing country (i.e. Bangladesh).