15-11-2012, 02:35 PM
Consumer Behaviour for Purchasing Cars Task 1.4
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Introduction
Two important factors have caused major evolutions and developments in the transportation
and automotive sector and have stimulated the use of new technologies for our transportation
modes: the availability of energy sources and the important negative effects of our
transportation system on the environment (Van Mierlo et al., 2006). The dependence on fossil
fuels and the environmental aspects related to our current transportation system, demand a
fundamental revision of the energy supplies in general and of transport and mobility in
specific. The ever more stringent emission standards for vehicles force the automotive
industry to reduce the environmental impact of conventional diesel and petrol vehicles by
using new technologies. Besides these improved conventional vehicles, vehicles with
alternative fuels such as Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), Compressed Natural Gas (CNG),
bio-fuels, biogas and hydrogen or drive trains such as hybrid, fuel cell and battery Electric
Vehicles (EVs) can form an attractive solution. This report reviews the impact of the
environmental friendliness of the car on the car purchase decision. In the next section, we will
briefly discuss the alternative fuels and technologies that we consider in this report as
environmentally friendly. A large scale market introduction of these environmental cars
seems to be a great challenge. It depends not only on large-scale infrastructure costs, such as
refueling/recharging facilities needed on the supply side, but it depends also on the acceptance
by the end-users on the demand side. It is of great interest for transport planners, policy
makers and car manufacturers to know if the strong concern for the environment that we
observe nowadays, will be translated into a public acceptance of green cars. In this respect,
sections 3 and 4 will set-up and present the results of a review of 26 scientific publications in
order to assess the importance of the environmental friendliness in the car purchase decision.
Still open research questions will be formulated in the conclusions.
Alternative Fuels and Technologies
Alternative Fuel Vehicles (AFVs) are vehicles that make use of LPG, natural gas, bio-fuels,
biogas or hydrogen. LPG is the most common alternative fuel currently on the market. At
atmospheric pressure LPG is a gas, but at a pressure of 4 bar it can be liquefied. Most of the
LPG vehicles that currently exist are retrofit petrol vehicles, but there is a tendency towards
the development of specific LPG vehicles. Natural gas mainly consists of methane (80 to 99
%). The vast majority of natural gas vehicles uses CNG, but Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)
also exists. Like LPG vehicles, CNG vehicles are usually adjusted petrol vehicles. They can
also use biogas, which is produced by fermentation of manure and/or organic waste.
Hydrogen can be used in a fuel cell (see further) or in a combustion engine. Through some
adjustments, a petrol engine can be converted to hydrogen. Hydrogen can be produced
through the oxidation of gas, which is the most common production method, or it can be
produced from the electrolysis of water or from biomass. Bio-fuels are supposed renewable
fuels, made from agricultural crops, wood or organic waste. The EU has set the target that
5.75% of the total amount of used transportation fuels have to be bio-fuels by the year 2010.
To that extent, the EU counts on the short term on biodiesel, bio-ethanol and to a lesser extent
on biogas and pure vegetable oil. On the mid-term they count on second generation bio-fuels,
such as bio-methanol, produced by the gasification of biomass.
Review of Consumer Preferences for Green Cars
According to Cooper (1989), a research review should be designed in a systematic, objective
way. To this extent, the integrative research review contains five stages as main structure. The
first stage is the formulation of the problem, which will guide the research (section 3.1). The
second is the determination of the data collection strategy and a selection of multiple channels
in order to avoid a bias in coverage (3.2). The third stage elaborated in 3.3 will give an
evaluation and selection of the retrieved data. The fourth stage contains an analysis and
interpretation of the reviewed literature (3.4). Finally, section 4 will give the presentation of
the results (Bontekoning et al., 2002).
Formulation of the Problem
In order to assess the importance of the environmental awareness in the car purchase decision,
it is necessary to get an insight into the process of purchasing itself. The consumer s decision
to purchase a product is a multi-staged process. Kotler (2006) identifies that the consumer
will go through five stages. Vehicle purchase behavior is fairly complex, as car purchase
implies a high level of social and/or psychological involvement (Abramson and Desai, 1993).
Therefore, the consumer will transit each stage of the purchase decision making process as
presented in Figure 1.
Problem Recognition
The purchase decision of a new product is induced by problem recognition. This means that
the buyer recognizes a discrepancy between the existing and the wanted situation (Kotler,
2006). In the case of car purchase, there can be several buying-triggers. A study of MU
Consult (2000) identified several motives to purchase a new car. These motives can be,
among others, reparation costs or a good exchange value for the old car.
Information Search
Following on from the problem recognition, the information search is the stage in which the
consumer will inform himself about the product. The purchase of a car is a high involvement
purchase which might mean that there will be an extensive information search. This
information search may cover external or internal sources of information. An external search
means gathering information from sources such as books and magazines, automobile articles,
salespersons at dealerships, friends and test-drives. The consumer can also use his long-term
memory or an internal information search (Punj and Staelin, 1983). Even before consumers
actually consider buying a car, they are confronted with information out of advertising,
television programs and articles. According to Abramson and Desai (1993), the purchase of a
car is so important that the consumer attends to messages about cars continuously. As a result,
at the time of actual search, the consumer does not pay extra attention to information about
cars. Moreover, Abramson and Desai (1993) found out that, while car purchase is a high
involvement action, the actual information search behavior is characterized by little effort.
Evaluation of Alternatives
Once sufficient information is gathered, the consumer moves on to the evaluation of the
alternative solutions. The evaluation process of a car is complex. The consumer wants to
make a well- reasoned purchase decision and will consider several car attributes when making
his decision. In general, the consumer will assign different levels of importance to attributes.
By use of a quantitative survey of 581 people who recently bought a car, OIVO (2004) found
out that the three most important attributes consumers take into account when evaluating car
alternatives are the purchase price, the operating cost and the quality of the car. Based on
these attributes, consumers will select certain alternatives. Once these alternatives are
selected, consumers will base their actual choice by the evaluation of other car attributes.
According to Potoglou and Kanaroglou (2006a), the attributes of the car can be categorized
into the monetary attributes, the non-monetary attributes, the socio-economical attributes and
the environmental attributes.
Purchase Decision
After the evaluation of several alternatives on the basis of the set of car attributes, the
consumer will form his purchase intention that will result in the actual purchase decision.
However, there are still two factors that can come between the purchase intention and the
purchase decision. First of all, the attitude of others such as family members: the stronger
their opinion and the closer related to the purchaser, the greater their influence on the
purchase decision. Secondly, the purchase intention can be influenced by unexpected
situational factors (Kotler, 2006).
Post Purchase Behaviour
The last stage within the decision making process, is the evaluation of the purchased product.
The level of satisfaction will depend on the relationship between the expectations about the
product and the perception of the product performance (Kotler, 2006).
Determination of the Data Collection Strategy
For the data collection, a computerized search was used. The use of electronic sources may
involve a risk of having a bias in the data coverage towards more recent articles. Literature
from the early 80s is often not accessible from electronic resources. Due to this
inconvenience, the review could only treat 3 papers from the early 80s. Nevertheless, the
short period of coverage will not produce a significant coverage bias in this review, as we
presume that the majority of the papers involving the demand for environmentally friendly
vehicles were published in the 90s. The review covers the period 1980-2007 as much as
possible. The articles were mainly retrieved by tracking cited references and by tracking ecatalogues.
Several sources were used in the search for literature in order to avoid a bias in
coverage. This includes the web-based search tools (V-spaces, article database; web of
science and other e-sources) and the VUBIS library e-catalogue from the university library
of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Also ordinary web-search robots such as google were
used to track cited references and to find publication titles. The search was conducted during
May 2007, using the general search terms such as alternative fuel vehicles environment
and purchase behaviour .