Influence of conative attitudes towards green advertising on Black Generation Y Students’ environmental behaviour

Abstract

This article reports on a study undertaken to determine the influence of conative attitudes towards green advertising on black Generation Y students’ environmental behaviour in the South African context. In South Africa, the Generation Y cohort, which is defined as including individuals born between 1986 and 2005, accounted for 40 percent of the country’s population in 2011. The African portion of this cohort (hereafter referred to as black Generation Y) comprise an estimated 84 percent of this cohort. This translates into black Generation Y individuals being a market force of significant importance to marketers, including those engaged in green advertising efforts. Despite the importance of this market segment, their consumer behaviour remains under researched in general, specifically concerning their attitudes towards environmental issues and marketing. In order to address this shortfall in the literature, a structured, self-administered questionnaire was used to gather data on conative attitudes towards green advertising and how this influences environmental behaviour from a sample of 400 black Generation Y students across four South African public registered higher education institutions’ campuses situated in the Gauteng province. Data analysis included measurement of model fit, independent z-tests and path analysis using structural equation modelling. According to the results, there was acceptable fit between the proposed two-dimensional model for measuring conative attitudes towards green advertising and the data in the sample. The findings suggest that in South Africa, black Generation Y students’ conative attitudes towards green advertising have a significant positive influence on their environmental behaviour.