Understanding Portuguese consumers’ beliefs, attitudes and intentions to purchase fair trade products

Abstract

The remarkable increase in social and environmental awareness in much of today’s society has resulted in the emergence of a group of consumers that increasingly began to interact with ethical factors. These have been shaping consumers’ opinions about products and playing an important role on their purchase decision. The main focus of this study is about a particular ethical issue, the fair trade, that has had a rapidly diffusion of its principles throughout the world and consequently has had a rise in the number of consumers that strongly claim to be supporting this movement through their purchase behavior.The purpose of this thesis is to provide a picture of the main beliefs, attitudes and other constructs of the decision-making process that model the Portuguese consumers’ intentions to purchase fairly traded products. This investigation is based on the modified version of the Theory of Planned Behavior as well as other previous studies in the field of the ethical consumption. This study concludes that the vast majority of Portuguese consumers hold a relatively favorable attitude towards the fair trade cause. The results revealed significantly differences between the groups of consumers in terms of their beliefs and attitudes that underline their intentions to purchase fairly traded products. However, when questioned about the factors that were a major obstacle to their ability to purchase fair trade products, all segments seemed to agree on the same factors, indicating the lack of information available about fair trade products. Also, they suggest that these products should be marketed in a larger number of retail chains outside the fair trade shops such as supermarkets, grocery stores, etc. A great number of respondents also indicated the high price of these products as a reason for not acting according to their intentions. Finally, several differences were noted in terms of demographic features. The target group is composed by females aged above 34 years with higher levels of income.

Date of Award	2012
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Susana Frazão Ferreira Fernandes Pinheiro (Supervisor)