Consumer Resistance to Green Innovations: Developing a New Scale and an Underlying Framework

The development and marketing of green innovations provide great potential to reduce carbon emissions, ease fossil fuel dependency and stabilize energy costs. The diffusion of many green innovations among consumers, however, remains low and they are often referred to as resistant innovations. Consumer resistance to green innovations is a generally under-researched area and empirical evidence is scarce. The objective of this study is therefore twofold. Building on recent advances in the literature, the study firstly aims to operationalize and empirically validate a measure of consumer resistance to green innovations. Secondly, the research aims to anchor this measure in a theoretically grounded model based around status quo bias theory (Samuelson and Zeckhauser 1988) and empirically test the relative influence of factors leading to consumer resistance to green innovations. The research presented in this study is based on a large scale study of homeowners in the Republic of Ireland. The proposed scale and framework are both empirically validated via structural equation modeling techniques, providing valuable information for marketers and policymakers.