Critical determinants influencing consumers’ decision-making process to buy green cosmetics. A systematic literature review

ABSTRACT

The current Systematic Literature Review (SLR) represents the first attempt to systematically classify the factors influencing consumers’ decision-making process to purchase green cosmetics, based on a review of 60 studies from 2007 to 2022. The factors were classified using the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) paradigm as the theoretical framework. The findings of the SLR indicate that consumers’ decision-making process is primarily driven by socio-psychological stimuli, such as environmental concern, health consciousness, and social norms. These stimuli trigger internal states in consumers, which consist of cognitive and affective states. The internal states are represented by facilitators, such as attitude towards green cosmetics, perceived product quality, and product knowledge, as well as inhibitors, such as perceived high price, skepticism, and greenwashing. Among the final responses, purchase intention was found to be the most detected in the reviewed studies. Regarding socio-demographic characteristics, the segment of green cosmetic consumers is mainly characterized by women, employed individuals, with a high level of education and income. The study also highlights the core limitations of the existing literature and proposes a research agenda for future investigations.

KEYWORDS:

• Consumer behaviour
• sustainable consumption
• purchase intention
• natural
• SOR theory

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and careful reading of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Mendeley Data at http://doi.org/10.17632/cn2ddk982f.1.

Author contributions

Riccardo Testa contributed to the study conception and design and wrote the original draft as well as the reviewed one. Giuseppina Rizzo worked with Riccardo Testa to perform the literature search and data analysis. Giorgio Schifani contributed to write the first draft. József Tóth contributed to the investigation process. Giuseppina Migliore critically revised the work and supervised the study. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Funding Fund [FFR_2023] funded by the University of Palermo, Italy.