1. Introduction
As environmental sustainability becomes increasingly important [
1,
2,
3], rise in energy consumption has caused concerns worldwide and could impede the achievement of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals for 2030. In an attempt to address these issues, policies emphasizing energy efficiency have grown in prominence over the recent decades. For example, the European Commission devised a plan to reduce energy consumption by 27% [
4]. Greater energy efficiency is considered to be a significant way of achieving the global objective of reduced energy use and addressing climate change and could be achieved through improved and quicker dissemination of energy-efficient units. Increased energy efficiency may help to reduce fossil fuel consumption and CO
2 emissions [
5]. According to Ek and Söderholm [
6], policymakers believe that consumers should be made more aware of the environmental side effects of their energy consumption and that environmentally beneficial household-related activities such as recycling and buying eco-labeled products, should be enforced, so as to change consumer behavior and reduce electricity consumption.Urban and Ščasný [
7] argued that consumers who use energy-efficient appliances (EEAs) could reduce their energy consumption and its harmful environmental impacts. According to Waris and Hameed [
8], environmental policymakers increasingly emphasize the responsibility of the individual consumer for the environmental side effects of their acts, and many environmental goals are expressed in terms of household-related activities. These include, for instance, recycling, purchasing of green-labeled products, and activities that decrease electricity use. Increased energy efficiency can generally help reduce fossil fuel consumption and CO
2 emissions [
5]. In a study of energy efficiency and appliance purchase, Tan et al. [
2] pointed out that in order to decrease energy consumption, an increase in energy use efficiency (through the use of higher-efficiency appliances) and the encouragement of more environmental consumer behaviors (through better use of electrical appliances) should be promoted. Similarly, Oikonomouet al. [
9] stated that investing in energy-efficient appliances (EEAs) is likely to save more energy than energy curtailment. Given the long lifecycle of appliances, buying energy-efficient products is better for both the economy and the environment [
9,
10]. A recent study found that home appliances account for 70% of China’s carbon dioxide emissions and that air conditioners, refrigerators, and televisions are responsible for 50% of these emissions [
11]. Minimizing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions through EEAs appears, therefore, to be a desirable strategy.
Intensive research into energy-efficient behavior has been conducted in developed economies such as the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, and Germany [
6,
12,
13,
14,
15] and in emerging economies including China, Malaysia, South Korea, Vietnam, and India [
2,
16,
17,
18,
19]. However, research into intentions to purchase EEAs in developing countries would appear to be crucial since, in those countries, electricity demand is estimated to increase by 30% by 2040 [
20]. Pakistan is one such developing economy. The country is the world’s sixth largest, with a population of 208 million, and it has been hit by a severe energy crisis that deeply impacted economic growth and created political instability [
21]. A lack of energy is estimated to cost the country 4% of its GDP. Moreover, the future energy demand for industrial purposes is expected to rise at an annual rate of3.8%, while energy demand for domestic use is expected to increase at the staggeringly high annual rate of 9% [
22]. High levels of expenditure on electronic and electrical products for domestic, industrial, and commercial purposes have increased energy consumption [
23]. Moreover, during the last 15 years, 85% of new household consumers have been added, and by 2050, a threefold increase is expected [
22]. An Energy Standard and Labeling System Scheme, adopted by the Ministry of Energy, has been introduced in Pakistan since 2014. Under this scheme, all household appliances such as cooling fans, washing dryers, and air conditioners must have energy-efficient labels [
24]. This legislation encouraged appliance manufacturers to compete on energy efficiency criteria. However, past research has shown that Pakistani consumers have a low propensity to purchase EEAs and that, for the most part, the country is still in the early stages of its ecological transition [
25,
26]. Similarly, Waris and Hameed [
8] call for additional research efforts to examine the progress of consumers’ attitudes, intentions, and behaviors toward EEA consumption in developing countries.
In order to understand how to encourage consumers to purchase EEAs, the majority of research into energy-saving behaviors has focused on the roles of attitude, beliefs, and norms in shaping consumer purchase behavior [
19,
25,
27,
28]. Moreover, rooted in the theory of planned behavior (TPB), the literature largely addresses consumer purchase intentions toward EEAs; researchers have included several variables in the TPB including norms [
29], price [
11,
30,
31], environmental knowledge and concern [
32,
33], and the use of innovative technology to reduce carbon footprints [
34], while previous energy studies have paid attention to consumer values [
25]. However, the influence and role of (green) psychological benefits remain under-theorized, even though perceived benefits play a key role in consumer decision-making processes [
35,
36,
37]. Past research has identified two distinctive types of benefit that may affect purchase intentions; namely utilitarian environmental benefits, and “warm glow” benefits [
18,
38]. Psychological benefits such as these can be critical determinants of environmentally friendly purchasing [
37,
38]. People are willing to pay more for green products if they can experience the psychological benefit of a warm glow and the positive emotional state consequent from saving resources, benefiting other people and the Earth’s environment [
39,
40]. Past studies have found that such positive emotions directly or indirectly influence consumer attitudes [
1,
38]. Tangential research has suggested that normative beliefs and moral obligations play a considerable role in forming consumers’ ecological intentions [
41]. Moral issues have been found to influence the subjective norms that determine behavior in moral situations [
42]. Moreover, Icek and Ajzen [
43] highlighted the significance of moral obligations that require persons to perform or refrain from performing a certain behavior (e.g., lying, cheating, and shoplifting), thereby influencing perceived social pressures (subjective norms). Normative beliefs reflect the normative expectations of others, and the motivation to comply with these expectations [
43], in order to establish a subjective norm [
41].
Attempts to understand how energy-efficient appliances purchase behavior should be encouraged; the majority of the pro environmental, energy saving behavior research has focused on the role of beliefs, values, attitudes, and personal norms in shaping consumer purchase behavior towards energy-efficient appliances. However, among these studies, a less-studied or no significant work can be found on how psychological benefits, normative belief and moral obligations encourage consumer intention towards energy-efficient appliances. Therefore, to narrow the contextual and literature gap, this study has three major theoretical contributions. Firstly, this research extends the TPB to incorporate specific types of benefits (i.e., utilitarian environmental benefits and warm glow benefits) as determinants of attitude and normative belief, and moral obligations as a determinant of subjective norms, to further examine the purchase intentions of consumers in developing economies toward EEAs.
In addition, some scholars have pointed out that eco-literacy positively correlates with the attitude toward, and intentions to purchase EEAs [
44,
45]. In fact, past research has primarily analyzed the direct impact of eco-literacy on attitude and purchase intention, but has ignored the possible moderating role of eco-literacy. Secondly, this study, therefore, examines the moderating role of eco-literacy in the relationships between attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and intentions to purchase EEAs.
Recent studies have focused on the determinants that affect purchasing intentions toward EEAs [
19,
46], and attempted to enrich the theoretical models of such intentions [
2,
25]. Most scholars have, however, focused on the energy-efficient purchasing intentions of samples of the wider population, so that research on differences between groups is lacking. However, some recent studies have begun to incorporate socio-demographic characteristics into their models with the aim of exploring group differences [
47,
48]. Thirdly, this study applies multi-group analysis (MGA) to deepen the structural equation model analysis, with the aim of exploring the purchase intentions of different groups of consumers toward EEAs.
6. Discussion and Conclusions
This study finds that utilitarian environmental benefits and warm glow benefits have significant positive effects on consumers’ attitude toward EEAs. Hence, the findings support previous literature that utilitarian environmental and warm glow benefits positively enhance consumers’ confidence in green products [
38,
76,
125]. The findings from this study suggest that the perception of utilitarian environmental benefits (environmental excellence and energy saving) among consumers is associated with EEAs. A positive consumer attitude toward EEAs is due to the superior environmental functionality that they can deliver. Additionally, another benefit related to altruism, called warm glow benefits, was also found to be significant, confirming past research [
38,
74]. The results suggest that the “feel-good” sentiment or “helper’s high” effect [
73] that consumers anticipate they will experience when enacting an altruistic behavior—even if it their altruism is impure [
71,
72] may also occur in the case of a pro-environmental behavior such as an EEA purchase. In other words, warm glow benefits motivate consumers to pay premium prices for EEAs to feel moral satisfaction. In sum, the high degree of variance observed in attitudes results from the compound perception of both superior environmental functionality benefits and moral satisfaction benefits that EEAs can deliver. In terms of subjective norms, moral obligation does not have a significant effect on subjective norms. According to Reference [
49], moral values are essential to predict negative behaviors such as lies, fraud, and stealing. Purchasing EEAs is a positive and publicly acceptable behavior that is not reliant on moral obligations. The results of this study, therefore, suggest that consumers’ intention to purchase EEAs, being positive and rational, may not have to be driven by their moral commitment to social acceptance. Normative beliefs have positive effects on subjective norms, which are similar to past studies [
81,
85,
126]. This finding suggests that consumers these days are more aware of environmental issues and ecology; therefore, normative beliefs shape Pakistani consumers’ subjective norms that society expects them to take pro-environmental actions.
The results support the theory of planned behavior through a significant positive relationship between TPB constructs of attitude toward EEAs, subjective norms, perceived behavior control, and intention to purchase EEAs. Attitude has the biggest impact on intention to purchase EEAs, which indicates that consumers in Pakistan have constructive attitudes toward EEAs, and would generally intend to buy such appliances. This finding is in line with previous studies [
2,
25,
100,
116]. Perceived behavioral control follows attitude in terms of the impact on intention to purchase EEAs. In line with consumers in other parts of the world [
2,
25,
100,
127], Pakistani consumers are more likely to purchase EEAs when they feel that this specific act of purchase is not extremely difficult for them, and thus feel that they are ready to engage in that purchase behaviour. Among the TPB variables, subjective norms tend to exert the weakest impact on intentions. This was further confirmed by the weak effect size. This is in line with previous studies conducted in Asian contexts [
45,
57,
120]. It is also consistent with some form of common sense, suggesting that consumers’ purchasing decisions could easily be influenced by the opinions of, and suggestions from, those who are close to them, such as family and, especially, friends. The results, however, contradict some past studies that found a non-significant effect of subjective norm on intentions [
25,
117]. Altogether, these results may hint at the fact that, in developing economies, social pressure to consume sustainable products may not be sufficiently prevalent to influence purchasing decisions. Jayanti and Gowda [
128] commented on this issue by emphasizing that emerging markets face the following dilemma: fast urbanization to raise living standards poses a concomitant threat to the environment. In other words, the economic criterion tends to prevail over the environmental one. Hence, since there is no strong social norm, it cannot influence consumers as much as other variables.
Our study found that consumers’ eco-literacy, that is, their knowledge of the environment, strengthens the relationship between attitude and intention to purchase EEAs. This finding is aligned with previous literature that suggested that eco-literacy influences consumer attitude and purchase intention for environmentally friendly products [
41,
129]. Eco-literacy actually induces consumers to look for products that have a less negative impact on the environment, and consumers’ knowledge of the environment helps their thinking process to become a belief that shapes their attitude toward the environment. Knowledge is a very important base for the formation of people’s actions, because they will act in accordance with their knowledge. Eco-literacy significantly moderates the relationship between subjective norms and purchase intention of EEAs; this finding interestingly opposes the assumption made by previous authors that high eco-literacy will reduce the explanatory power of subjective norms to influence consumers’ purchase intention. Further, it can be deduced that people in Pakistan give more importance to maintaining group ideology and preserving in-group harmony. A previous study confirms this, as it found that people in Pakistan who hold strong social group values and beliefs stress collective interests over individual ones [
130]. However, our study finds that environmental knowledge plays a role as a moderator between subjective norms and purchase intentions. Further, it finds that eco-literacy does not have an interaction relationship between perceived behavioral control and purchase intention of EEAs. The existing literature on this situation, such as [
61,
131], clarified that people from collectivist countries could face strong pressure from others and are willing to over-ride their own opinions or perceptions. As a result, they do not have a high level of autonomy and confidence in making decisions about purchasing novel products. It can be confidently asserted that the collectivist values of Pakistani consumers nullify the moderating effect of eco-literacy between perceived behavior control and purchase intention.
The results of this study show significant differences in purchasing intention due to differences in demographic characteristics such as gender, age, education, and income level. For the gender groups, the relationship between subjective norms and purchase intentions of EEAs, utilitarian environmental benefits, and attitudes toward EEAs pass the significance test for female groups, which is consistent with past studies [
61,
132]. In Pakistan, women are mostly the caretakers of the home, and men work to support the families. Female children are assumed to take care of household chores, while women stay at home and are closer to family members, who are more likely to be influenced by others. Therefore, it is common in Pakistan, especially in urban areas, for the women who manage monthly household budgets to buy products that consume less electricity, because of Pakistan’s high electricity charges. In terms of age, our results show that perceived behavioral control and purchase intention of EEAs have passed the significance test for the young people’s group. This shows that young people have more knowledge, resources, and confidence, which encourage them to buy pro-environmental products such as EEAs. In terms of education, the relationship between attitude and purchase intention of EEAs passes the significance test for highly educated people. This shows that highly educated people have a stronger attitude toward purchase intention of EEAs than less-educated people because they are more knowledgeable and informed about environmental issues such as global warming, CO
2 emissions, and their impact on people’s lives. Our findings support those of previous studies; more-educated consumers are more likely to be more environmentally friendly than less-educated consumers because of their better understanding of and involvement in, environmental issues [
133]. From the perspective of income level, the relationship between normative belief and subjective norms passes the significant test for low-income level people. This indicates that the normative belief has a strong impact on subjective norms in the low-income level group because energy prices have increased rapidly in Pakistan; people in the low-income group, therefore, assign more weight to the opinions of their friends and family, who encourage them to look for pro-environmental products such as EEAs that consume less energy.
6.1. Theoretical Contributions
This study also makes theoretical contributions to the extant literature on intentional behavior and topical research on EEAs in several ways. First, it extends and enriches the literature by focusing on EEAs and providing empirical evidence concerning the factors affecting purchase intention, which remains a less-researched study in the context of developing economies. In addition, in contrast to similar studies that extend the TPB to examine EEA purchases from a technology readiness perspective (e.g., [
25], this study proposes that a key to unlocking pro-environmental behavior is to have consumers perceive the benefits arising from such behavior. Another aspect refers to the role played by consumers’ stronger environmental awareness in the form of normative beliefs that foster pro-environmental behavior. The study, therefore, extends the TPB framework meaningfully, by investigating some key variables that have remained largely unexplored until now, such as warm glow benefits, utilitarian environmental benefits, normative beliefs, and moral obligations. While utilitarian environmental benefits, warm glow benefits, and self-expressive benefits have been incorporated as predictors of attitudes toward EEAs, this study’s second postulate places normative beliefs and moral obligation as an antecedent to the subjective norm. The theoretical implication of this study arises from the fact that it empirically supports TPB Ajzen [
59] in terms of energy-efficient appliances adoption in developing economy Pakistan, thereby increasing its scope and applicability.
Second, Pakistan is a potentially promising market for green and environmentally friendly products because of its pro-environmental population and rising economy. The purpose of this research was to gain deeper insights into consumers’ intentions to purchase EEAs in that specific developing market. The contribution of this study arises from its findings concerning EEAs consumed by consumers in Pakistan that support, empirically, the TPB [
126], which expands the scope and benefits of that approach.
Third, this study investigates the moderating role of eco-literacy in the relationship between attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and purchase intention of EEAs. Past studies have incorporated eco-literacy as an antecedent to attitude and purchase intention for environmentally friendly products and behavior [
44] According to the results of this study, eco-literacy could also be regarded as a moderator in the theory of planned behavior to investigate purchase intention and behavior.
Fourth, the result of this study found strong group aviation in the purchase intention of EEA, consistent with the results of past studies using multi group analysis [
47,
120]. The combination of PLS SEM and MGA method is very useful because it only examine the behavior but also quantify the variation in the behavior of different groups [
134].
6.2. Managerial Implications
The findings of this study have significant implications for marketers of EEAs. They suggest that utilitarian environmental benefits and warm glow benefits both potentially enhance consumers’ attitudes toward EEAs and increase their purchase intention, encouraging the adoption of EEAs. Marketers should, therefore, promote the environmental benefits of EEAs, such as preventing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing people’s carbon footprint, improving the quality of life, and warm glow benefits through appropriate advertising messages that appeal to the audience’s sense of community, stressing that, when they purchase EEAs they can “feel good while doing good”—socially and environmentally.
Our study also suggests that eco-literacy plays an important role in consumers’ intentions to purchase EEAs. Therefore, marketers and firms should provide environmental knowledge through social media platforms and electronic media, and provide information about eco-labels and signs, and the benefits of consuming pro-environmental products. This would ultimately enhance consumers’ understanding of environmental issues. As a result, consumers would look for products such as EEAs that have a less negative impact on the environment and sustainability. Consumers currently lack the appropriate knowledge, or have a skeptical attitude toward product information; therefore, enterprises should emphasize the environmental benefits of products to consumers. As well, companies should introduce new products that function better, cost less, and are technologically innovative.
Practically, this study provides new insights by extending the TPB to investigate empirically the purchase intention of EEAs in an Asian developing economy; that is, Pakistan. This could help global businesses better understand Pakistan’s consumers and the country’s green marketing potential. In addition, the results from testing the conceptual model can help managers understand the relative importance of the factors that contribute to consumer purchase intention. From a consumer perspective, the goal of EEA is to decrease the amount of its energy consumption, and it thus has a socio-economic impact on consumers directly and indirectly: when marketers create impressive and better marketing programs and influence more consumers to buy EEAs more energy will be saved, which means lower electricity bills. Consumers and society as a whole must have a better living environment, as reduced energy consumption is better for the environment.
6.3. Limitations and Future Research Directions
First, this study focused on consumers’ intention to purchase EEAs; future research on actual behaviors can be conducted by comparing people’s intentions with their actual behaviors, so as to effectively understand how intentions are transformed into those behaviors. Second, the current research mainly focuses on EEAs; future research should observe the perceptions of consumers in other areas of sustainability, such as the consumption of biodegradable products or green vehicles. Third, the participants in this research were mainly residents of a single city in Pakistan, namely Karachi. It is important that future studies collect data from different cities in Pakistan, and they could also increase the sample size to enhance the generalizability of their findings. In addition, changes in attitudes and behavioral intentions of consumers over time could be observed by carrying out a longitudinal study. Fourth, although the EEA’s purchase intention was examined in this study using a questionnaire survey, however observation techniques should be used as well in similar studies. The use of observation techniques can further improve understanding of pro-environmental behavior in which a more rational and ingenuous behavior can be examined. Fifth, it is suggested that in the future, researchers include a sub-cultural dimension in their research, as there are strongly rooted subcultures in Pakistani society. These cultural contexts have not only a strong influence on individuals’ personalities and traits, but also on their individual consumption habits. Therefore, it appears very likely that incorporating a cultural perspective would lead to more relevant results. Finally, this research could be used for a cross-cultural study of such countries as Pakistan and India and Pakistan and Bangladesh. Such a study could provide a comprehensive understanding of the cultural differences between markets, and thus suggest diverse approaches that professionals and marketers should consider when they operate in global and regional business environments.