Is it nutritional? Factors impacting purchase intention of sustainable dog food A quantitative study

Since the domestication of dogs, there has been a long history of pet dogs living with human beings. With the increasing dog ownership and growing expenditure on pet dogs, recent years witness great market growth of the pet food industry. As global warming and climate change become increasingly urgent global issues, the burgeoning industry of pet food is put under the spotlight for its environmental impacts. Since the large amount of livestock meat used during pet food production is a great contributor towards climbing greenhouse gas emissions, sustainable pet food with no livestock meat is produced as a response by pet food companies to take their environmental-related corporate social responsibilities. Sustainable dog food products are green innovative products. As they serve as environmental-friendly alternative options that are new to the market, whether they would be accepted and welcomed by the market is unknown. Effective promotion and marketing rely on the understanding of consumer decision making and psychology. Within the context of sustainable dog food products, this study applied a quantitative approach to examine factors that would influence consumer’s purchase intention towards sustainable dog food products. A survey was conducted online to collect data from Western European (potential) dog owners (N=230). The results of this study show that perceived nutritional value of sustainable dog food directly and positively influenced consumer’s purchase intention, but this association could not be enhanced by integrating anthropomorphic tendency as the moderator. Though sustainable dog food contains no livestock meat as ingredients, consumer’s environmental concerns had no direct influence on purchase intention. The association between these two variables could not be moderated by perceived nutritional value. Besides, the tendency to attribute supportive humanlike traits on dogs had marginally significant influence on purchase intention. Furthermore, this research also found that consumer’s level of loneliness was not associated with their anthropomorphic tendency.