Publication Type

PhD Dissertation

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

5-2026

Abstract

Industry consumer research widely portrays Generation Z as an identity-driven cohort that enacts sustainability values through consumption. This narrative is often generalized across cultural contexts, assuming that Western-developed green consumption frameworks can be directly transferred without structural modification. Yet Chinese Gen Z’s e-commerce purchase patterns depart notably from this depiction, raising core questions: Can Western green consumption frameworks be applied to Chinese Gen Z? If so, what theoretical and structural adaptations are necessary?

This dissertation develops and tests an integrated three-pathway model to explain green purchase intention among Chinese Gen Z consumers. The model places utilitarian benefits, self-expression benefits, and environmental benefits on the same comparative axis as predictors of green purchase intention, with environmental awareness and environmental knowledge-expertise as moderators of each pathway. The model is theoretically grounded in the Theory of Planned Behaviour, Social Identity Theory, and Baudrillard’s symbolic consumption framework. The empirical design combines a self-report survey administered through Credamo (N = 1,021 Chinese consumers aged 18-30), aggregated platform behavioural data from Tmall（天猫）covering 7.49 billion product page visits and 546 million unique purchases in 2025, and qualitative analysis of 1,021 open-ended response narratives. Hypotheses are tested through hierarchical regression with HC3 robust standard errors.

Three central findings emerge. First, environmental benefits dominate the comparative pathway weights, carrying approximately four times the predictive weight of self-expression benefits, while utilitarian benefits become statistically dormant after controls. Second, environmental awareness operates as a content-aligned amplifier rather than a general motivational resource: it strengthens the environmental-benefit pathway specifically and does not strengthen the self-expression or utilitarian pathways. Third, on interpretation, the integrated framework may require structural modification rather than mere recalibration to apply to the Chinese Gen Z population, with health and environmental motivations appearing bundled rather than separable in consumer reasoning, and with objective knowledge moderation absent from the empirical pattern. Cohort-internal heterogeneity shaped by life-stage transitions also produces systematic variation in the intention-behaviour gap that homogeneous cohort-level treatments mask. Two supplementary descriptive analyses extend the primary findings: a cross-cohort narrative comparison documents that environmental motivation operates as a universal frame (95-96% prevalence) across age cohorts in the Chinese consumer-research population while family-health framing is life-stage-mediated, and a SKU-level platform analysis on 658,031 Tmall product records identifies a substantial Greenwashing premium alongside an Information Gap penalty for genuinely certified but unsemanticised products, surfacing a supply-side contribution to the intention-behaviour gap that consumer-side analyses alone do not capture.

This study makes three key contributions:

(1) it empirically establishes the comparative hierarchy of the three benefit pathways among Chinese Gen Z;

(2) it proposes, on interpretive reading of the results, three structural modifications to adapt Western green consumption frameworks to the Chinese context;

(3) it demonstrates that a mixed‑methods design (survey + platform big data + narrative analysis) captures unique insights unavailable from single‑source approaches.

Practical implications follow for brand communication, category strategy, and labelling policy in the Chinese green consumer market.

Keywords

green purchase intention, Chinese Generation Z, integrated benefit framework, environmental awareness, mixed-methods research, Tmall platform data

Degree Awarded

Doctor of Business Administration (Accounting and Finance)

Discipline

International Business | Marketing

Supervisor(s)

MA, Dan

First Page

1

Last Page

278

Publisher

Singapore Management University

City or Country

Singapore

Copyright Owner and License

Author

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