Measurement of Green Lifestyle and Market Segmentation in the Promotion Strategy for Environmental Protection: An Empirical Analysis of Kaohsiung Metropolitan

AbstractIn recent years (2011), whether atypicality and global warming affect seriously all species and living environment of mankind. It activated a trend of local caring and environment protection throughout the world, and advocating green living has been one of the fashion affairs. Nevertheless, how can we understand and quantify people¡¦s acceptance of green living? How to design a scale of green living, with which we can apply consumer behavior analysis and the research technique of market segmentation, so that for promoting green living styles to people of all ranks.The current research tried to building up a scale of green living style, with three constructs: green values, cognition of environment protection, and green behavior and habits, in addition to a brief test of knowledge over environment protection. The contents of the questionnaire cover such topics as water resources, global warming, renewable energy sources, international trend in sustainability and related industrial policy, warm chamber effect, carbon emission and the status and policy of environment protection in Taiwan. Office workers and current students in the Kaohsiung metropolitan area were the main participants undertaking the questionnaire survey of the research, with effective sample size of 603 subjects. The research tested the scale¡¦s reliability and validity through factor analysis and verified it¡¦s construct validity with local recognition. After those validation for the scale, the study conducted cluster analysis for market segmentation based on green lifestyle. The main works and findings of the current research including: (1) building a scale of green lifestyle with reliability and validity; (2) discovery of four segments of the green lifestyle in the market; (3) there are different approaches to evaluate the government¡¦s performance of environmental protection; (4) sustainability values and green cognition influence behavior of environmental protection; (5) local recognition positively affect the green index of people; and (6) youth in the society and college students are relatively lacking of sustainability conducts, although they presents in a higher level of the environmental protection knowledge.