Effectiveness of Eco-label? : A Study of Swedish University Students' Choice on Ecological Food

ABSTRACT The recent years mark the appearance of many Eco-label schemes in the attempt ofhelping consumer to recognize the products with less harm to the environment, forexample: Euro flower, Nordic swan, Blue Angle, Krav. These labels belong to the thirdparties, which get supports from government with object of achieving sustainabledevelopment. However there is still lacking a clear understanding about theeffectiveness of Eco-label in consumer consumption activities due to the lack ofresearch working on that field. We take this challenge as an opportunity to do the studyof investigating about the role of Eco-label in the process of leading consumers topurchase Eco-products. The research focuses on Swedish university students‘ choice onecological food. A number of Swedish students in Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden are selected as thegroup of respondents for this study. In order to understand the effectiveness of Eco-labelin students‘ food products choice, four key factors are taken into account to invest igate:students‘ awareness on Eco-label, students‘ knowledge on Eco-label & ecological food,students‘ environment motivation, and the availability of ecological food & Eco-labelinformation. The demographic characters including gender and education backgroundsare known as the influence factors among these four factors. The results proved the effectiveness of Eco-label as the guiding instrument for students‘product choice towards ecological food. It provided the evidence that three of these fourfactors above (accept the only one external factors: availability) can encourage students‘attention to Eco-label. In additional, student‘s attention to Eco-label can actually leadtheir purchase behavior on ecological food. With findings and recommendations, thestudy is expected to contribute to the field of ecological consumer behavior marketingresearch. However, the representative of the results is risky because of the limitedcontext and sample of the study