How Millennials Sustainable Lifestyle Practices Influences Motivation to Promote Green Products to their Friends

A social group that shows the greatest interest and concern about ethical and CSR issues is young people, often defined as Generation Y or Millennials (Klimkiewicz and Oltra, 2017). One of the main distinctive feature of this generation is the approach to CSR (Anderson et al., 2018). According to Walker (2007), generation Y seeks to promote social justice, they pay particular attention to the natural environment and its preservation, poverty reduction and the solution of ethical and moral problems. Millennials are considered as key consumers of today, they believe that consumption and socially responsible lifestyle habits can change the world in a better direction (Cone, 2008). Lifestyle influences the purchase decision and consumption behaviour, and relates to consumerism (Chu and Chan, 2008). Thus, lifestyle can be viewed as an interpretive framework for the construction of social reality (Yeh and Chen, 2011). Upon acquiring explicit knowledge of how specific activities affect society (Buenstorf and Cordes, 2008), consumers likely pursue behaviour participations such as consuming green products, recycling, considering clothing care, and adopting eco-friendly behaviour (McDonald and Oates, 2006). Prior research has examined the extent that consumers in general are concerned about the environment and the extent to which they are interested in environmentally friendly products. The current study seeks to add to the research literature by assessing sustainable lifestyle practices and motivation to recommend environmental friendly products of Millennial consumers. Specific research questions are as follows: What sustainable lifestyle practices are specific to Millennials? How sustainable lifestyle practices inspire Millennials to promote green products to their friends? The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between Millennials’ sustainable lifestyle practices and motivation to promote green products to their friends. In order to test the proposed link a survey was conducted on a sample of 421 Millennials in Eastern Europe. Purposive sampling was used to recruit on a volunteer basis in September - December of 2018. Sustainable lifestyle practices are measured with using 41-item scale developed by Lee et al. (2015), the Millennials motivation to promote green products to their friends is measured with using a five-item scale (Smith, 2010). Research findings has confirmed the relationship between millennials sustainable lifestyle practices and motivation to promote green products to their friends. Millennials are willing to pay more for environmental products, they prefer to buy brands which promote green campaigns, feel moral obligation and personal responsibility for social problems.