Amidst numerous negative developments regarding the state of the climate and the natural environment, the world is increasingly focused on reaching a sustainable way of life. While some progress has been made, the goal is far from reached. One major driver for this movement is represented by the changes in consumer behaviour and the rise of green consumerism. The increasing number of consumers demanding more sustainable products and services from companies represents an opportunity for firms to adopt a green marketing approach to business and appeal to those green consumers. However, this also opens the door to opportunistic and unethical behaviour from companies in the form of greenwashing, which can hinder the progress of the green movement. Due to the importance of these topics, this paper investigates the green purchase intent of young consumers in Denmark, and the way greenwashing concern affects that intent. The Theory of Planned Behaviour is used as a starting point and based on extant literature, it is extended to include three new factors which impact the purchase intent alongside the original ‘attitude’ and ‘subjective norm’: ‘perceived environmental knowledge’, ‘environmental concern’, as well as ‘greenwashing concern’. Greenwashing concern is hypothesized to have a negative moderating effect on the relationship between the former factors and the green purchase intent.

This study uses an internet-administered survey with items on a 7-step likert scale to collect quantitative data, and open-ended questions to collect qualitative data relevant to the topics of greenwashing concern and green purchase intent. A total of 77 respondents have completed the survey which was shared through various social media channels. As a result of the hypothesis tests, the findings show that environmental concern has a positive effect on both the consumers’ attitude towards sustainable products, and their purchase intent for those types of products. Moreover, positive attitudes towards sustainable products have the highest positive impact on green purchasing intent, but that relationship is negatively moderated by the consumers’ greenwashing concern. Greenwashing concern is not found to have a moderating effect on the relationship between the rest of the factors and the purchase intent. However, consumers are also found to have a relatively poor ability to identify greenwashing in advertisements shown to them in the survey. Contrary to expectations, subjective norm and perceived environmental knowledge were both found to not affect green purchase intent.