Purchase Intentions of Green Products Among Young Consumers: Exploring the Impact of Beliefs and Subjective Norms

Purchasing green products is essential for addressing the environmental crisis, underscoring the need to understand what drives such behavior. Based on the theory of planned behavior, this study addresses three research gaps using an open belief‐elicitation and a follow‐up online survey. First, it tests the theory's generalizability across organic dairy products, ecological cleaning products, and organic cosmetics and personal care products. Structural equation modeling shows consistent main effects across product categories. Second, the role of subjective norms is examined in more detail, revealing additional indirect effects through attitudes. Third, the study explores underlying behavioral, normative, and control beliefs, which remain understudied despite being central to the theory. The results reveal product‐specific differences in the importance of these beliefs as well as in the influence of the background factors environmental concern and gender. For example, availability emerges as a key control belief for ecological cleaning products, and women report more positive control beliefs overall. The findings suggest the importance of social norm–based communication strategies, given their additional effects on attitudes, as well as tailored communication approaches that target product‐specific beliefs and specific consumer groups based on environmental concern and, to some extent, gender.