Abstract:
Industries around the globe have been the reason to emerge the natural disasters and calamities
occurring from environmental greenhouse effects. Environmental preservation have been adopted by
many organizations and the importance of the green revolution has been started to realize. But the
event planning industry in Sri Lanka does not concern much about the environment and does not
attempt to adopt green practices. The insights of this study lead to understand the factors that
influenced the perception of the event planners in Sri Lanka. Particularly, these insights were
depicted that awareness, environmental concern, green advertising, greenwashing, green product
attributes, social norms and income were identified as key factors for generating the perception of
event planners in Sri Lanka. The semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted among the 05
most reputed event planners in Sri Lanka to derive research data and the narrative analysis method
has been adopted as the data analysis method in this study. A qualitative approach was applied to
determine the underlying influences on event planners‟ perceptions about eco-friendly events in Sri
Lanka. Additionally, the impact of the perception of consumers about the green concept related to the
events was explored in this study from the event planners‟ point of view. Findings of the study show
that awareness, environmental concern and green advertising are the factors that mostly impact on the
consumers‟ green purchase intentions. Further, social norms, product attributes and income were
identified as the factors which impact the green purchase intentions of consumers to a considerable
extent. These insights will be fruitful to event planners to identify the opportunities to further invent
new green strategies for their businesses and will able to influence the purchase intentions of
consumers to be more environmentally friendly.
Keywords: Green marketing; Event planning industry; Green concept; Green purchase intention; Eco
friendly products and services
