An Exploratory Investigation of Consumer Motives and Impeding Barriers to Buying Organic Food Products in Pakistan

Health safety and environmental damage due to agricultural abuses have gained a global significance. Consumers are now concerned about the quality and purity of their intake food, and they are looking for a more environmentally friendly answer to these problems. Organic food is considered as eco-friendly and meets individuals’ environment-relateddesired objectives. The core objective of this study is to explore consumers’ buying motive and impeding barrier they face in buying organic food products in Pakistan. For this purpose qualitative interviews and thematic analysis had been incorporated. Twenty-five respondents were interviewed at a famous shopping mall in the city, Lahore Pakistan. The shopping mall was selected due to the availability of organic food products. A coding mechanism had been devised and applied to respondents' answers and further analysed to state their opinions for organic food products under each category. Hence, four categories appeared in the exercise, such as environment and health-related worries, morality and ethicality, self-identity and subjective impeding barriers. The result showed that almost all respondent declared a health and pollution free environment motive as their prime drive to buying organic food products. Most interestingly some respondents attached their organic food buying with their moral intrinsic motivation and self-identity. In terms ofimpeding barriers to buying organic food products, trust, product availability and higher prices were proved to be a major matter of concern. Therefore, organic food marketers are suggested to devise marketing strategies in more holistic manners by attaching consumers’ self-concept, moral and ethical dimension with health and environmental protection objectives. Specifically, promoting moral concept harmonized with environment and animal protection shall produce a consumer pull. Consequently, it will support the organic food development in the country. Further, it is suggested that organic food supply may be channeled with a trusted brand name, by doing so the product acceptability shall be increased. Surging demand shall invite more competition in market, which resultantly shall reduce the organic food prices and increase the consumers’ product affordability. This paper contributes to the marketing knowledge in organic food and suggests some motivational factors encouraging the consumers to buy the environmentally friendly food product and same time throws light on impeding f