Green Advertising and the Reluctant Consumer

Kim Sheehan, Lucy Atkinson, Kim Sheehan, Lucy Atkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317700050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

This edited collection presents cutting edge research into the topic of green messages and subsequent consumer responses. The research studies draw on a rich tradition of communication, psychological and sociological theories that examine consumer responses in a nuanced way. At the same time, the studies present important implications for advertising practitioners and academics alike. Written by communications scholars from North America, Europe and Asia, the studies encompass a range of research techniques including experiments, surveys, content analyses and depth interviews. The book provides important insights into current practice as well as directions for future research.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Advertising.

INTRODUCTION

Revisiting Green Advertising and the Reluctant Consumer

Kim Sheehan and Lucy Atkinson

The Journal of Advertising first devoted a special issue to green advertising in the summer of 1995. The guest editor of that issue, Easwar Iyer, indicated that the use of the word “green” in describing this particular type of advertising was meant to connote pro-environmental behaviors on behalf of both companies and consumers. Green advertising was further defined as a message promoting environmentally oriented consumption behavior (Kilbourne 1995); as a promotional message that may appeal to the needs and desires of environmentally concerned consumers (Zinkhan and Carlson 1995); and as a message that features an environmental attribute for a product or service (Schuhwerk and Lefkoff-Hagius 1995).

That issue, consisting of six papers, covered a range of topics that created what might be considered the first comprehensive framework around environmental messages, addressing the complex relationship between attitudes, behaviors, consumers, and advertising. Most notable in this issue was the framework proposed by Kilbourne (1995) that explicated the political and human relational elements of green attitudes. The political aspect of the framework was further explicated in papers addressing policy issues and agency management. To address the human relational element, other papers addressed the interplay of strategy and consumers, looking at how different positioning appeals (sick baby versus well baby) affected consumers.

In the nearly two decades since that special issue, the environment has become even more of a hot button topic among consumers, corporations, and policymakers. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chairman Jon Leibowitz noted, “In recent years, businesses have increasingly used ‘green’ marketing to capture consumers’ attention and move Americans toward a more environmentally friendly future.” A 2010 study of advertising practitioners indicated that more than three-quarters of surveyed practitioners planned to increase their advertising and marketing spending on green messages in the future. That increase is due to numerous polls showing that many U.S. consumers are willing to pay more for “green” products (e.g., GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies 2008; Integer Group and M/A/R/C Research 2011; Mintel 2010). This trend holds true around the world, with recent polls showing that consumers in China (Ogilvy Mather 2011), Japan (McKinsey 2010), and Europe (FoodDrinkEurope 2011) are looking for ways to integrate sustainability into their lifestyles.

This trend is complex, however, with studies showing that consumers’ green intent does not always translate into actual green purchase behaviors (Grail Research 2009; Lindqvist 2011). For example, a 2011 study by Nielsen reports that half of Americans say they prefer eco-friendly products, but only 12% of consumers are willing to pay more for them. The patterns are similar in other countries. This attitude–behavior gap reveals a discrepancy between consumers’ environmentally friendly, socially desirable orientations and their real-world marketplace choices. The green advertising landscape is further complicated by questions of ethics and the numerous contradictory and sometimes misleading messages in green advertising. At the forefront are concerns about greenwashing, where messages overstate the environmental benefits of products and services.

Since that first special issue in 1995, green advertising has gained considerable academic attention in the marketing and advertising fields. Evidence of this now-widespread interest can be seen in the breadth and depth of the papers in this issue. The 1995 special issue laid the framework for the role of “green” messaging in advertising, and this issue builds on that framework in this unique way. Starting with those cutting-edge papers, this special issue extends those groundbreaking exploratory and descriptive studies, and brings much-needed theoretical rigor to the field of green advertising.

The 9 papers here represent a variety of methodological approaches, including experiments, surveys, depth interviews, and content analyses, as well as theoretical frameworks ranging from signal theory and regulatory focus to prospect theory and the theory of planned behavior. They also cast a broad geographic net, with studies drawing samples from Taiwan, Portugal, Germany, and South Korea, in addition to the United States.

Running through all the studies, however, are three important common threads: theoretical richness, complex model building, and real-world implications. First, the papers in this collection draw on a rich tradition of psychological and sociological theories to ground their findings and generate theoretically rich insights into green advertising. In so doing, these studies help build our understanding of green advertising, the mechanisms at play, and how advertising audiences react to them. Their theoretical contributions help bring clarity to the topic of green advertising and offer road maps for future research, as well as theory building and testing.

For example, in their paper “The Role of Regulatory Focus and Self-View in ‘Green’ Advertising Message Framing,” Kareklas, Carlson, and Muehling rely on the theory of regulatory focus to explain audience reactions to different green advertising frames. Their results replicate the theory’s applicability to green advertising while shedding new light on the role of regulatory focus in the context of advertising appeals directed at the personal level compared with those at the more general, environmental level. In “Communicating Green Marketing Appeals Effectively: The Role of Consumers’ Motivational Orientation to Promotion Versus Prevention,” Ku et al. also studied the phenomenon of consumer regulatory focus in relationship to green motivations. Their work suggests that green appeals that are nonproduct focused can be highly motivating to many consumers. In “Green Eco-Seals and Advertising Persuasion,” Bickart and Ruth rely on the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM) to explain the persuasiveness of eco-seals, while underscoring the importance of environmental concern as an important theoretical component. Royne et al. use Prospect Theory and Mental Accounting Theory to examine the relationship between advertising appeals and product pricing in “The Effectiveness of Benefit Type and Price Endings in Green Advertising.” Their study looks at how those two elements play into perceptions of the product quality of green products relative to other types of products, given different pricing structures. The study also contributes to our understanding of consumer motivations for purchasing green products.

Second, this collection of papers brings a careful, nuanced eye to the ways in which consumers process green advertising messages and with what effects. The simple view of a reluctant green consumer has been expanded in this special issue to account for important mediating and moderating influences, such as environmental concern and advertising skepticism at the individual level, and the influence of framing and medium effects at the message level. They go beyond developing typologies of green consumers or the various kinds of green advertising to build more complex models of green consumer behaviors.

For example, two studies underscore the importance of consumer involvement in green advertising messages. In Minton et al.’s cross-cultural article, “Sustainable Marketing and Social Media: A Cross-Country Analysis of Motives for Sustainable Behaviors,” involvement, which the authors operationalized as a measure of sociability and camaraderie, was an important predictor of green behaviors in the United States and Germany, but less so for consumers in South Korea. In “Victoria’s Dirty Secrets: Effectiveness of Green Not-for-Profit Messages Targeting Brands,” Cervellon takes a different view of involvement, operationalizing it in terms of environmental involvement. She shows how exposure to messages about a brand’s negative environmental track record resonate more strongly with less-involved consumers than with highly involved consumers when the message is framed as a loss. Tackling involvement from a slightly different angle, Tucker et al. explore involvement in the form of past environmental behaviors and perceived consumer efficacy. In “Consumer Receptivity to Green Ads: A Test of Green Claim Types and the Role of Individual Consumer Characteristics for Green Ad Response,” they show how higher levels of involvement are positive predictors of ad credibility, which leads to more positive attitudes toward the ad and the brand.

Paço and Reis, in “Factors Affecting Skepticism Toward Green Advertising,” build on this attitudinal knowledge by examining the role of consumer skepticism in message processing. While consumers are indeed skeptical of green claims, Paço and Reis found that such skepticism does not negatively affect behaviors: Consumers perform and participate in green activities and buy environmentally friendly products regardless of this skepticism. Xie and Kronrod also explore the nature of skepticism in “Is the Devil in the Details? The Signaling Effect of Numerical Precision in Environmental Advertising Claims.” The authors found that in certain situations, a high level of numerical precision in advertising claims can be persuasive to highly skeptical individuals. Specifically, scarcity of information enhances the importance and persuasiveness of whatever information is available.

Finally, each paper speaks to the applied and practical aspects of green advertising. Across the board, these studies raise important questions and present meaningful suggestions for industry professionals. In so doing, they shed light on one of the more frustrating and limiting aspects of green advertising: how to bridge the attitude–behavior gap among would-be green consumers. This green gap is particularly problematic for practitioners, who are left with little guidance on how to motivate consumers to purchase green products and exhibit green behaviors.

Xie and Kronrod provide information on providing explicit numeric claims to increase persuasiveness in specific situations. Ku et al. recommend that marketers prime a target audience for either a promotion-focused or a prevention-focused strategy to influence the persuasiveness of communications.

Taken together, this collection of papers offers detailed insight into the current field of green advertising while raising important questions and avenues for future research. It is our hope that the work represented in this volume energizes future studies of green advertising and lays the groundwork for another decade or so of scholarship, just as the first special issue did in 1995.

REFERENCES

FoodDrinkEurope (2011), “Environmental Sustainability Vision Toward 2030,” available at http://sustainability.fooddrinkeurope.eu (accessed February 28, 2013).

GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (2008), “The GfK Roper Yale Survey on Environmental Issues: Consumer Attitudes Toward Environmentally Friendly Products and Eco-Labeling,” available at http://environment.yale.edu (accessed February 28, 2013).

Grail Research (2009), “The Green Revolution,” available at http://grailresearch.com/about_us/featuredresearch.aspx?aid=90/ (accessed February 28, 2013).

Integer Group and M/A/R/C Research (2011), “Green Report,” available at www.marcresearch.com/archives.php#The%20Checkout/ (accessed February 28, 2013).

Kilbourne, William E. (1995), “Green Advertising: Salvation or Oxymoron?” Journal of Advertising, 24 (Summer), 7–20.

Lindqvist, Nea (2011), “Green Segmentation,” available at http://behavioraltargeting.biz/tag/nea-lindqvist/ (accessed February 28, 2013).

McKinsey (2011), “Finding the Green in Green,” available at http://csi.mckinsey.com/knowledge_by_region/asia/japan/finding_the_green_in_green/ (accessed February 28, 2013).

Mintel Oxygen Reports (2010), “Green Living,” available at www.mintel.com/press-centre/press-releases/514/are-americans-willing-to-pay-more-green-to-get-more-green/ (accessed February 28, 2013).

Nielsen (2011), “Sustainable Efforts and Environmental Concerns,” available at www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports-downloads/2011/sustainable-efforts-environmental-concerns.html (accessed February 28, 2013).

Ogilvy Mather (2011), “Corporations Not Cashing In on Chinese Consumers’ Desire for Sustainability,” available at www.ogilvy.com/News/Press-Releases/April-2011-Corporations-Not-Cashing-In-On-Chinese-Consumers-Desire-For-Sustainability.aspx (accessed February 28, 2013).

Schuhwerk, Melody E., and Roxanne Lefkoff-Hagius (1995), “Green or Non-Green? Does Type of Appeal Matter When Advertising a Green Product?” Journal of Advertising, 24, (Summer), 45–54.

Zinkhan, George M., and Les Carlson (1995), “Green Advertising and the Reluctant Consumer,” Journal of Advertising, 24 (Summer), 1–6.

CONSUMER RECEPTIVITY TO GREEN ADS

A Test of Green Claim Types and the Role of Individual Consumer Characteristics for Green Ad Response

Elizabeth M. Tucker, Nora J. Rifon, Eun Mi Lee and Bonnie B. Reece

This article is dedicated to the memory of the first author, Elizabeth M. Tucker. The authors thank Paula Storrer and Mark Stuenkel for creating the ads used in the study. They also thank the three anonymous reviewers and the special issue editors for their constructive comments.

ABSTRACT: The overarching goal of this study is to clarify how individual characteristics may influence consumers to be more or less receptive to ecologically themed ad claims. An experiment compares the effectiveness of strong and weak green product claims with a cause-related marketing strategy to advertise a “green” product. The results suggest that consumers with positive attitudes toward environmental protection are equally receptive to all conditions tested. An analysis using a theoretically based structural equation model points to the important role played by perceived consumer effectiveness in creating positive responses.

Environmental protection has resurfaced as an important issue with consumers, policymakers, and corporations. Recent environmental disasters such as the BP oil rig explosion (Brown and Fountain 2010) and evidence of global warming (Gillis 2012) remind consumers of the importance of environmental protection, rekindle consumer awareness and interest in environmental issues (Chitra 2007), and have reinvigorated green marketing strategies (Cronin et al. 2011; Haytko and Matulich 2008). The use of green marketing emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s (Davis 1993; Ottman 1998) and has grown exponentially in the past two decades (Futerra 2008). As noted in the call for papers for this issue, a majority of practitioners surveyed report the intention to increase spending on green marketing. However, academic research has not kept pace with industry interest (Chamorro, Rubio, and Miranda 2009), and there is a gap in our knowledge regarding consumer response to ecologically themed ad appeals.

An ongoing conundrum is the gap between consumer concern for...