Research Article
How Do Consumers React to Products’ Green Signals? The Effects of a Low-involved Product’s Green Communication Strategies on Environmental-Friendly Consumer Attitude
Chonnam National University
Chonnam National University
Chonnam National University
Published: January 2017 · Vol. 46, No. 1 · pp. 109-136
DOI: https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.17287/kmr.2017.46.1.109
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Abstract
Environmental issues including climate change have emerged as one of the most important and imperative issues in the business circle as well as politics, economies, and society. Global environmental policies and business strategies in response to environmental issues have more focused on the product side as they have realized that there would be no substantial effects in emission reductions and climate change mitigation without changing consumer attitude and behavior. Eco-labels such as carbon footprint, designed to connect eco-friendly and low carbon production and consumption by utilizing a market mechanism, are widely used around the world as environmental policies and corporate marketing tools; however, very little research has explored a topic on the effects of eco-labeling from a marketing and consumer behavior perspective. This study examines how environmental communication strategies influence consumer attitude and behavior towards environmental and climate change issues in different ways, depending on environmental information delivering modes. The research results based on experiment and survey methods with 576 consumers present severing important findings. First, in general, delivering environmental performance information of products leads to a higher levels of awareness of environmental-friendly and communication credibility than doing nothing. Second, in terms of communication modes, text messages have a greater effect on consumer attitude than label messages. Moreover, a eco-communication delivering simple eco-labels such as carbon footprint is not found to have a significant effect. Third, a ommunication strategy presenting the specific environmental information of products has a significant and greater levels of effects on consumer attitude than a strategy providing broad and somewhat general information. Last, eco-labeling is found to have a greater effect on consumer attitude when other labels related to product attributes are provided at the same time. This study contributes to the green marketing literature, particularly green signals using eco-labeling to consumer attitude, by exploring and validating the effects of green communication strategies. The results of this study provide several meaningful implications for marketing managers and environmental policy makers. Green communication strategies on what and how environmental information is to be delivered to consumers should be more elaborate by considering environmental performance, product attributes and communication modes in a combined way in order to make eco-labeling including carbon labels works properly in markets. This study considers different income levels of consumers, and thus provides practical implications to develop marketing strategies and environmental policies to promote environmental-friendly consumption attitude at a wide range of consumers beyond a limited scope of green consumers.
