“Buy Me, I’m Green”: The Effects of Verbal and Visual Claims on Consumer Responses to Environmental Products: An Abstract

Abstract

Consumers spend less than 90 s making up their minds about a product after their initial interaction with it. Most of their assessments in this short amount of time are based on the visual attributes of the products. The overall purpose of this study is to take the first step toward understanding consumer attitudes toward environmental claims on packages by using low- and high-involvement products and then determining how different product claims (verbal and visual) affect their decision-making processes. Specifically, based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), this study examines consumer responses to environmental verbal statements and green visual components of product packages. The research utilizes a 2 (claim: eco-friendly or high performance) × 2 (color: green or yellow) factorial experiment (n = 256) to understand how packaging elements can affect buying decisions of consumers by varying product packaging on both high-involvement (laptop computer) and low-involvement (dishwashing detergent) products. The results show that green color packaging elicits better attitudes than nongreen for low-involvement products because these products are perceived as being more environmentally friendly. The results also demonstrated that for the eco-friendly claim, the color-product fit was significantly higher for green products than nongreen products. However, for performance claim (i.e., Ultra Clean), the results did not show any significant difference in terms of color-product fit. Also, for the high-involvement product claims, the study results did not show any significant difference in consumer responses.

The study has several important contributions. First, the research addresses the significance of visual (i.e., color) and verbal claims on high- and low-involvement product packages and purchase reactions in the environmental sustainability context. Second, the research furthers evidence suggesting the important role of environmental color in mediating relationships between perceived environmental friendliness and consumer reactions. Third, in the same environmental context, the study furthers knowledge of how consumers cognitively store and respond to product color and claim. Thus, the paper has both practical and theoretical implications.