Current Issue Summary
Sept 2023 (Vol. 64, Issue 3)

Do Consumers Prefer Sad Faces on Eco-Friendly Products? How Facial Expressions on Green Products in Advertisements Influence Purchase Intentions
How can advertising appeals effectively drive consumers’ intentions to buy environmentally friendly products and services? Would an ad featuring a happy-faced coffee mug made of organic materials be more compelling than a sad-faced appeal? To find answers to these questions, Chinese researchers Ke Zhang, Siqi Wang, Huan Yang and Long Chen (all at Soochow University, except Wang who is at Shanghai University), examined functional and emotional advertising appeals across utilitarian and hedonic green products. The task at hand: to evaluate how the disparate appeal types affect consumer intentions. Across a set of three experiments, the authors also assessed the moderating effect of positive and negative facial expressions, and mediating factors (processing fluency—or the ease with which information is processed—and greenwashing perceptions). Both factors play a significant role in the reported relationships. Among the findings:

• Functional appeals work more effectively than emotional appeals in ads that promote green purchase intention.
• “Consumers exposed to positive (versus negative) expression report higher green purchase intention for a functional (emotional) appeal.
• “The moderating effect of product facial expressions works partly through the two mediators—processing fluency and greenwashing perception.
• “Consumers exposed to positive (versus negative) expression with utilitarian (versus hedonic) products report higher green purchase intention for functional (emotional) appeal.”

Read the full article here.