How Consumers Emotionally Process Green Advertising

Summary

This JAR paper, authored by academics from Peru and Spain, addresses a practical and topical marketing issue:  How do consumers emotionally process and react to messaging intended to prompt responsible behavior toward the environment?

The authors used a psychophysiological approach to analyze how different combinations of elements in an advertisement generated different types of response. (The paper explains Psychophysiology, the study of the relationship between the mind and the body. Some of the methods used in the researchers’ experiment are rarely used; others, such as skin conductance and facial coding, are widely used in neuromarketing studies.)

The authors’ sought to identify messages that can activate respondents’ motivational system in ways that would result in physical action, that is, find the types of messages that are better at provoking emotion so as to increase the potential of a campaign to elicit positive changes in behavior. The outcome of their work:

• The authors were reluctant to describe their findings as conclusive, since they were based on only one study. However, their study clearly points to positive messages that emphasize the benefits of environmentally responsible behavior (as opposed to those focused on the negative) as more likely to achieve positive results.
• This study addresses “green” advertising, but the authors believe their research approach can be used to identify messages that are more likely to result in real behavior changes for all kinds of social issues as well as for marketing objectives.