A deeper understanding of customers’ desire for and participation in green activities can lead to organizations designing more efficient and effective green programs. This research finds that the guests’ assessment of the importance of being environmentally friendly has the greatest effect on their intention to stay in a green hotel. Second, the research identifies the following customer barriers to participation: inconvenience, perceptions of cost cutting, and decreased luxury—all of which significantly affect consumers’ intention to stay at a green hotel or pay more for a room in such a hotel. Third, the results show that customers believe that hotels should have certain green practices, but did not consider it important to stay in a hotel that actually maintains the thirteen green practices tested here. Fourth, the results find that customers behave with greater environmental responsibility at home than they do in a hotel. Among the implications of these findings is the idea that hotel managers’ communications and actions must be relevant to guests’ concerns by educating customers, increasing convenience to participate in green programs, and decreasing perceptions of cost cutting.

In an industry plagued by high failure rates and exorbitant amounts spent on marketing, restaurants must find ways to increase the effectiveness of their advertising. The purpose of this study is to explore how verbal smell references in restaurants’ radio advertisements (e.g., “You can almost smell the smoky and delicious aroma of your steak grilling to perfection”) affect consumers’ perceived ability to “almost taste” and “almost smell” the advertised product, affective response, and purchase intentions. In a between-subjects experiment conducted on undergraduate students, this research finds that a verbal smell reference in a radio ad significantly influences a potential consumer’s ability to almost smell and almost taste the advertised product. The smell reference also significantly affects individuals’ affective responses to the ad and purchase intent for the product. Interestingly, this research also finds that the level of “brand excitement” associated with the advertised brand perfectly mediates the relationship between the verbal smell reference and affective responses. From a managerial perspective, these results seem to indicate that verbal smell descriptions in restaurant radio ads can be associated with a number of desirable outcomes.