Activating values to stimulate organic food purchases: can advertisements increase pro-environmental intentions?

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine different strategies for an increasing adoption of “environmentally friendly” products. Scholars have consistently shown that consumers with strong biospheric and altruistic beliefs are more likely to purchase these products, while marketers are increasingly appealing to consumers’ self-interest in their efforts to sell their “green” products. This paper explores this divide and offers a potential explanation for it, using the concept of value activation. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents results of two survey experiments that test this explanation in the context of organic food advertisements. In a simulated trip to a grocery store, participants were exposed to advertisements designed to activate the six different values in Schwartz’s framework. After viewing the advertisements, participants were asked to select among organic and non-organic options in six product categories – milk, bread, eggs, spinach, potatoes and chocolate. Findings The study’s results suggest that while advertisements designed to activate values may have limited effect on consumer intentions, those that relate to protecting the health of oneself and one’s family are most likely to increase organic purchases. Originality/value This paper is one of the first of its kind to explicitly test whether advertisements designed to activate a range of human values can increase consumers’ intention to engage in pro-environmental behaviors. The two studies reveal that value-based advertisements may have a stronger effect on the organic purchasing intentions of specific demographic groups (e.g. consumers who are aged under 40, lack a college degree and do not identify as liberal).

Antecedents of Purchase Intention toward Organic Food in an Asian Emerging Market: A Study of Urban Vietnamese Consumers

“…The topic on organic food consumption has captured a great attention from scholars and practitioners, since food consumption plays an important role in influencing the environment and individual and public well-being [3]. Most past research related to organic food; however, has been conducted in the context of developed economies, specifically in the US and Western Europe [1,[5][6][7][8][9]. There is a need to understand more about organic food consumption in the context of emerging markets, where the organic food industry is still a relatively young and emergent sector, and the knowledge of consumer behavior pertaining to organic food purchase is still limited [3,4,10,11].…”

Chocolate Consumption and Purchasing Behaviour Review: Research Issues and Insights for Future Research

“…All papers dealing with sustainability issues have adopted questionnaires. One study created an online questionnaire, simulating a real shopping experience [40]. Another study took place at a shopping stand where Fair Trade products were sold, in order to observe consumer behaviour [23].…”

“…Then, consumers' attitudes towards Fair Trade sustainability was explored in 2008 [23]. From 2015 onwards, the number of studies analysing consumers' perceptions of chocolate sustainability attributes have strongly increased [3,18,34,36,38,40,42,47,53,55,69,70],. Chocolate packaging started to interest researchers in 2009 [24], and a focus on chocolate sustainable packaging followed in 2014 [17].…”

“…The geographical distribution of the various topics (Table 4) provides interesting insights. Sustainability plays an important role in thirteen consumer studies in Europe [3,4,17,30,34,36,38,42,44,47,53,55,69] and four in North America [18,21,23,40]. No sustainability studies have been conducted in Asia or Oceania.…”

“…Consumers mostly rely on organic labelling as a guarantee of human health and protection for the environment [3,17]. A study by Bullock, Johnson and Southwell (2017) [40] shows that the health attribute has a crucial effect on consumer choices. They argues that advertising has an effect only if it is "related to protecting one's own and family health", rather than "activating ethical values".…”