Go Green! Should Environmental Messages be So Assertive?

Abstract

Environmental communications often contain assertive commands, even though research in consumer behavior, psycholinguistics, and communications has repeatedly shown that gentler phrasing is more effective when seeking consumer compliance. This article shows that the persuasiveness of assertive language depends on the perceived importance of the issue at hand: Recipients respond better to pushy requests in domains that they view as important, but they need more suggestive appeals when they lack initial conviction. The authors examine this effect in three laboratory studies and one field experiment using Google AdWords. Their findings refer to various environmental contexts (i.e., economizing water, recycling plastic containers, reducing air and sea pollution). The key implication of these findings is that issue importance needs to be carefully assessed (or affected) before the language of effective environmental campaigns can be selected.

Tackling Grand Challenges Pragmatically: Robust Action Revisited

“…Finally, robust action, and particularly the notion of multivocal inscription, suggests that the continued emphasis on persuading audiences, and the general population, with compelling facts 36 about sustainability, may be misguided (Kronrod, Grinstein, & Wathieu, 2012;Norgaard, 2011).…”

The Involvement of Future Generations in the Circular Economy Paradigm: An Empirical Analysis on Aluminium Packaging Recycling in Spain

“…The circular economy implementation in our society could be facilitated through environmental communication campaigns regarding the stakeholders' perceptions [11,12]. Thus, based on the fact that some of the stakeholders' perceptions came from their education, this study considers the importance of environmental learning in children to modify the future behaviour of stakeholders.…”

Still Waters Run Deep: Comparing Assertive and Suggestive Language in Water Conservation Campaigns

“…In contrast to most consumer goods marketing messages, which were overwhelmingly found to use suggestive phrasing, the majority of environmental slogans were found to be assertive [18]. While much of the marketing and demarketing literature highlights drawbacks of assertive language in inducing compliance, some has demonstrated the effectiveness of assertive messaging in certain cases of pro-social communication, especially in environmental contexts [16,18].…”

“…While there is a growing body of literature on information and conservation campaigns as policy instruments for managing water demand, much less research has been dedicated to evaluating which types of interventions work best; this, despite the growing consensus in both the behavioral economics and marketing literatures that suggests that the content of conservation campaigns is critical to determining their level of effectiveness and to ensuring success, especially in the context of environmental management (e.g., [15][16][17][18]). Much of the existing work that has attempted to address the content of conservation messaging has focused on normative social comparisons, wherein an individual's or household's consumption is compared to that of their neighbors (e.g., [19-21]) Addressing the need for an effective communication strategy to encourage residential water conservation, this work investigates a different aspect of conservation messaging or demarketing, namely, the tone of the language used in conveying the messages.…”

“…While much of the marketing and demarketing literature highlights drawbacks of assertive language in inducing compliance, some has demonstrated the effectiveness of assertive messaging in certain cases of pro-social communication, especially in environmental contexts [16,18]. However, some of the same literature has found that the different types of messages work differently for certain types of goods.…”