Green marketing messages and consumers' purchase intentions: Promoting personal versus environmental benefits

The Effects of Environmental Brand Attributes and Nature Imagery in Green Advertising

“…Grimmer & Woolley, 2014;Hartmann et al, 2005;Schuhwerk & Lefkoff-Hagius, 1995;Searles, 2010;Spack, Board, Crighton, Kostka, & Ivory, 2012). Green consumerism, however, significantly varies by age, education, and gender (Atkinson & Kim, 2015;Roberts, 1996;Shrum, McCarty, & Lowrey, 1995), so student samples lack population validity and are of limited use when investigating the effects of green advertisements.…”

Greenhushing: the deliberate under communicating of sustainability practices by tourism businesses

“…In general, the messages promote active engagement on the part of the clients (85%), for example, "Come and enjoy the best of British design from locally made furniture to English fine furnishings". Where framing messages with a more personal tone and emphasising customer benefit is evident, this suggests that the businesses are targeting individuals with lower environmental affect (Grimmer & Woolley, 2014) because they do not wish to be constituted as preaching to their customers (Kim & Kim, 2014;Stanford, 2014).…”

“…For example, a message that suggests customers should use the bus to enjoy better views of the landscape on their days out is positively framed, has an experiential benefit and hence is written for customers with lower environmental affect; while an alternative message that suggests customers should use the bus because otherwise their car will pollute the environment is negatively framed, does not emphasise a customer benefit and is therefore written for consumers with a high environmental affect. Customers with higher environmental affect have been shown to respond better to messages that convey an altruistic environmental benefit, although the majority of customers, with lower environmental affect, respond better when the added value is more personal (Grimmer & Woolley, 2014).…”

Switch the channel: using cultural codes for designing and positioning sustainable products and services for mainstream audiences

“…This approach is out--dated and new findings on human risk assessment and decision--making evidenced by behavioural economics show that perceptions, biases and emotions have a greater weight on our choices and preferences than facts (Kahneman, 2012). As Grimmer and Woolley (2012) recommend, 'sustainable offerings would benefit from a stronger appeal to the emotionality of customers to be more effective' (p.16). However, de Burgh--Woodman and King (2013) warn that we must be wary of counting on the emotionality or empathy generated by 'depletion and destruction scenarios' as motivators for lasting behaviour change, evidencing that 'humans enjoy a historically embedded relationship with nature in either its literal or metaphoric sense', which renders nature a passive constant that is 'just there' and hard to imagine it gone (ibid, p. 146).…”

“…only those already within the sustainability 'universe of meaning' connect with the proposition, and those outside of it remain unaffected (Grimmer and Woolley, 2012).…”