| dc.description.abstract | The recent trend towards being “green” has had certain undeniable effects upon the consumer market, with many companies rapidly introducing new “green” products. Consumers are constantly exposed to more and more advertisements for these items. Such ads stress how the product will save energy, use low amounts of power, or not produce pollution. Although the ads used this or any other appeal to the consumer to “love the planet”, their real goal is to emotionally move a consumer into buying the product, thereby increasing the company’s revenue.
Thus, does the sight of advertisements for green products, and appeals made by the companies really influence consumers to purchase them? Kotler (1995) believes that in order to understand what factors would cause a consumer to purchase a product, companies should consider what their target demographic wants. In order to successfully promote a Green product, the advertisements must explain how this product would benefit the Earth and the environment. It must convince potential buyers that this information is accurate and trustworthy, that the claims and supporting data used in the advertisement can really be accepted and believed by consumers. Many studies done on this subject have come to the conclusion that, if the data or figures comes from a trusted, reliable source, they do increase the perceived trustworthiness and value of said product, and can change how consumers view and feel about the product（Petty & Cacioppo, 1981; Ohanian, 1990; Bohner et al., 2002; Reimer et al., 2005.） So far, in the literature related to the subject of green product advertisements, there has been insufficient research conducted on the accuracy and trustability of the information source on data included in these advertisements. Thus, in this study, through a review of related documents, we attempt to discover, what the effects of different types of advertisement appeals (Emotional or Rational) and the credibility of different information sources (High and Low) are under various conditions, as well as what effects the advertisement contents for a green product have upon how the consumer’s views and reactions to this product and his or her subsequent purchasing behavior.
This study primarily manipulates the two variables, the advertising appeal and source credibility, in order to explore the effects of various types of advertising (advertising attitude, brand attitude, purchase intention). In addition, we add different levels of product involvement (high and low) to the green product advertisement as an interference variable in order to discover if differing amounts of product involvement in the advertisement has any influence on the ad’s effectiveness. The experimental
design is as follows: there are a total of two experiments, each being a 2*2 experimental design. Test subjects were assigned to different environments and then exposed to advertisements before researchers offered an explanation and they were given a questionnaire to record their responses. The SPSS 17.0 and other statistical software were employed to analyze the research data and test the hypothesis.
Research findings are as follows: (1) green products advertisements that make emotional appeals have a stronger effect than those that appeal to rational. (2) Advertisements with information from more reliable sources are more effective than those with unreliable information. (3) When product involvement is high, advertisements appealing to rational have a greater effect than those making emotional appeals. On the other hand, when the product involvement is low, advertisements making emotional appeals are more effective than those making rational ones. (4) Regardless of the amount of product involvement, high or low, advertisements with more trustable information sources had a larger effect than those without.
| en_US |