Green advertising: examining the effects of appeal arrangement on young Indonesian consumers’ Green attitudes and buying intention

ABSTRACT

Studies of green advertising have had mixed findings from using single and hybrid appeals to consumers’ green attitudes and behavioral intentions. However, the effects of ordering or sequencing the appeals or repeating them have scarcely been investigated. Drawing upon prospect theory, green advertising, and the theory of planned behavior, this experiment, with 160 Indonesian university student participants, found that green attitudes were better formed by appeal order than appeal repetition. In contrast, the types of appeal arrangement generated insignificant differences in buying intention between green products with lower and higher perceived difficulty. The moderating effects of perceived difficulty were significant only on green products with lower perceived difficulty. Furthermore, green attitudes mediated the impacts of appeal arrangement on the intention to buy green products with both lower and higher perceived difficulty. The findings’ theoretical and practical implications also are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Green advertising
• message appeal framing
• appeal order
• appeal repetition
• Green attitudes
• Green buying intention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Afred Suci

Afred Suci is currently a Ph. D. candidate under the supervision of Prof. Hui-Chih Wang in Business Administration Department of National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan. His research interests include: social marketing, message framing, and consumer decision making.

Hui-Chih Wang

Professor Hui-Chih Wang earned her Ph. D. degree in Marketing and Strategy from Cardiff University, UK. She is currently a professor in Business Administration department of National Taiwan University of Science and Technology in Taiwan. Her research interests include: neuromarketing, entrepreneurial media marketing, and consumer decision making.

Her-Sen Doong

Professor Her-Sen Doong earned his doctorate in Information Management from National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan and is currently a Professor of Management Information Systems at National Chiayi University in Taiwan. His current research interests are in the areas of innovation adoption and diffusion, human-computer interaction, and electronic commerce.