Is advertising helpful for organic businesses? Differential effects of packaging claims

Abstract

What claims should companies use to improve consumer perceptions of their certified organic products and help consumers differentiate them from conventional products? This study focuses on advertising – specifically, on packaging claims that differ in their degree of explicitness and message topic. A laboratory experiment shows that a single claim positively influences perceptions of organic products, though additional claims can cancel out this positive effect. Different claims have distinct impacts on consumer perceptions. This study, thereby, reveals an effect of thematic scope: messages related to the environment have greater scope than those related to health, and they influence both environmental and health perceptions strongly.

Keywords:

• certified organic products
• cues
• packaging claims
• message topic and explicitness
• perceptions

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Ko de Ruyter and Carlos Flavián for comments on an early version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain [grant number ECO2014-53060-R].

Notes on contributors

María Hidalgo-Baz

María Hidalgo-Baz (PhD student, University of Salamanca) is a part-time instructor of marketing at the University of Salamanca. Her researches focus on communication issues, specifically, on consumer goods packaging and customer's response to them.

Mercedes Martos-Partal

Mercedes Martos-Partal (PhD, University Carlos III of Madrid) is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Salamanca. Her current research interests focus on the private-label phenomenon, relationship marketing issues and analyses of the consumer packaged goods industry. She has published in international journals such as Journal of Retailing, Marketing Letters, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Advertising Research, European Management Journal, International Journal of Market Research, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Service, International Review of Retail and Distribution and Consumer Research among others.

Óscar González-Benito

Óscar González-Benito has a degree in mathematics from the University of Salamanca (1995), a MSc degree in marketing from UMIST (UK) (1997) and a PhD in economics and management sciences from the University of Salamanca (1999). He is professor of marketing at the University of Salamanca. In addition to publications in some of the most well-recognized Spanish marketing and management journals, he has published in international journals such as Journal of Retailing, Marketing Letters, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, International Journal of Market Research, British Journal of Management, OMEGA and Psychology & Marketing.