Green Demarketing in Advertisements: Comparing “Buy Green” and “Buy Less” Appeals in Product and Institutional Advertising Contexts

Abstract

This research compares consumer response to traditional green advertising appeals to that of less conventional, “green demarketing” (GD) appeals—messages by for-profit companies encouraging reduced category consumption for the sake of the environment. Rather than encouraging greener consumption, modern environmentalism calls for decreased consumption overall, a trend reflected in recent advertising campaigns (e.g., Patagonia's “Don't Buy This Jacket”). Despite its potential impact and unconventionality, research on GD in general is sparse, and no empirical research has examined consumer response to GD appeals relative to traditional green appeals. In three experiments, we find that, in the context of product advertising, consumers' attitudes for green ads are more favorable than those for GD ads, mediated by greater inferences of genuine environmental concern. However, we find the reverse pattern in the context of institutional ads. Further, an “anti-consumption amplifier” message embedded in the ad—espousing the potential harm of overconsumption—further boosts favorable consumer attitudes for the GD institutional ad relative to its traditional green counterpart. Importantly, we assess all effects while controlling for consumers' individual levels of green consumerism, such that implications may be applied more generally rather than to a specific segment of green consumers.

Notes

1. In all three studies, we also analyzed the environmental concern inferences scale items using principal axis analysis and maximum likelihood method of extraction. In every study, all three methods returned near-identical results and supported aggregation of the scale items into a single composite. We also ran a one-factor CFA on the environmental concern inferences scale items in all three studies, showing reasonable fit to the data (all χ²s < 33.485, all ps > .006, all CFIs > .991, all RMSEAs < .064). For ease of exposition, we report only the results of the PCA.

2. We included attitudes toward the product as an additional check on the differences between the green and GD appeal. Though not hypothesized or included in the full model, we report the total effects of the manipulation on this variable for the sake of completeness.

3. We also tested for a simple effect of appeal type on attitudes toward the product among only those participants in the two product ad conditions (n = 128). An independent samples t test revealed that participants' attitudes toward the product were significantly more favorable in the green product condition (M = 5.56, SD = 1.02) than in the GD product condition (M = 4.28, SD = 1.95, t [126] = 4.623, p < .001).