Sustainability as an advertising message: why consumers remain suspicious
Crafting advertising messages in a way that consumers trust is a challenging task—especially when a company wants to score points with its values. Consumers have little way of verifying how seriously a company is actually pursuing its touted sustainability goals. Trust is essential for them to purchase sustainable products and services. Researchers are also studying how to achieve this.
Sustainability has never been ascribed greater importance than it is today. Climate movements such as "Fridays for Future," but also equal rights movements such as the women's strike, are gaining more and more support in our society. The pressure to act is not only at the political level. Above all, sustainable behavior must also be anchored at the individual level in everyday routines, such as purchasing decisions. But can advertising messages that seek to promote consumer behavior be reconciled with the basic idea of sustainable development? Can their senders be trusted at all?
The author: Friederike Vincent is a senior assistant at the Institute for Communication Science and Media Research at the University of Zurich, Department of Media Psychology and Media Effects. Her research interests lie in the areas of persuasion and media effects research, especially prosocial communication. This article was first published in the Media Week published.
Marketing and sustainability - at first glance, these two concepts are at odds with each other. In marketing, advertising messages are intended to convince customers to buy a product or service. Whereas sustainable behavior is equated with a certain renunciation. However, marketing, understood as a dual management concept, encompasses not only sales-oriented corporate activity, but also market-oriented corporate management. For example Jones, Clake-Hill, Comfort, and Hillier (2008). as well as McDonagh and Prothero (2014). that, in accordance with the needs of the market, various economic players have set themselves the goal of making their corporate actions more sustainable. This is reflected in the products that these companies pass on to their customers on the sales market. Sustainability marketing is therefore not about increasing consumption per se, but about promoting sustainable beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. This may involve a certain amount of renunciation, but above all the aim is to adapt existing consumer behavior and make it more sustainable.
Sustainable behavior in general and ecological consumer behavior in particular are now strongly recognized in our society. Customers say they look for green attributes, such as organically grown vegetables, when making purchases (for example Cason & Gangadharan, 2002). At the same time, customers do not necessarily trust advertising messages that extol such attributes and highlight the companies' implementation of ecological responsibility (for example Naderer, Schmuck, & Matthes, 2017)
Since sustainability is a product property that cannot be verified with certainty by the consumer even after consumption, the customer must trust the supplier's claims. However, greenwashing scandals are becoming public again and again. Most recently, the big diesel scandal at VW. Cases like this make a lasting impression. In the minds of many people, they are emblematic of the fact that companies present their ecological commitment in an exaggeratedly positive light. Consumers doubt the stated sustainable objectives. They assume that green advertising messages are only used as measures to increase consumption and thus company profits. Consequently, sustainability communication in the context of advertising communication faces the major challenge of communicating the ecological, social, but also economic product benefits to its customers without them being able to check whether the company is actually fulfilling its advertised responsibility.
In the past, communication science has assumed that people who are interested in environmental issues and have a positive attitude towards organic products are more distrustful of green marketing strategies. In their overview article, Zinkhan and Carlson (1995), for example, characterize the so-called "green consumer" as a generally advertising-skeptical person, who is open-minded due to his or her value attitude toward ecological products, but is nevertheless skeptical. Due to persuasive intent, this consumer type distrusts advertising messages. Other authors identify a more specific distrust and assume that the sustainability-savvy target group is explicitly skeptical of the green appeals of the advertising message.
Among others, the assumption of the skeptical green consumer questions Matthes and Wonneberger (2014). They conclude that green consumers do not exhibit higher reactance to advertising messages in general than other consumers. Further, Tucker, Rifon, Lee, and Reece (2012) show that an environmentally friendly value attitude also does not specifically influence trust in green advertising appeals. They argue that a much more important factor in trusting an advertising message is whether the customer perceives the information as useful. Accordingly, an advertising message must receive information that educates the customer about the product, including the benefit of sustainable aspects.
The focus of advertising messages is usually on the social benefit - for example, "for the sake of the environment" - which is inherent in sustainability. The individual benefit - for example "because it tastes better" - is often neglected (for example Hartmann & Apolaza Ibáñez, 2006). In this context, each individual consumer expects a certain immaterial or material benefit from a consumer good. Only if the advertising message conveys a personal added value attributable to sustainability can the customer perceive the information in the advertising message as useful and thus trust it. Vincent (2019) was able to show in her dissertation that customers can perceive an individual benefit in the form of emotional added value. However, this presupposes that advertising messages are tailored to the specific characteristics of the various target groups. Factual-altruistic information on sustainability appeals emotionally to people who already have a high affinity for sustainable behavior. People who otherwise tend to act less sustainably, on the other hand, are more likely to be appealed to by self-referential-emotional sustainability appeals.
Advertising messages can certainly contribute to sustainable development. The big challenge: If you want to promote sustainable consumer behavior, you have to convey the emotional added value of sustainable products and services to specific target groups so that consumers perceive the advertising message as useful and thus as credible.
