“Environmental brand attribusetand nature imagery in vegan product advertising”

Abstract

Environmental issues have been the center of discussion for a long time and the effects of climate change are becoming increasingly visible around us. On a positive side, people have started to become more aware of these effects and other environmental issues. This has also led to people being more conscious about the power of their own purchasing decisions (Glocalities 2019). In addition, companies around the world have started executing more environmentally friendly business practices and offering greener products (Clarke, Crocker, Ferguson y Marcell 2019) following consumers’ growing demand for sustainability. Among the rise in demand for green products also the sales of different plant-based food products have seen an incredible rise in recent years (The International Trade Center 2019; The Good Food Institute, 2020). Although today there are some significant green trends, green marketing and green advertising have existed for a long time. For decades marketers have used different green advertising strategies in order to attract environmentally conscious consumers. One of these strategies is the usage of different green product attributes such as ecolabels and information of the product’s environmental characteristics in advertisements in order to communicate the product’s environmental benefits to the consumer and to generate cognitive advertisement responses such as utilitarian environmental brand benefits. Another green advertising strategy includes the usage of nature imagery which purpose is to create affective responses in consumers by creating virtual nature experiences. These effects are said to positively affect for example, brand attitude which in turn could have a positive effect on purchase intention. This thesis follows the study of Schmuck, Matthes, Naderer and Beaufort (2017) in which they investigated the cognitive and affective advertisement responses and their effect on brand attitude and purchase intention using different levels of environmental involvement, environmental concern, green purchase intention and attitude towards green products, as moderators. Among other relevant variables environmental involvement is often used as a predictor of green consumer behavior. The objective of this present study is to test how the international vegan label, the V-Label, generates perceived utilitarian environmental brand benefits when used as an environmental brand attribute in advertisements. In addition, the combined effect of nature imagery and the V- Label is tested in order to gain insight into what type of responses nature imagery creates in vegan product advertising, especially when advertising vegan food products. The products chosen for this study are plant-based milk and a television. Plant-based milk was chosen due to the growing popularity of vegan milk alternatives, and television in order to test what kind of responses the exposure to the V-Label creates in a similar product category used by Schmuck et al. (2017). Two fictitious brands were created around these products: Plantay for the vegan milk and Kandai for the television. Consequently, altogether three advertisement appeals were created for each of the products: control appeal presenting the product on a blank background, functional appeal presenting the product together with the V-Label and a combined appeal that included both the V-Label and nature imagery. The effects were measured by conducting a survey which included the advertisement appeals as stimulus. The survey measured the levels of individuals’ environmental involvement before exposure to the advertisements. After seeing the advertisements, the cognitive and affective responses of utilitarian environmental brand benefits and virtual nature experience were measured. This was followed by questions related to the respondents’ attitudes towards the brand seen on the advertisement and their purchase intention. These results were then tested by running different statistical analyses such as ANOVA and regression modeling. The tests provided similar results as previous studies alike, further consolidating the existing correlations between the studied variables. One of the key findings of this study is that V-Label was found to create perceived utilitarian environmental brand benefits in a similar way like other labels, such as eco-seals (see Schmuck et al.2017). The findings were similar with both the functional and combined advertisement appeals. The findings indicate that the usage of V-Label in vegan product advertising is more beneficial than for instance just stating the product being plant-based and may create a more positive effect on utilitarian environmental brand benefits even among those individuals perhaps otherwise not interested in vegan products. In addition, presenting the V-Label together with emotional attributes such as nature imagery can create even stronger effects which then in turn positively affect brand attitude and purchase intention.