Gaining trust through greenness; How green advertising messages translate into green trust for varying degrees of social distance.
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2018-06-28
Language
en
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
How green advertising messages translate into green trust for varying degrees of social distance.
Global warming and plastic pollution can be limited by adoption of sustainable products, which can be encouraged by using green advertising claims to promote a trustworthy green brand image. This study argues that such trustworthiness can be achieved by devising advertisements with high ad greenness, which denotes the extent to which its claims are specific, informative and useful. Social distance, which describes the degree of perceived psychological distance from consumer to brand, is hypothesized to moderate the relationship between ad greenness and green trust. Subsequently, green trust is expected to positively influence purchase intentions of the advertised product. A 2 x 2 between subjects design was employed. Ad greenness was manipulated through two variations of the same advertisement. Social distance was manipulated by presenting one of two contextual stories. Results indicate that perceived ad greenness positively affected green trust directly, but also indirectly through its negative effect on environmental claim skepticism. When claims in the advertisement were increasingly perceived as specific, informative and useful, they were decreasingly judged as untruthful, exaggerated and deceptive, which lead to higher levels of green trust. Ultimately, green trust was shown to be a positive predictor of purchase intentions. No meaningful insights were gathered on the possible moderating role of social distance as its manipulation proved to be non-functional.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen