Who Does the Good Deed? The Effect of Message Framing on Green Consumption

摘要

Despite their positive attitudes towards green products, consumers tend to purchase non-green items which generally offer lower prices (Olson 2013). Accordingly, there has been a great deal of research exploring factors that have the potential to boost consumers' purchases. One among them is how marketers frame their environmental messages and communicate them to consumers (Olsen et al. 2014). However, regardless of intensive research effort on this topic, the subject of environmental messages has been unexplored. Particularly, it is not uncommon that firms try to show consumers their commitment to environmental protection. Their messages are centered on themselves and how they produce products with recycled materials. Consistent with this practice, previous studies suggest that firms explicitly show their environmental commitment to consumers (e.g., Wang et al. 2016). However, a common reason that hinders green purchases is consumers' difficulty in identifying the impact they are making (Johnstone and Tan 2015). Firm-centered messages can make the situation worse since they can overshadow consumers' impact and thus discourage green consumption. Therefore, our study seeks to answer the questions: "Do consumer-centered messages (versus firm-centered messages) enhance consumers' intention to purchase green products? If yes, does consumer involvement with environmental protection moderate the effect?"