A study on the influence of green advertising appeals on advertising effectiveness

Abstract

As ecological sustainability has become an important public issue, more and more enterprises take green advertising as a marketing strategy while related studies are being conducted to explore the most positive way to maximize the advertising effect. The research uses the experimental method based on the heuristic-system model (HSM) to specifically explore the influence of green advertising appeals and its interaction effect with claim specificity and visual presentations on its effectiveness. It is shown that there are differences between the eight groups in terms of participants’ attitude towards green advertising with respect to all the dimensions, advertising appeals, claim specificity and visual presentation. The self-benefit appeals, together with specific claims and dynamic presentations appear to have a stronger promotion for green advertising across all the perceptive measures towards green advertising. The findings provide useful insights to practitioners as to the type of appeals preferred for green advertising. Besides the theoretical contributions, the present research also offers important implications for marketers on green advertising strategies to develop green ads more effectively.