Consumers' evaluations of ecological packaging – Rational and emotional approaches

By Nicole Koenig‐Lewis, Adrian Palmer, Janine Dermody, Andreas Urbye. 2014

350 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ecological marketing claims have been criticized for confusing or misleading buyers, leading to calls for more rationality in promoting and evaluating ‘green’ products. However, emotions are important drivers influencing pro-environmental purchase decisions. This study investigates consumers' emotional and rational evaluations of pro-environmental packaging. A conceptual model incorporates individuals' general environmental concerns, their rational beliefs about environmental effects of product consumption and emotions evoked. Hypotheses are tested with 312 Norwegian consumers who evaluated a beverage container incorporating organic material. Purchase intention was significantly influenced by general environmental concern, but not by rational evaluations of benefits. Rational evaluations had differing effects on positive and negative emotions. Both positive and negative emotions had significant direct effects on purchase intention. This paper contributes to evidence that emotions rather than rational evaluations are key drivers for changing pro-environmental purchase behavior and adds new knowledge about the role of negative emotions evoked by pro-environmental packaging.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/863c3a2ca907563b088afb7d420af4638ba63e44

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In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Marketing

Citations in the corpus

A comparative study of relative roles and sequences of cognitive and affective attitudes on tourists’ pro-environmental behavioral intention (2020, background): “These interventions assume knowledge or awareness deficits underlying environmental inactions, and the deficits could be solved by infusing environmental facts or improving awareness (Koenig-Lewis et al., 2014; Barr & Gilg, 2007).”
Experiences of pride, not guilt, predict pro-environmental behavior when pro-environmental descriptive norms are more positive (2016, background): “In addition, positive emotions (e.g., feeling happy or optimistic) have been found to be an important predictor of green product purchases (Koenig-Lewis et al., 2014).”