“Buy Me, I’m Green”: The Effects of Verbal and Visual Claims on Consumer Responses to Environmental Products: An Abstract

Consumers spend less than 90 s making up their minds about a product after their initial interaction with it. Most of their assessments in this short amount of time are based on the visual attributes of the products. The overall purpose of this study is to take the first step toward understanding consumer attitudes toward environmental claims on packages by using low- and high-involvement products and then determining how different product claims (verbal and visual) affect their decision-making processes. Specifically, based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), this study examines consumer responses to environmental verbal statements and green visual components of product packages. The research utilizes a 2 (claim: eco-friendly or high performance) × 2 (color: green or yellow) factorial experiment (n = 256) to understand how packaging elements can affect buying decisions of consumers by varying product packaging on both high-involvement (laptop computer) and low-involvement (dishwashing detergent) products. The results show that green color packaging elicits better attitudes than nongreen for low-involvement products because these products are perceived as being more environmentally friendly. The results also demonstrated that for the eco-friendly claim, the color-product fit was significantly higher for green products than nongreen products. However, for performance claim (i.e., Ultra Clean), the results did not show any significant difference in terms of color-product fit. Also, for the high-involvement product claims, the study results did not show any significant difference in consumer responses.