THE EFFECTIVENESS OF GUILT STATEMENTS IN FAIRTRADE PRODUCTS

This paper presents how guilt statements can affect luxury Fairtrade chocolate products. Specifically, the study will examine how willingness to pay more can affect Fairtrade through guilt advertising. Fairtrade is a labelling certification aimed at helping farmers in marginalised countries (Mendez et al., 2010). Huhmann and Brotherton (1997) explained that ‘informative statements’ can help evoke guilt and these statements are used on the packaging to investigate consumers’ perceptions of ad credibility, inferences of manipulative intent, guilt arousal, attitudes towards the ad, purchase intention and willingness to pay more for Fairtrade chocolate products. A combination of statements and logos were used as stimuli. The results of this study has shown that guilt statements may be too intense and may have caused inferences of manipulative intent in a Fairtrade context, resulting in lower purchase intention and willingness to pay more. This study is the first study to explore how guilt statements and logos influence consumers’ purchases for Fairtrade products. This study has managerial applications in developing marketing strategies to promote Fairtrade products and other charitable co-branding schemes.