How communicating sustainable packaging impacts the consumer’s purchase intention

: investigating the effect of the consumer's added value for sustainable packaging and its pro-environmental attitude

Abstract

Consumers are more and more concerned about environmental and social issues and thus increasingly ask for products with sustainable product attributes. Around one third of the consumers already base their purchase decision on a brand’s social and environmental-friendly efforts. Since green marketing efforts have a bad image among consumers though, marketers face a conflict when it comes to communicating their sustainable product attributes. This study aims at identifying which factors and which communication style (emotional vs. informative) impact the consumer’s purchase intention for products that communicate sustainable packaging – a product attribute that addresses the consumer’s major environmental concern namely waste. In the context of an exploratory study, a cross-sectional survey was conducted that exposed respondents to a product picture of washing-up liquid communicating sustainable packaging either in an emotional or in an informative way or to a control stimulus. The stimuli were created based on a pre-study inspired by the Delphi technique which aimed at finding a consensus between the respondents according their perceptions about the degree of emotions of existing sustainable packaging claims. Findings indicate that communicating sustainable packaging in an emotional or an informative way makes no difference for the consumer’s purchase intention. Overall, the impact of communicating sustainable packaging on the purchase intention is mediated by the consumer’s added value for sustainable packaging and has different effects depending on the consumer’s pro-environmental attitude.

Date of Award	16 Mar 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Paulo Romeiro (Supervisor)