تاثیر پیام های سبز بر روی خرید و فروش برند The effect of ‘green’ messages on brand purchase and brand rejection

1. Introduction The last decade has seen a proliferation of ‘green’ brands appearing in almost every consumer goods category with consumer appeals ranging from environmental concerns, the sustainable sourcing of materials and organic production (Scheffer, 1991; Elkington and Hailes, 1989), through to social concerns such as fair trade and non-animal testing (Webster, 1975; Carrigan and Attalla, 2001; Vermeir and Verbeke, 2006; Winchester and Romaniuk, 2008; Tanner and Wolfing Kast, 2003; Bogomolova and Nenycz-Thiel, 2008; Young et al., 2010). A driver for this growth in ‘green’ brand messages is the belief that being ‘green’ is a way to attract new buyers to a brand; that being ‘green’ is an attribute that buyers value and will show brand preference for (Vandermerwe and Oliff, 1990; Gordon, 2002). There is also the advantage that going ‘green’ creates news for a brand – a point of difference; and that this may help to gain the market’s attention and thereby increase the likelihood of a brand being bought (Sharp and Newstead, 2010). Given that the major battle brands face is for a customer’s attention, this is a convincing argument. With an average of 30,000 products in a supermarket (Sorensen, 2009), it is easy for a brand to simply not be noticed. Yet despite these purported advantages of linking a brand to a ‘green’ message, most ‘green’ brands are small share if they were not already a big brand with an established customer base prior to being ‘greened’ (Bonini and Oppenheim, 2008; Vantomme et al., 2004; Roozen, 1999). One reason for this may be that historically ‘green’ brands have had low quality associations (Peattie, 2001; Alwitt and Berger, 1993; Vantomme et al., 2004) and a perceived high price relative to their non-green competitors (Peattie, 2001). They have also been perceived as ‘niche’, appealing to only a part of the category’s market (Pickett-Baker and Ozaki, 2008; Vandermerwe and Oliff, 1990; D’Souza, 2004; Charter et al., 2002a,b; Gordon, 2002). It is therefore possible that a ‘green’ message could actually work to inhibit a brand’s growth through linking it to these limiting perceptions. This raises the question of whether ‘green’ brands are typically small share because the mainstream buyers are rejecting them on these grounds, or whether it is just that awareness of ‘green’ brands remains low, despite the alleged benefits they offer, and hence are only bought by a few people. This paper examines these questions through identifying the incidence of conscious rejection of ‘green’ brands on the basis of negative performance/quality, or niche perceptions. If the incidence of rejection for reasons linked to the brand’s ‘greenness’ is low, this suggests that marketers of ‘green’ brands are just suffering the effects of the challenging battle for buyer attention that is faced by all brands. As an extension to this issue, this paper also examines brands that are not linked to ‘green’ messages in categories where ‘green’ brands exist to assess whether brands run a risk by not responding to the groundswell in ‘green’ messaging. Not being ‘green’ leaves a brand potentially vulnerable to rejection on these grounds. The paper examines the incidence of rejection of non-green brands on the basis of lack of ‘greenness’ in categories where other brands are advertising this feature.