Green marketing

Ann Kronrod, Amir Grinstein, & Luc Wathieu

Go Green! Should Environmental Messages Be So Assertive?
Environmental communications often contain assertive commands, even though research in consumer behavior, psycholinguistics, and communications has repeatedly shown that gentler phrasing is more effective when seeking consumer compliance. This article shows that the persuasiveness of assertivelanguage depends on the perceived importance of the issue at hand: Recipients respond better to pushy requests in domains that they view as important, but they need more suggestive appeals when they lack initial conviction. The authors examine this effect in three laboratory studies and one field experiment using Google AdWords. Their findings refer to various environmental contexts (i.e.,economizing water, recycling plastic containers, reducing air and sea pollution). The key implication of these findings is that issue importance needs to be carefully assessed (or affected) before the language of effective environmental campaigns can be selected. Keywords: persuasion, assertive language, issue importance, environmental marketing, demarketing, social marketing

he protection anddevelopment of environmental resources and social responsibility is an area of growing importance for consumers, businesses, governments, and the society at large (e.g., Banerjee, Iyer, and Kashyap 2003; Grinstein and Nisan 2009; Menon and Menon 1997; Peattie and Peattie 2009). However, not everyone shares this view, and for many individuals or groups, environmental protection is not as important (e.g.,Lord 1994). Persuading consumers to act in an environmentally/socially responsible manner is a particularly challenging task because the beneficiary of proenvironmental/social behavior is not always directly the consumer him- or herself but often society, other consumers, or the planet. Many changes in consumption habits would be desirable from an environmental/social point of view, but the immediateincentives for consumers to change their behavior are often weak or nonexistent (Osterhus 1997; Pieters et al. 1998). Strikingly, many environment-/social-related issues are being forcefully promoted through assertive slogans and

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Ann Kronrod is a postdoctoral fellow, Marketing Group, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (e-mail: kronrod@mit.edu). Amir Grinsteinis Assistant Professor of Marketing, Guilford Glazer School of Business and Management, BenGurion University of the Negev (e-mail: gramir@bgu.ac.il). Luc Wathieu is Associate Professor of Marketing, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University (e-mail: lw324@georgetown.edu). The authors acknowledge constructive comments from Maria Aladjem, David Katz, Debora Thompson, Aviv Shoham, as wellas seminar participants at Sloan School of Management, Aston Business School, VU University Amsterdam, Tel-Aviv University, and Haifa University. They are also grateful to the three anonymous JM reviewers for their helpful comments. The research project was supported by a grant from the Israel Foundations Trustees (2011–2013). This article was accepted under Ajay K. Kohli’s editorship.messages, such as the Ad Council’s “Only YOU can prevent forest fires”; Greenpeace’s “Stop the catastrophe”; Plant for the Planet’s “Stop talking. Start planting”; and Denver Water’s campaign “Use only what you need.” An assertive request is one that uses the imperative form, such as “do,” “go,” and so forth, or one that leaves no option for refusal, such as “you must go” (Brown and Levinson 1987;Vanderveken 1990). To document this phenomenon, we examined the assertiveness of real slogans posted at www.ThinkSlogans.com. Specifically, we examined all posted environmental slogans (e.g., for EarthDay, GoGreen, recycling; N = 78) versus a randomly selected sample of slogans for consumer goods such as cereal, computers, and coffee (N = 187). We found that while approximately 19% of the consumer goods...