Abstract
In response to the negative impact of consumption on ecological sustainability, green marketing (GM) messages have become increasingly common. In GM ad messages, brands encourage purchases of products that respect the environment and the limited capacity of resources aiming to drive the share of sustainable products in consumers’ baskets (White et al. 2019). However, reducing consumption overall is more effective at reducing environmental pollution and saving natural resources (Benton 2015). Through claims like “Buy Less, Demand More” (Patagonia 2021) brands have begun to practice green demarketing (GDM). GDM is an extension of demarketing that discourages demand for products for the sake of the environment. GDM thus contradicts brand activities that aim to increase sales (Bruce et al. 2012). Compared to GM, GDM is a more radical approach in the sense that companies no longer promote their green products, but rather promote a general reduction of consumption. Due to the unconventional character of GDM ad messages, it is important to investigate consumer’s responses and the underlying mechanisms of GDM ad processing. Also, engaging in GDM is likely to become increasingly interesting for brands that target environmentally conscious consumers. The present study adds to existing research (e.g., Armstrong et al. 2015, Reich et al. 2016) by examining the impact of GDM messages on attitudes toward the ad. Moreover, we shed light on the processing of GMD messages. We propose two opposing mechanisms that affect consumer’s attitudes towards a GDM ad message. Since social and environmental business practices have the potential to entail positive consumer responses (e.g., Reich et al. 2016; Luo and Bhattacharya 2006; Olsen et al. 2014), we suggest that due to their focus on sustainability, attitudes toward GDM ad messages are more positive compared to traditional marketing (TM) ad messages, but not different from GM ad messages. While GDM ad messages might profit from their sustainability focus, attitudes toward GDM ad messages are likely to be compromised by low processing fluency and increased skepticism. As GDM ad messages are considered to be unconventional, they are likely to be processed less fluently than TM and GM ad messages, evoking higher levels of consumer skepticism and thus results in lower levels of attitudes towards the ad. Results showed that attitudes toward sustainable ad messages were significantly higher than attitudes toward the non-sustainable ad message. Additionally, results revealed a positive and significant direct effect of GDM ad message on attitudes toward the ad and a negative significant indirect effect mediated serially by processing fluency and skepticism on attitudes toward the ad. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.