The effects of environmental certification and involvement on advertising effectiveness in an elaboration likelihood model framework

Public opinion polls throughout the 1990s have shown that public support for environmental protection and preservation is quite high. In response to this surging environmental interest, corporations have begun to introduce green products, i.e., products with a more benign environmental impact than comparable products, in great numbers. Consumer skepticism about the truthfulness of green claims associated with these green products is, however, considerable. In response, a number of third party environmental certification programs begun by governments and private corporations have sought to counter this skepticism by providing independent evaluation of advertising and labeling environmental claims. Whether consumers respond to advertisements in a different manner when environmental claims within ads are certified by an independent third-party is unknown. Because the forest products industry has been at the forefront of the development and implementation of environmental certification programs and because the forest products industry's environmental image is poor, this research project will study the effects of environmental certification for forest products.;Expectations for consumer responses are developed within an elaboration likelihood model (ELM) framework which focuses on cognitive responses. Respondents evaluated ads for a wood and for a paper forest product that contained no environmental claims, uncertified environmental claims, environmental claims certified by a fictitious certifying agency and environmental claims certified by an actual certifying organization. Advertising effectiveness was assessed through the dependent variables of the perceived believability of the ad, judgments of the expertise and trustworthiness of the sources of environmental information, attitudes toward the ad, the advertiser and the brand being advertised, and intentions or interest in purchasing the product. Because involvement is a key factor in explaining responses to persuasive communications in the ELM framework, both issue involvement and product involvement were used as covariates in the analysis of variance. The treatments did not produce statistically significant results in the MANOVA analysis. The addition of product and issue involvement improved both the significance level and power of the analysis, but the results were not statistically significant.