Sustainable messaging strategies and consumer food waste: The congruence effect between message framing and state anxiety

Food waste has emerged as a significant global concern, exacerbated by the consistent rise in waste despite numerous attempts to mitigate it. As crucial information disseminators, food retailers and restaurants possess the potential to significantly impact consumers' food-saving behavior through meticulous design and effective dissemination of informational messaging strategies. Based on the Limited Capacity model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing, this study attempts to develop a conceptual model to assess the impact of message framing strategies on consumers' food saving intention, considering their varying levels of state anxiety. Three experiments were conducted to verify the hypotheses. The results revealed a matching effect between message framing and state anxiety on food savings. When businesses utilize sustainable advertisements to encourage food savings, approach-framed messages are more effective among consumers with heightened state anxiety, whereas avoidance framing demonstrates superior effectiveness among those with lower levels of state anxiety. Additionally, evaluative self-reactions mediate these matching effects, and memory efficacy plays a significant moderating role. The findings facilitate marketers in the proper employment of targeted message framing strategies based on consumers' varying levels of anxiety to prevent food waste.