An Investigation Of The Effects Of Consumers’ Environmental Attitudes On Perceptions Of Green Ads And Attitudes Toward The Brand

Recently, the continued rise of green consumerism has forced companies to change their marketing strategies toward the natural environment. Today, businesses are at the decision point between modifying their processes or resisting transition and practicing manipulative techniques in presenting an environmentally favorable image. Some greenwashing practices appear to be on the rise and already have seen as a global problem. Consumer skepticism and deficiency of trust towards green claims looks as a threat not only for green product markets but also for all advertising industry, trusted firms, and initiatives. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to determine the effects of consumers’ environmental attitudes on the perceptions of green ads, believability of green claims in printed ads and attitudes toward the brand. For this purpose, survey method was used to gather the data from the two national universities students in Turkey. The 362 usable questionnaires were received from the voluntarily participated students with in the research. During the analysis process, data was analyzed via Partial Least Square Path Modeling (PLS-PM) analysis method. The findings of this research reveal that while environmental concern and perceived effectiveness level had a positive impact on skepticism toward green claims in the ad, consumers did not notice the greenwashing claims of advertisements. Furthermore, analysis results indicate that while skepticism toward green ad had a negative impact on advertising believability, in the following step, believability of ad had a positive impact on attitude toward the brand or company. These findings indicate that students did not pay attention to the green claims in ads when evaluating to ad believability. Finally, regardless of whether or not companies use deceptive green claims in advertising, the advertising credibility may lead to positive attitude toward the brand or company.