Environmental communications often contain assertive commands (e.g., Greenpeace’s “Stop the Catastrophe”, Plant-For-The-Planet’s “Stop Talking and Start Planting” or Denver Water Campaign’s “Use only what you need”), even though prior research has repeatedly shown that gentler phrasing is usually more effective when seeking consumer compliance. In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Marketing, Dr. Amir Grinstein of the Department of Management at the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management and colleagues show that the persuasiveness of assertive language 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 personal conviction.
Grinstein, along with colleagues Dr. Ann Kronrod of MIT and Dr. Luc Wathieu of Georgetown University, examined this effect in three laboratory studies and one field experiment using Google Adwords. The key implication of their findings is that issue importance needs to be carefully assessed before the language of effective environmental campaigns can be selected.
Intuitively and based on past research, assertive requests are not effective, yielding low consumer compliance, explains Grinstein. Specifically in the context of “green” requests this should be the case as well. However, based on a study of slogans on ThinkSlogans.com, environmental slogans (e.g., for EarthDay, GoGreen, recycling) are in effect much more assertive than slogans for consumer goods (e.g., for cereal, computers, coffee). Grinstein and his colleagues found that while about 19% of the consumer goods products’ slogans were assertive, a staggering 57% of environmental slogans were assertive.
So, is assertive persuasion the most effective for environmental behavior? Or should environmentalists change the wordings of their advertising campaigns, and rely more on subtler, more suggestive language? Grinstein argues that when the issue promoted is important to the consumer – s/he will be expecting an assertive request and such a request will be more effective. When the issue at hand is less important – s/he will be expecting a non-assertive more suggestive request and that type of request will be more effective.
The research has real world implications for those in marketing, particularly those in green marketing.
Go Green! Should Environmental Messages be so Assertive.doc
