Green Apparel Advertising and Decision Tree

What is it about?

This study uses a human-centered approach to environmental ethics to examine which perceived factors in advertising predict consumers’ intention to purchase “green”, or sustainably and ethically produced, apparel. We use eight different types of green apparel advertisements to build a decision tree model to determine the most influential factors that lead to future purchases of green apparel. We classify consumers’ perceptions of green advertising as either humanistic, environmental, or product-related responses and propose a conceptual framework to outline the essential elements of an effective green advertising strategy. We use a sample of 829 US consumers from the period January 2015 to December 2017 in our empirical research. Our results show that four factors, namely, perception of the apparel’s quality, its uniqueness, caring, and nature connectedness, predict consumers’ intention to purchase green apparel. Notably, the largest segment of consumers (36%), those who perceive high levels of apparel quality and caring in the advertising, are identified as the high-purchase group. Our findings could improve strategies in green apparel advertising by providing a new analytical approach to model consumers’ behavioral intention to purchase green apparel.

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Why is it important?

Based on our decision tree analysis, an important rule in advertising green apparel should be to ensure effective communication to attain consumers’ favorable perceptions of (i) apparel quality, (ii) caring, and (iii) apparel uniqueness. Remarkably, the largest segment of consumers (36%), those who perceive greater levels of apparel quality and caring, are identified as a high-purchase group. This result means that the perception of apparel quality and the feeling of caring in green apparel advertising are the most influential factors in predicting high purchase intent. Furthermore, a low level of perceived apparel uniqueness will most likely lead to nonpurchase of green apparel in response to an advertisement. While emphasizing that social initiatives of green advertising can foster sustainable consumption, consumer-centric product attributes also play a prominent role in green apparel purchasing. For an effective advertising strategy, orchestrating these product-related factors concurrently with the welfare of others will determine marketers’ success in advertising green apparel. Our study endeavors to enhance marketers’ strategies for advertising green apparel by providing a new analytical method for modeling consumer behavior in response to green apparel advertising. We hope that this study provides additional insight into how marketers can increase consumers’ adoption of green apparel and to better understand their choices of sustainable consumption.