Environmental Messages in Fashion Advertisements: Impact on Consumer Responses

Abstract

This study examined if consumers' environmental concerns influence their responses to fashion advertisements. Photographs of models wearing fashionable casual apparel, either in nature or non-nature settings, were combined with environmental or fashion advertising claims and were reproduced as slides. Independent variables were advertising message (environmental vs. non-environmental) and environmental concern (high vs. low); the dependent variable was the affective response to advertisements. Female college students (N = 120), enrolled in merchandising classes, recorded affective responses while viewing stimulus advertising slides. Environmentally-concerned subjects reacted more positively to fashion advertisements than did non-environmentally-concerned subjects, regardless of advertising message. As an interaction effect, environmentally-concerned subjects reacted more positively to the fashion advertisements with an environmental message; subjects who were not environmentally concerned reacted more positively to fashion advertisements without an environmental message. These findings demonstrate the importance of consumers' environmental concerns as a mediator of affective response to fashion advertisements, and suggest the need for further research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 68 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.