Role of color in environmental messages and claims: green can be both beneficial and misleading

With the growth of environmental concerns and increasing competition among firms, it is important for (social) marketers to create more effective environmental messages and claims. On the other hand, with the increase in number and types of environmental claims, consumer confusion regarding environmental claims has also increased. These changes suggest that it is increasingly important to understand how consumers interpret environmental claims and whether some elements of environmental claims can mislead consumers. In this dissertation I provide insights about these issues by studying the role of color in environmental messages and claims. On the basis of the processing fluency literature, I propose that consumers base their evaluations of environmental messages and claims not only on the information they receive, but also on how easy it is to process the information. Specifically, I propose that information about environmental products or behaviors is more fluently processed when it is presented with green, rather than other colors, because the color green matches the meaning of the target information. As a result, consumers will respond to environmental messages and claims more positively when these messages are presented with green than other colors. This effect has two important consequences.