The Moderating Effect of the Sense of Power on Green (NonGreen) Appeal in Promoting Sustainable Consumption

Yue Ni and Qiqi Cheng
Additional contact information
Yue Ni: College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 20, 1-18

Abstract: Sustainable behavior could be promoted via green advertising. Based on the agentic–communal model and the construal level theory, this paper explores the moderating effect of sense of power on the effectiveness of green and nongreen appeals through a random experiment. We expect that in a powerlessness mindset, a green appeal outperforms a nongreen appeal and that in a power mindset, a nongreen appeal outperforms a green appeal with a reduced effect size. As expected, the results show that low-power consumers are more likely to be persuaded when the appeal emphasizes the green attribute rather than the nongreen attribute, whereas the converse holds (not significantly) for high-power consumers. The results also show a significantly positive effect of green appeal on WOM intention. The moderated serial multiple-mediator model indicates that attitudes toward the ad and brand serially mediate the effectiveness of advertising, which is moderated by power. Overall, those results demonstrate that the success of an appeal can be affected by psychological sense of power. The practical implications are also discussed.

Keywords: power; green advertising; green appeal; persuasion; construal level theory; agentic–communal model; mindset (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/20/12983/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/20/12983/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:20:p:12983-:d:938878

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().