Marketing has been examining consumer’s changing attitudes towards green products and marketing. Here’s a story from Advertising Age that provides some insight on the American side of this issue.
Economic concerns have shifted focus away from the environment
According to a new report from GfK, consumers’ concern about environmental marketing claims have declined over the past few years, as has their skepticism about greenwashing.
The 2011 version of the Green Gauge Report, based on surveys of more than 2,000 respondents between June 9 and July 5, found only 33% said the environment is “very serious and should be a priority for everyone” this year, down from 39% last year and 46% in 2007. At the same time, 41% of people agreed with the statement “first comes economic security, then we can worry about environmental problems,” up 13 points from 2007, according to GfK.
That attitude filters down to reported purchase behavior. Only 24% of respondents this year said they avoid products that aren’t environmentally responsible, down 6 percentage points from 2008. Only 30% of people this year said they’d bought a “green” or environmentally responsible version of a product in the past two months, down from a high of 36% in 2008.
Yet there was a trend toward “simple and practical steps,” as GfK puts it, including 63% who say they now use tap water instead of bottled water (up 5 points from 2008) and 39% who say they use reusable shopping bags, up 11 points over the same period.
Despite people being less responsive to environmental ad claims, they seem to believe them more often. The Green Gauge report found 39% of people say business claims about the environment aren’t accurate, substantially lower than the 48% who believed that three years ago. And 37% of respondents this year said business and industry are fulfilling their responsibility to the environment, up 8 points from 2007.
Despite slippage in support for the environment in recent years, however, people are still more supportive than they were in 2002 or 1990, said Timothy Kenyon, director of the Green Gauge study for GfK.
There’s more! To read the full article in Advertising Age, click here.
