“This product is ecological!”: An examination of consumers’ reactions to unsubstantiated marketing claims

Marketers are often claiming that productsare “green”, “organic”,and“ecological” without backing thisup with official,certifying labels or by other evidence. The effects of this practice were examined in the present study for ingestible products (water and beer) and non-ingestible products (sunglasses and boots) with a set of between-subjects experiments.The presence versus the absence of an (unsubstantiated) ecological claim was the manipulated factor. The purpose wasto examine the impactof ecological claimsonbeliefs that a product is indeed ecological, on beliefs about related product attributes (environmental friendliness, healthiness, and naturalness), and on overall product evaluations in terms of the attitude towards the product. The main finding, in each experiment, was that the participants believedto a greater extent that a product is ecological when this isclaimed, thus showingthat beliefs can be influenced easily.