Shaping minds to increase ecological consumption?

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into Swedish consumers' attitudes and behavior regarding their purchasing of ecological food and household products. We also aim to investigate if, and how, negative goal framing can affect consumers in their purchase behavior and evaluation of these products. We used a quantitative method for data collection. The methodology consisted of a pre-study using an online questionnaire with 20 respondents, as well as a questionnaire with an experiment through an online questionnaire with 152 respondents. The framing was designed with either a health focus, or environment focus, to investigate whether any differences occurred. Using t-value analysis, we examined whether there are statistically significant differences with regards to the perception of price, quality, health risk and environmental risk depending on use or absence of ethical framing. Our findings show that using negative goal framing does have an effect on consumers, but we conclude that the effect does not depend on what is being communicated; health or environment issues. Our findings point to a similarity with previous observations proposing that the reason for why ethical framing has an effect is the lack of information among consumers related to ethical issues, and suggest that companies possibly can use negative framing as a tool for more effective market communication of ecological products.