The Effects Of Green Appeals On Purchase Intention: The Moderating Effects Of Temporal Distance

Due to the deteriorating ecological environment Governments have draftedenvironmental policies regulate and supervise production and operating activities ofthe enterprise.Meanwhile, along with the enhancement of consumers awareness ofenvironmental protection, the green consumer market offers great opportunities.In thedual role of pressure and power, companies implement green marketing has becomean inevitable choice for its survival and development. How to narrow the"attitude-behavioral intention" gap that often occurs in the green consumption. Howto successfully promote the green purchase behavior is the key of greenmarketing.When the green product brands compete with each other to exploreChinese market，it has great significance in theory and practice to study the greenappeals preference of Chinese consumer to green products. The existing researchshows that gain frames are more impactful than loss frames. However this researchproposes that the effectiveness of green appeals of green products depends on thetemporal distance, corporate commitment type and reward. Using the college studentsas research subjects in this article, three experiments were designed, through theanalysis of variance,the main conclusions of the study include:(1)The loss appeals was more effective in the near future and gain appeals wasmore effective in the distant future.(2)When the green consequence is framed in proximal terms, loss framed greenappeals will lead to more positive purchase intentions than will gain framed greenappeals; When the green consequence is framed in distal terms, gain framed greenappeals will lead to more positive purchase intentions than will loss framed greenappeals.(3)When companies make a commitment to environmental protection, in thecontext of the recent future, consumers exhibit more positive sustainable intentions inresponse to loss appeals. In the context of the distant future, there were no significantdifferences between the effect of gain appeals and loss appeals. When companies make charitable commitments, the results consistent with study one.(4)When companies provide rewards for consumers to purchase green products,the gain appeals was more effective in the near future and loss appeals was moreeffective in the distant future. When the enterprise does not provide rewards, theresults are consistent with the study one.This research comes to a conclusion that the different situations of purchaseshould take into consider when analyzing the effectiveness of different appeal type. Itis valuable for a lot of marketing activities such as segmenting markets by consumers’mental traits，green product positioning strategy.