Michelle Hom

The Impact of Recent Fire Awareness on Sustainable Advertisements' Effectiveness

Started Nov. 1, 2021

Abstract or project description

In a phenomenon, local warming, people’s awareness of warmer daily temperatures increases their perception or belief that global warming is occurring (Druckman & Shafranek, 2017). Also, experiencing severe events, like flooding and air pollution, has been linked to affect one’s attitude towards climate change and their pro-environmental values (Farrokhi et al., 2020; Spence et al., 2011; Whitmarsh, 2008).
Thus, as more consumers are willing to pay for environmentally friendly products (Nielson Global Corporate Sustainability Report, 2015; Eurobarometer 2011), we hope to see if this local warming effect could be applied to sustainable advertisements and the recent California wildfires. For this research, through an online survey, we attempt to observe differences in effectiveness of positive emotional and informational appeals of sustainable-related and filler neutral advertisements. One group is aware of the fires before evaluating the advertisements, while another group is not aware of the recent fires. We use a mixed experimental design to investigate causality amongst our control and treated groups, showing the same variety of advertisements to each subject. We then analyzed the data gathered from the survey to observe how the treatment impacted the students’ experience with the advertisements.