Association of “Green”: A Research on the Contingency Mechanism of the Effects of Green Product Packaging Color on Consumers’ Green Purchase Intention

Abstract

Packaging color, functioning as an indispensable tool used by enterprises for marketing and information transmission, would quickly and intuitively transmit product information to consumers and portray brand imagery. Enterprises that launch green products tend to redesign the packaging color of green products and are likely to replace the original packaging color with green, in order to highlight and transmit the environmental attribute of green products, and to create green brand positions. Green product packaging color is widely used as a kind of external visual cue by enterprises to give effective visual stimulation to consumers, to quickly transmit the attribute information of green products, and to enhance consumers’ green purchase intention. Furthermore, the functioning of green product packaging color has attracted the increasing attention of scholars in the field of green marketing. However, it is still a debatable issue whether green product packaging color plays an important role in improving consumers’ green purchase intention, which has aroused heated discussion among scholars. In fact, whether green product packaging color can effectively boost consumers’ purchase decisions as a kind of external visual cue may be largely influenced by consumers’ thinking style. In other words, in experiential thinking style, consumers tend to make decisions based on abstract and symbolic information, so the packaging color can have a significant impact on their green purchase intention; while in rational thinking style, consumers are more accustomed to making decisions after reasoning and analyzing the detailed information, and the packaging color as a peripheral cue cannot meet their needs. Thus, exploring how green product packaging color influences consumers’ green purchase intention in different thinking styles has become an important topic that needs both enterprises and academics to pay attention to. Herein, this study designs three experiments to explore the interactive effect of green product packaging color and thinking style on consumers’ green purchase intention, and to verify the mediating role of product evaluation and the moderating role of green product type. Experiment 1 suggests that green (vs. other colors) packaging triggers a stronger green purchase intention of consumers in experiential thinking style; whereas in rational thinking style, there is no significant difference between green and other colors. Experiment 2 shows that in experiential thinking style, green (vs. other colors) packaging can enhance consumers’ quality evaluation and environmental efficiency evaluation, which leads to a stronger green purchase intention. Experiment 3 demonstrates that when the green product is egoistic, the mediating effect of quality evaluation exists, while that of environmental efficiency evaluation does not; in the case of altruistic green products, the mediating effect of environmental efficiency evaluation exists, while that of quality evaluation does not. The conclusion of this study provides a new theoretical perspective and practical suggestions for further exploring the functioning of green product packaging color, effectively communicating green product information and reasonably formulating green packaging strategy.