Emotional Marketing for Sustainable Consumption: Research Test Social Media Post Effective Chocolate Evaluation

Does evoking certain emotions increase your desire to pay for sustainedly produced food? Social media often uses emotional messages to influence users’ consumer behavior. An international team of researchers, including the University of Goettingen, investigated the short- and medium-term effects of such content on the willingness to pay for bars of chocolate. They found that in the short term, evoking certain emotions increases motivation to pay, but after a very short period of time the effect fades. The results can be found in the Journal Q Open.

Food and its production have social and ecological costs that affect both current and future generations worldwide. For example, cocoa cultivation is often associated with child labour and deforestation. supermarket shelves display chocolate bars labeled with a promise of sustainably sourced cocoa. However, market share remains relatively low. Social media is increasingly using emotional messages to promote more sustainable consumption.

Therefore, researchers investigated whether emotional content had a positive effect on purchasing behavior. To do this, the team randomly split over 2,000 participants into four groups. They showed various social media posts about cocoa cultivation in the form of videos, with information about deforestation and child labour or the same information, reinforced with emotional elements.

This study shows that evoking emotions increases motivation to pay for sustainable chocolate in the short term. Participants faced with emotional content were happy to spend more money on chocolate on sustainability labels or promises.

“This effect is especially due to negative emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness caused by images of child labour and deforestation,” explains Dr. Lisa von Grafenstein at Idisett, a research institute in New Delhi. However, the effect was significantly weakened within two weeks. The emotional response was reduced, and after some time, participants who saw the emotional content rated their claims of sustainable labeling and sustainability than those who received factual information alone.

“The results suggest that the emotional content of social media campaigns is an effective way to promote sustainable consumption in the short term,” explains Dr. Sarah Iweala, research associate in marketing for the Food and Agricultural Products Research Group at Göttingen University. “However, we need to select the timing of our campaigns strategically to maximize the impact on actual purchase decisions,” adds Dr. Annette Raml of the German Institute for Global and Regional Studies in Hamburg.

“However, our results also show that purely factual information is at least effective, especially in the medium term,” emphasizes Dr. Stephen Paarl, of the United Nations Industrial Development Agency in Vienna.