The impact of consumer skepticism on attitudes towards green advertising

The recent increase in environmental problems led the media, the state and politicians to inform the consumers. Thus, the level of involvement of consumers towards environment has increased and attention was paid to production conditions, product content, cruelty-freeness of a product, and recycling processes. The change in behavior, attitudes and demands of consumers has forced institutions to transform and "pretend" despite not having green products. Hence, consumers are skeptic of green products and advertisements. In this study, it was aimed to examine the effect of skepticism of consumers developed according to the level of environmental involvement on attitudes towards green advertisements. This study differs from the others in that it looks at skepticism from a multidimensional perspective, examines the relationship and effect, as well as discusses the possible consequences of the reasons of skepticism and negative attitudes. In the research, whether the consumer skepticism differed according to the involvement rate was determined by dividing the consumers' interest levels using the Elaboration Likelihood Model, and the effect of consumer skepticism on attitudes towards green advertisements was examined. The results shows that consumer skeptisicm differs with the level of involvement, people with low level of involvement have a lower level of skepticism and vice versa. Hereby, green advertisements cannot reach their target audience (consumers with high involvement) and cannot persuade them. Besides, it was seen that consumer skepticism also negatively affected the approach to green advertisements and negative attitudes might threaten the continuity of green products by eventually causing negative behaviors. Keywords: Environmental involvement, consumer skepticism, green advertisements, attitudes towards green advertisements