Effect of Advertising Type on Purchase Intention of Eco-friendly Outdoor Fashion Products

Abstract

Outdoor apparel companies have actively produced products using environmentally friendly materials and the scale of this market has expanded annually in South Korea. In this respect, increasing numbers of outdoor apparel companies modify their product advertisements and marketing strategies to incorporate environmentally friendly practices (Fashionbiz, 2013). However, the research conducted into eco-friendly advertising in relation to outdoor fashion product does not derive consistent results. From this point, more research should be conducted to investigate the effect of advertisement type in eco-friendly outdoor fashion products.

The aim of this research is to study the effect of advertising type on purchase intention in the eco-friendly outdoor fashion product market. To achieve this aim, the most effective advertising types in the eco-friendly outdoor advertisement were examined using an online questionnaire. Then, the effect of advertisement type on purchase intention was measured. The delivery level of eco-friendly message, advertising attitude, product attitude, purchase intention were adopted as the variables in this experiment.

To conduct this research, a questionnaire was used to measure the delivery level of eco-friendly message, advertising attitude, product attitude, purchase intention, and respondents information using 7-Likert scale and multiple choice questions. Three different advertising types including information advertisement, medium information plus imagery advertisement, and imagery advertisement were introduced as the stimulus in this study and they were reconfigured based on a real online outdoor advertisement. Data was collected from the online hiker community called Sansu and 102 samples were used in this experiment.

The result of the paired t-test represents that a significance was found between the delivery level of eco-friendly message and different advertising type. In addition, the result of regression analysis referred that the delivery levels of eco-messages affect to the product attitude and purchase intention. However, the result of ANOVA indicated that consumers advertising attitude towards the eco-friendly outdoor advertisement does not affect their product attitude.

Delivery level of the eco-friendly message is considered as a core factor to decide the effect of the eco-friendly outdoor advertisement. Therefore, advertisers should make a great effort to fully deliver eco-friendly message related to the advertised product and feature. Since medium information plus and imagery advertisement is found as the most effective advertisement, a clear information related to the advertised product with picture or lined information that can help to increase consumers understanding in eco-message should be included to create the effective advertisement of the eco-friendly outdoor fashion product.

This study has meaningful implications to both the industry and consumer. The result of the effective advertising type on purchase intention in terms of the eco-friendly outdoor fashion product can provide a clear advertising strategy to the outdoor apparel manufacturing company. Also, advertising with eco-friendly theme helps them to fulfill the firms social responsibility and an ethical image of the company can be built. At the same time, consumers have an opportunity to understand the eco-friendly outdoor product, so that their environmental conscious could be enhanced.