Sustainability, Vol. 10, Pages 3688: A Human-Centered Approach to Green Apparel Advertising: Decision Tree Predictive Modeling of Consumer Choice (Sustainability)

This study uses a human-centered approach to environmental ethics to examine which perceived factors in advertising predict consumers` intention to purchase `green`, or sustainably and ethically produced, apparel. We use eight different types of green apparel advertisements to build a decision tree model to determine the most influential factors that lead to future purchases of green apparel. We classify consumers` perceptions of green advertising as either humanistic, environmental, or product-related responses and propose a conceptual framework to outline the essential elements of an effective green advertising strategy. We use a sample of 829 US consumers from the period January 2015 to December 2017 in our empirical research. Our results show that four factors, namely, perception of the apparel`s quality, its uniqueness, caring, and nature connectedness, predict consumers` intention to purchase green apparel. Notably, the largest segment of consumers (36%), those who perceive high levels of apparel quality and caring in the advertising, are identified as the high-purchase group. Our findings could improve strategies in green apparel advertising by providing a new analytical approach to model consumers` behavioral intention to purchase green apparel.