Relevanta, unika och alldeles lagom gröna

Sammanfattning: The business world has been through an extreme transformation over the past decades, which have forced companies to look at themselves from a new point of view. Consumers have a complete new set of ways to gather information and are more motivated than ever to make sustainable consumption choices. This change of attitudes among consumers has made companies focus on other things than price versus quality. A whole new concept has been brought up to questioning: environmentalism. Consumers demand more organically produced products. These consumers however are hard to get a grip on. For certain product categories these new organically produced products are greatly appreciated by the consumers and the market shares are very high. Unfortunately in some product categories organic alternatives reach extremely low shares of the market and are therefore very costly for the companies. The main method for companies to affect consumers' behaviors is through marketing. It is therefore very relevant for companies to learn better when to use green marketing for different types of product categories in order to make their marketing strategies successful. Limited research has focused on what the moderators of this might be and how marketers can better estimate the success of a certain organic product. This thesis is doing just that. We are launching a completely new predictor of how effective advertisement of organic products will be in terms of attitude formation, intentions and other evaluations. We find that depending on consumers' environmental associations to a certain product category, green marketing will have different outcomes. One effect is notably predominant. A product category should not have too strong nor too weak environmental associations to gain the best effects of green marketing. We generally find that the best product categories for green marketing are the ones that have medium strong environmental associations. We are investigating this matter using a quantitative method with six different product categories within the food industry.