The effect of the exposure of greenly advertised product and the environmental issues awareness

to the consumer’s buying intention in Semarang

1.1 background

in this modern era, the world of advertisement has been improving. Along with enormous

types of advertisement, the most compelling one that we can retract is the green advertisement.

The green advertisement is described as advertising a product as an environmentally friendly to

the consumer (Dahl, 2010.). Furthermore, the term of ‘environmental issue’ has become the

greatest topic of all time, involving everyone from young to adults to participate for the impact

that will happen in no time, and climate change is the most obvious among others (Huang &

Darmayanti, 2014). As an effort of participation to this problem, considerable amount of

companies has been participating to share the awareness by making an advertisement, creating

environmentally friendly product, etc. On the other side, there are also several companies that

tries to use this opportunity as their strategy to gain the advantages by conflicting the meaning of

environmentally friendly product advertising and green advertising to the consumer which in

result would hinder the collaborative effort to share the intended message of ‘green campaign’.

In recent years, advertising has become the most powerful method to delivering messages to

public (Huang & Darmayanti, 2014). And this, in result, will escalate the number of green ads as

the way of corporation involves in the market to be seen as environmentally friendly.

However, focusing our scope to the list of countries that contributes the largest total of

plastic waste, Indonesia is still placed at the 2nd, with more than 3.20 million metric tons

produced annually, one step behind China that contributes around 8.80 million metric tons each
year (Statista, 2019). Moreover, another data from (IQAir, 2019) also states that based on the air

pollution, Indonesia is ranked at 11th with 42,01 µg/m

3 ,
indicates that the air pollution is

unhealthy for groups that have higher sensitivity compared with others. This indicates that

the there is a gap between the awareness of environmental issues from the public and the

questionable effect from the green ads that has been engaged with the society as a mass

communication media from the company to provides people an eco-friendly choice of

product.

1.2 Problem Statement

Green advertisement is the advertisement that is intended to propose the possible

consumers or people to be aware to the environmental issues, simultaneously promotes the

product as the symbol of effort to the environmental change (Suki, 2013). Ideally, since there are

variety of companies and organizations that promote green advertisement, people should be

aware to the current environmental condition and started to consume and shift their generic

product to the more environmentally friendly one.

Unfortunately, the impact of green advertisement has not yet shown significant result.

People tend to still consume such generic product, especially the common plastic product that

takes long period of time to be recycled.

The reasons for the consumers preference are still yet unanswered. As I mentioned above, some

research states that green advertised product does affects consumer’s preference on which

product they might purchase.

1.3 objective
 ³Therefore, the aim of this research is to observe the impact of green advertisement and

people awareness on the current environmental issues to consumer’s types of product preference.

the scope of this research will be limited in the region of Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia and

will be conducted through online surveys regarding to the issues being observed.

References:
Dahl, R. (2010). Greenwashing: Do You Know What You're Buying?, 118 Envtl. Health Persp.

A, 246.

IQ Air AirVisual, (2019, September 23) “Jakarta Air Quality Index (AQI) and Indonesia Air

Pollution.” www.airvisual.com/indonesia/jakarta.

Pratiwi, N.P.D.K. & Sulhaini, Sulhaini & Rinuastuti, B.H.. (2018). THE EFFECT OF

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE, GREEN ADVERTISING AND ENVIRONMENTAL

ATTITUDE TOWARD GREEN PURCHASE INTENTION. Russian Journal of Agricultural

and Socio-Economic Sciences. 78. 95-105. 10.18551/rjoas.2018-06.10.

Mohd Suki, Norazah. (2013). Green awareness effects on consumers' purchasing decision: Some

insights from Malaysia. International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies. 9. 49-63.