Extensive choices and options of the products provided by the companies can cause serious confusions to the consumers rather than giving them the enjoyments of purchasing. The consumer confusions interrupt the rational purchase processes and lead to the purchase failures. Since the consumer confusions have direct impacts on the economic performances of the companies, the confusion issue has drawn much of the marketer’s attention and has been considered as a critical one. In recent years, as more and more consumers have been particularly concerned about the purchase of environment-friendly products, the confusion issue with regard to eco-labelling began to emerge. It is mainly due to the floods of environment-friendly products and all sorts of related eco-labelling and green claims in the market. Many companies use the words like ‘eco-’, ‘green’, ‘natural’ and so on thoughtlessly in order to appeal to the environmental needs of consumers without providing any clear evidences for the appropriateness of the use of the terminologies. Also flourishing of various eco-labels that have no clear meaning adds to the consumer confusions. These phenomena make the consumers think of eco-labels only as a marketing means to induce more purchases and lead to the great distrust of product’s environmental performances.
Thus, the purpose of the present study is to examine the consumer confusions of eco-labelling and to suggest some solutions to alleviate the confusion problem. Based upon the existing research, we categorized the confusions of eco-labelling into three dimensions : the similarity confusion, the overload confusion, and the ambiguity confusion. This study attempts to investigate empirically the mediating effects of negative emotion on the relationship between consumer confusions of eco-labelling and consumer’s responses.
We proposed the hypotheses that three dimensions of confusions of Eco-labelling have impacts on the negative emotion, and then the negative emotion, in turn, has impact on the negative word-of-mouth, distrust and dissatisfaction. And also, we proposed the hypotheses that consumer’s attribution propensity has moderating effects on the relationship between consumer confusions and negative emotion.
This study examined the eco-labelling confusion problems for the two environmental-friendly product categories, i.e., food and dishwashing detergent, the former having more eco-labels than the latter. The models were tested and the results were compared for each product category and then for the combined data.
The questionnaire surveys were targeted for the consumers who had purchasing experiences for both the environmental-friendly foods and environmental-friendly detergents. A confirmatory factor analysis using SPSS 20.0 was performed as a primary method of statistical analysis for testing reliability and validity of the scales. SEM(Structural Equation Model) of LISREL 8.70 was used to test the hypotheses.
The fit statistics of all analyses indicated the satisfactory fits between the models and the data.
The results of the structural analyses indicated that the three dimensions of confusions behave differently in their linkage with the negative emotion. The results for the environmental-friendly foods showed that three dimensions of confusions had impacts on the negative consequence variables(word-of-mouth, distrust and dissatisfaction) through mediation of negative emotion. Also, the less the consumer’s internal attribution, there seemed to be a positive relationship between similarity confusion and negative emotion.
On the other hand, the results for the environmental-friendly dishwashing detergent revealed that only the ambiguity confusion among the three dimensions of confusions had impacts on the negative consequence variables through mediation of negative emotion. Also, the consumer’s attribution had no moderating effects on the relationship between confusions and negative emotion.
Eco-labelling systems having too many ambiguous and similar eco-labels are blamed for creating confusions among the consumers and undermine the credibility of the eco-labelling systems. Therefore the eco-labelling systems need to be consolidated and simplified to reduce the confusion problems caused by the proliferation of similar and ambiguous eco-labelling. Since highly technical and specialized types of eco-labelling also seemed to generate confusions, we need to put more efforts to reduce this kind of ambiguity confusion. In order to reduce such ambiguity confusion we can use relatively simple and clear labels and/or provide appropriate green information to consumers through variety of media and salesperson training. These efforts will help consumers to improve the quality of their purchase decisions and provide more pleasant purchase environments to them.