An international team, including from the University Göttingen, Germany, found that provoking certain emotions increases customers’ willingness to pay for sustainable food, but the effect weakens after a very short time, according to a study published in the journal Q Open.
Food production has social and ecological costs that impact both current and future generations globally. For example, cocoa plantations are often associated with child labour and deforestation and supermarkets display chocolate bars clearly labelled as sustainable. However, their market share remains low compared to other products. To increase the consumption of sustainable products, social media is using emotive messages.
The researchers wanted to assess whether emotional content positively affects the purchasing behavior of sustainable products. The team divided over 2,000 participants into four groups, which were shown different social media posts about cocoa cultivation. The videos were either factual with information about deforestation or child labour or contained strong emotional elements to share the same information.
The results show that creating emotions increases the willingness to pay for sustainable chocolate, but only in the short term. Participants who watched emotional content were more likely to purchase sustainable chocolate. “This effect is due, in particular, to negative emotions such as fear, anger or sadness, which are triggered by images of child labour or deforestation,” explained lead author Dr Liza von Grafenstein at the research institute IDinsight in New Delhi. However, the effect decreased significantly after two weeks. The emotional reaction diminished, and eventually, participants who watched emotional content considered sustainability claims even lower than those who only received factual information.
“The results suggest that emotional content in social media campaigns can be an effective way to promote sustainable consumption in the short term,” explains Dr Sarah Iweala, Research Associate at Göttingen University’s Marketing for Food and Agricultural Products research group. “However, the timing of the campaigns must be strategically chosen to maximize their influence on real purchasing decisions,” added Dr. Anette Ruml, German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg.
“Our results also show, however, that purely factual information is at least as effective, especially in the medium-term,” concluded Dr Stefan Pahl of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization in Vienna.
Liza von Grafenstein, Sarah Iweala, Stefan Pahl, Anette Ruml, Emotional priming for sustainable consumption? The effects of social media content on the valuation of chocolate, Q Open, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2025, qoaf003, https://doi.org/10.1093/qopen/qoaf003