The effects of emotional appeals on visual behavior in the context of green advertisements: An exploratory eye-tracking study

Eco-labels and eco-fact claims are marketing tactics that inform consumers that a product or service was developed in an ecologically responsible manner. Corporations use eco-labels to highlight their commitment to sustainability and demonstrate corporate social responsibility by serving a green cause. The primary objective of this research is to examine how positive and negative emotional appeals when used in advertisements that promote environment-friendly products influence the visual behavior of users. For this purpose, a total of six advertising messages were used, three of which were intended to evoke negative emotions (fear, guilt, disgust) and three to elicit positive emotions through associated messages (environmental benefits, personal benefits, and societal benefits). All advertising messages featured the same environmentally friendly product, eco-labels, a main illustration, and a textual message that enforced the visual appeal. A total of 75 people participated in the eye-tracking experiment that was conducted. The analysis of the collected data concluded that the two categories of ads exhibit fundamental differences in terms of visual behavior. In the case of negative emotional appeals, visual attention was given to the appeal AOIs displaying an illustration provoking fear, guilt, or disgust (more fixations, longer fixation durations, and lower TFFs). In the case of positive emotional appeals, participants focused more on textual AOIs describing environmental priorities and product information.


INTRODUCTION
Advertising is an important component of the promotional side of the marketing mix, and it has a substantial influence on customer attitudes and decision-making processes [1][2][3].The main goal of marketing is to convince prospective consumers to buy a good or service.In order to reach a certain group of people, marketers can engage their target market by employing a variety of strategies, such as psychographic, demographic, and geographic targeting [2][3][4].Advertising helps consumers recognize and recall brands, and it may be used to convey crucial product details like features and advantages.This is particularly true for brand-new products since customers might not be familiar with the company or its offerings [2][3][4].
The practice of selling goods and services in a way that is sustainable and kind to the environment is referred to as "green marketing, " also known as "sustainable marketing" or "eco-marketing" [3,5,6].The purpose of green marketing is to provide products and services that satisfy the demands of customers and businesses, while safeguarding the environment [3,4,6].This entails promoting goods that employ sustainable production methods, ecologically friendly resources, and have a minimal environmental impact.Promoting sustainable and responsible corporate practices, such as limiting fuel usage and assisting with green projects, is another aspect of green marketing [6][7][8].In order to effectively promote green products and services, it's important to comprehend customer attitudes and buying patterns.This may involve determining both the preferences and motives of consumers, as well as any impediments that could potentially prevent individuals from adopting environmentally friendly alternatives [6,9,10].
The objective of this paper is to investigate how emotional appeals of displayed advertising messages influence the way consumers perceive eco-labels of environmentally friendly products on a cognitive and behavioural level.To this end, an eye-tracking experiment was designed to compare how positive and negative emotional appeals affect users' visual behavior.The rest of this paper is organized as follows.The second section provides the relevant literature review on green consumer behavior, the influence of emotional appeals on green advertisements and eco-labels.The third section outlines the eye-tracking experiment's methodology, as well as the design of the advertisements utilized in the context of the research and the purpose they serve.The fourth section presents and discusses the experimental results obtained from the eye-tracking data.Section five summarizes the main findings and outlines future recommendations for research.

RELATED WORK
The necessity for environmental conservation and preservation is one of the most significant challenges confronting humanity, which motivates today's people to incorporate green alternatives into their daily routines.With the ultimate objective of eliminating or mitigating negative environmental implications, green or sustainable marketing encourages the usage of products or services to suit the demands of customers while constantly ensuring environmental awareness [2,4,6].In order to establish sustainable practices within contemporary enterprises and guarantee ethical relationships with consumers, environmentally friendly solutions are increasingly receiving the priority and attentiveness of modern marketers and businesses [3,6].
While green marketing focuses on sustainability and long-term success through ethical practices, traditional marketing still provides valuable insights into customer needs and desires by understanding what drives them to buy certain items or services from a specific business over others [2,3,5].Ajzen's theory of planned behavior (TPB) claims that an individual's behavior is governed by his attitude towards the behavior, perceived social pressure to engage in the behavior, and perceived control over their capacity to engage in the behavior [11].This theory may be utilized in the context of green marketing to explain why customers could possibly not choose to purchase environmentally friendly products and what variables could influence their decision-making process [12][13][14][15].Ajzen's theory of planned behavior is a psychological model that examines how attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control determine an individual's intentions and consequent behavioural patterns [11,12,16].
Emotional appeal has long been deployed by advertising designers as a major tactic for attracting attention and providing information in each advertising message [17,18].The intention of developing an identifiable commercial illustration or message, is to elicit specific emotions that customers can identify with the marketed merchandise [19,20].In this approach, companies can combine positive or negative emotions to reflect the value they want to place on their products or services, recalling the appropriate feeling in each situation (humor, passion, empathy, guilt etc.) [19][20][21][22][23].
In broader terms, the influence of emotional advertising is inversely proportional to its value.Positive emotional advertising outperforms negative emotional advertising [24,25].Numerous studies, however, indicate that portraying negative emotions in a marketing message can lead to positive ad evaluations, product attitudes, and other outcomes [24,25].Advertising that appeals to negative emotions can serve as a powerful tool for attracting customers and emphasizing the possible repercussions of forgoing a good or service.Furthermore, negative emotions can be used to create a sense of urgency, such as when viewing an advertisement for a flash (limited time) sale [26][27][28].Nevertheless, it's crucial to be aware of potential ethical issues and make sure that advertising doesn't unethically manipulate or exploit consumers' emotions [26][27][28][29][30].
Green products and services are intended to maximize value for consumers while minimizing adverse environmental effects [3,6].Ecolabels are labels that are placed on products to demonstrate the environmental benefits associated with their manufacturing and consumption, such as biodegradability or renewable energy [31][32][33][34].They provide information to raise awareness regarding green products, services, and they could potentially aid individuals to make wiser purchasing decisions, reduce waste, and benefit the environment.Corporations have responded to this need by highlighting the sustainable qualities of their goods and services via the adoption of eco-labels [34][35][36].An eco-label is simply a declaration issued by a third party that has reviewed and validated the product's environmental attributes, such as an environmental organization, government, or industry group.These marks guarantee that the product complies with environmental, social, and/or human health safety criteria [31-33, 37, 38].
Businesses implement eco-labels alongside pro-environmental claims to draw the attention and commercial interest of green consumers while trying to express the environmentally beneficial value of their product or service [31,32,35].They provide an efficient approach for performing and establishing a strategic competitive plan that emphasizes environmental awareness and environmentally friendly practices to differentiate from the competition.Indeed, pro-environmental claims highlight and project the expected benefits that consumers and the environment obtain from purchasing the products or services of these companies.Thus, for companies and organizations, placing eco-labels on packaging but also in advertising is of critical significance, to communicate their message appropriately [33,34,36,38].Nevertheless, to maintain consumer trust and the company's reputation, these messages must be based on genuine, truthful, and accurate information, to ensure the use of eco-labels does not lead to or cause false and misleading claims that harm the company and, consequently, the consumers.The latter is a reality that motivates businesses to embrace and improve existing pro-environmental practices, and additionally to take measures to improve their environmental performance [6, 9, 33-35, 38, 39].

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Eco-labels and eco-fact claims are marketing tactics that inform consumers that a product or service was developed in an ecologically responsible manner.These certifications are designed to make it simple for customers to identify substances that have a lower environmental effect [32,33,35].A company's environmental fact claims are assertions regarding the environmental advantages of its goods or services.It should be noted, however, that corporations can make these claims without third-party verification thus not all assertions about environmental facts are truthful or trustworthy [35,40].Eco-labels and environmental fact claims may both be advantageous assets for customers to utilize about making better educated purchase decisions and for business to undertake efforts to be more environmentally friendly [31,36,37,39].Furthermore, by aligning with a cause that resonates with its target audience, a company can establish a positive image and reputation, while nonprofit organizations can benefit from the company's financial and advertising support [41][42][43].CRM helps establish the relationship between the company and a non-profit organization, and additionally benefits consumers as it provides a sense of gratification about their purchase while simultaneously supporting a cause they believe in.The idea behind this campaign is to increase awareness and support for a specific environmental concern while helping to generate revenue [44][45][46].Corporations strive to highlight their commitment to sustainability and demonstrate corporate social responsibility by collaborating with a green cause [45,46].In green marketing research, the decision-making, visual, and cognitive processes of consumers present complex challenges.These challenges involve not only the effective utilization of eco-labels but also the implementation of appropriate tactics for message framing and appealing to the consumer audience.Therefore, it is crucial to integrate the necessary information within the advertisement design to address these multifaceted challenges and effectively promote the products or services, details we take into consideration in our research methodology and design.
This research extends the study in [47] which examined the impact of emotional appeals in green advertising, the way they influence consumer attitudes toward green advertisements and their impact on consumer intention to make environmentally conscious purchases.The primary objective of this research is to examine how positive and negative emotions influence the way people visually perceive environmentally friendly products and services.For this purpose, a total of six (6) advertising messages were used, three (3) of which were intended to evoke negative emotions (fear, guilt, disgust) and three (3) to elicit positive emotions and associated messages (environmental benefits, personal benefits, and societal benefits).All advertising messages featured the same environmentally friendly product, the Aloe Vera hand sanitizer, as depicted in Figure 1.Users were recorded when executing the given tasks by a Tobii Pro Nano, a portable eye tracking device at 60Hz and collected data were analyzed and visualized using the iMotions software [48].

Participants & Procedures
The experiment took place at a properly configured usability evaluation laboratory at the Department of Management Science and Technology of University of Patras.A total of seventy-five (75) people participated in the experiment, a number that allows for both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the related eye-tracking metrics (i.e., fixation count, time-to-first fixation, fixation duration, etc.).A repeated measures within-subject design was implemented, as the same participants were assigned to all treatment conditions [49,50].To eliminate user bias, a "completely randomized factorial design was employed for randomization to assign participants to all treatment conditions" [51,52].In particular, the default condition was selected to be a random order for each participant.As depicted in Table 1, most participants (87.9%) consider themselves familiar with green consuming products, as most of them had previous experience and have stated their preferred green product type.
The descriptive statistics of the sample show that the sample was gender-balanced, with 56% of respondents being male and 44% female.In terms of age distribution, the age group "18-25" has the largest proportion of 85.3%, followed by the age group "26-30" with an 8% percentage.The respondents' educational background is comprised mainly of bachelor students (81.3%) and graduates (8%).

Experimental Protocol, Instrument & Metrics
Participants were given a brief introduction to the experimental procedure and its purposes along with a short explanation of green advertising and corporate responsibility concepts.Then they were informed of their right to stop and abandon the process at any time and for any reason if they felt so and about the data that would be collected and analyzed, how eye-tracking works and they were assured that it is not harmful for their eyes.Finally, they were asked to take the time and read the Participant Consent Form before signing it.In addition, and since the experiment was conducted under COVID-19 safety measures all the necessary procedures were followed.
Following that, participants completed a pre-test questionnaire to acquire information about their demographics (age, gender, education, etc.) as well as general questions concerning the participants' green product preferences.The experiment using the eye-tracker was then carried out.Users went through the calibration procedure after completing the pre-test questionnaire.As previously mentioned, the displayed advertisements were static images presented in a random sequence.Each ad was presented to participants for 10 seconds, with a grey screen in between each ad alteration.To serve as a balanced selection approach, our user sample included university students and participants from the general population.Participation was voluntary, all subjects had perfect or near-perfect vision, and the questionnaires were structured to reduce the potential of participant rejection.
Regarding the data collected during the eye-tracking recording, this study has focused on the following metrics: • Fixation Count (FC): Average amount of fixations/visits detected inside an active Area Of Interest (AOI).• Fixation Count Percentage (FC%): The percentage of those who observed at the AOI, given that they looked at the stimulus onset.• Time to First Fixation (TFF): Average time that passed until the first fixation was detected inside an active AOI (relative to AOI onset).It indicates the amount of time that it takes a respondent (or all respondents on average) to look at a specific AOI from stimulus onset.• Fixation Duration (FD): Average duration of all fixations/visits detected inside an active AOI.A visit is defined as the time interval between the first fixation on the active AOI and the end of the last fixation within the same active AOI where there have been no fixations outside the AOI.
To gain more information about users' visual stimulus and the points of interest that capture the user's attention, the six (6) ads were designed to include a combination of the following: emotional appeal (negative/positive), product (Aloe Vera hand sanitizer), ecolabels (five different labels) and text (corresponding to each selected eco-label).The advertisements were designed so that each point of interest is subject to change based on the advertisement i.e., in the case of "pro-environmental claims" ad, we incorporated the elements of eco-labels and pro-environmental facts and defined an AOI to accumulate eye-tracking data for the product.Moreover, we studied the produced heatmaps and gaze plots which offer accumulated data from all users about the areas that attracted the visual attention and the sequence of fixating from one place to the next.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This section presents in a more exploratory fashion the analysis of collected data and then summarizes the main findings from all negative emotional appeals and positive messaging AOIs based on the eye-tracking metrics previously referenced.Figure 2 presents an example of negative emotional appeals and positive messaging with both designs annotated with the AOIs we have defined during the analysis phase of the experiment.
To eliminate visual distractions, we ensured all significant variables (elements) of each ad have similar product placement.Regardless of the example analyzed, we attempted to make the envisaged appeal dominant and elicit an intense emotional reaction from the individual viewing it.This is evident in Figure 3, where fixations are numerous and distributed across the ad.Most visual attention in the disgust advertising is concentrated around the displayed emotion of disgust and the text, whereas in positive messaging the aggregated fixations are accumulated on the text referring to the beneficial claims for consumers and around the product.
TFF is a metric that allows as to measure how easy it is to find the visual object bounded by the AOI.In other words, it offers us an initial impression of how much certain elements of the visual stimulus (i.e., the ad) draw the viewers' attention and the place each element occupies in the visual hierarchy of the overall stimulus.According to Table 1, among the advertisements with negative emotions, the fear ad exhibits the shortest time in terms of appeal (57.65 ms), demonstrating the intensity of the portrayed emotion.Regarding  the product, consumers were slow on average to demonstrate any specific interest in it, with the advertisement of fear claiming the slowest time to initial fixation at 6374.1 ms.This finding is particularly noteworthy because it indicates the importance of appealing to emotion and how it could influence visual behavior, as our users failed to concentrate on the elements of the advertising message that we would prefer, namely the product.This is crucial since the ultimate purpose is to offer the product purchasing value and lead consumers to future purchases.As mentioned before, the wording is closely linked to the eco-labels of each advertisement.Thus, we strive for the AOIs of text and eco-labels to achieve low average times for the TFF metric.This holds in the case of the guilt and fear advertisement as participants scored TFF average times of 626.50 and 672.92 ms respectively.Despite that, for the guilt advertisement the eco-label AOI scores a relatively high TFF indicating eco-labels failed to visually stand out.
Fixation Count (FC) is a metric that helps draw conclusions about which AOIs had the most interest for the users (they were examined more thoroughly).About the product AOI, the case of fear ad, provides an interesting result.On one hand it gathers the lowest number of fixations for the product while the highest for the text element.A result which signifies the importance of the displayed message and its role in influencing consumers visual behavior.In comparison, with 19.43 average fixations, the emotional appeal element of the disgust ad gathers the highest number of fixations, indicating once again the intense emotional reaction from the users.Taking into consideration the percentage of fixation count in each AOI to the sum of all fixations on the visual stimulus, we observe that in all three instances of negative emotions, the AOI appeals attract high percentages, near 50%.In the case of the guilt ad, users placed on average 46.65% of their fixations on the AOI appeal, followed by 39.33% on the text.Regarding the effectiveness of the AOI appeal, the disgust advertisement outperforms the rest of the advertisements by attracting 60.77% of total user fixations compared to the fear advertisement which gathered 39,40% of total user fixations on the appeal AOI.These percentages contribute to the previous observations since they indicate that the visual stimulation of most users was concentrated around the emotional appeal elements.As previously observed, the areas that captured the greatest attention additionally displayed the highest fixation counts (appeal, text), emphasizing the relevance of emotional appeals in consumer visual behavior.Fixation Duration (FD) indicates the amount of time a user spends in an AOI.In our case, regardless of the studied element, we would desire high average times but since users were given specific time to look at the stimuli the elements in each ad compete with each other to attract the user visual attention of users.Out of all negative advertisements, the guilt ad accumulates the highest average duration for the product element.The disgust once again by scoring high on the emotional appeal signifies how intense emotions translate on visual behavior whilst the fear ad proves the importance of communicating facts in the green advertising context (users have spent considerable amount of time looking at the text area of the ad).
In Table 3, we approached the advertising with positive messaging in the identical manner.In this case, cause-related advertising (CSR) aims to publicize and associate a charity organization and its mission with the product without necessarily connecting these two notions or accentuating any specific attributes of the product.It primarily seeks to establish a trusting relationship between the product and the charity.Particularly noteworthy is the fact that, as compared to the other ads, CSR receives a higher number of visits, notably in the appeal AOI (9.14).This demonstrates that the charity of choice has a vital role in this scenario, since consumers build a connection with the products in question.The fixation duration measure shows that for the cause-related ad all AOIs have similar durations and only the eco-label AOI has a slightly lower fixation duration (187.54 ms).In fact, this ad has managed to draw and keep considerable user attention to the product AOI (339.66 ms).As already mentioned, the placement of the elements in each advertisement remains consistent, reinforcing our initial hypothesis that potential consumers will place particular emphasis on the message ("Grant a smile... 5% of sales will support UNICEF") and the value which the advertised product offers.An additional finding that supports the importance of emotional appeal elements is the low TFF (480.6 ms) which was the lowest of all AOIs in the cause-related ad and the lowest among all positive messaging ads signifying the strong emotional arousal of the ad.
In comparison, the other two ads with positive message demonstrate higher visual attention on the textual message (25,90 and 26.11 fixations on average for the personal belief and the proenvironmental fact ads respectively), thereby highlighting its importance.The fact that participants exhibited low interest in the product AOI in each of these ads, with an average of 2.5 fixations for the personal belief ad and 4.33 fixations for the pro-environmental facts ad, is nonetheless notable.In both ads, users noticed the textual message quite fast as average TTF was 170.12 for the proenvironmental ad and 635.94 for the personal belief ad.This is considered expected given that it is the dominant element of advertisements in these cases and provides the useful information that the participants as consumers are looking for, i.e., environmental fact claims are assertions regarding the environmental benefits, but also the personal benefits that can arise from one's consumption of its goods or services.This could possibly explain the fact that participants spent a considerable amount of time on searching for the eco-labels, i.e., their time to first fixation, while fixation duration was quite substantial for all the positive message advertisements indicating their search for the environmentally related information.Another observation is percentage of fixations users allocated to text AOIs on all positive message ads.Text AOIs reached the demonstrated high percentages of 51,51%, 75.97% and 73.59% respectively, with a high average number of average fixations as well.As a result, the fixation count percentages for product AOIs are notably low, with the lowest at 7.33% in the case of the eco-label in the personal belief ad, with the rest of the ads demonstrating similarly low percentages (11,51% and 12,20% respectively).This fact emphasizes the consumers' lack of interest in the products while indicating their significance in acquiring the necessary knowledge about the green product from the textual information.
Overall, we can conclude that the two categories of ads (i.e., negative emotional appeals and positive messaging) exhibit fundamental differences in terms of visual behavior.These distinctions primarily occur as in the first case, the appeal to emotion is undoubtedly stronger since these advertisements attempt to persuade users through unpleasant feelings.Eye-tracking provides us the first impression that we have accomplished our goal, that is, to elicit thoughts and feelings, either by acquiring an extensive amount of fixation counts or fixation durations for each area of interest or even by demonstrating that users attempted to avoid focusing on its context that's related to the emotion.Users' visual behavior when it comes to ads with positive feelings is mostly oriented to texts which present environmental priorities and product information, therefore attempting to approach users' environmental consciousness.The tracker's first results highlight this hypothesis, emphasizing the significance that advertisers must devote to selecting the textual components of ads, but it is also a guiding direction for businesses to constantly assure that they provide accurate information about their environmentally friendly practices.

CONCLUSION
Through the utilization of eye tracking techniques, our study aims to investigate the impact of eco-labels, textual information and emotional appeal on visual behavior and attention.Our findings corroborate and expand previous research.In the current study we observed that regardless of their environmental practices, consumers/users do not recognize the existence of eco-labels, as visual engagement in the eco-label AOIs was considerably low [53,54].A factor that also coincides with [53] research, where consumers placed a lower priority on environmental information among product attributes, yet most purchases occurred out of habit.In addition, in accordance with [55], negative emotions appear to attract users' attention faster and more frequently, and the wording of the message may influence fixation patterns and information acquisition, with negative emotions indicating greater emotional arousal.
We also know that various factors can influence visual stimuli and make it more challenging to recognize pr-environmental information.Among these aspects are label location, where a placement in the center is considered to improve identification, or even label size, as well as visual salience, which has a beneficial relationship with time to first fixation and attention capture [56,57].Placement, information presented, features, visual attention, and hierarchical label placement and presentation are examples of good practices according to [56,57].It is also worth noting that, while this study focuses on nutrition and sustainability claims, it appears that egocentric motives, i.e., the consumer's personal advantages can prove to be a driving factor in consumer decision-making.Something that corresponds with our findings in terms of visual attention and capture as in the case of the "personal belief" ad, users paid particular attention in product choice [58,59].This research is not without limitations.Our exploratory study didn't include methods to investigate underlined factors that influence cognitive or behavioral patterns.Although eye tracking techniques facilitate research of visual stimuli and user behavior, depending on the experimental scenario, the results could vary from being entirely realistic.In our case, the users were placed in the research laboratory and were observed during the experiment, a condition that does not represent a real-life setting, such as a visit to the supermarket and may have affected their behavior.Regardless of that, the eye-tracker remains a non-intrusive tool for studying cognitive behavior.The fact that it is not a realistic setting could potentially relate to the research choice not to include price tags, an essential aspect in purchasing behavior, considering no money is exchanged at the end of the experimental process.In the future, it would be interesting to expand the sample to include more nationalities, a wider age spectrum, background education, environmental attitudes, and so forth, with the intent to explore in depth and identify any variations that may emerge from the eye-tracking data.Although the sample is more than adequate for an exploratory eye-tracking study, the users of the specific research are concentrated in the ages 18-25 (85.3%).Even though this is not necessarily prohibitive for this type of study, we need to consider the fact that younger ages are likely to be more aware of environmental risks and already take precautionary measures, which may influence emotional aversion to advertisements.
Green marketing is a form of advertising intended for attracting environmentally concerned customers by promoting environmentally friendly products, services, or business practices.The idea of green marketing is to provide consumers with environmentally friendly options that have a lower environmental effect while increasing sales and brand exposure.To successfully implement green marketing, businesses must be able to demonstrate their dedication towards sustainability through genuine and transparent actions.As a result, companies must follow a legitimate and secure practice if they are to earn customers' trust by truthfully providing information about their merchandise's environmentally friendly characteristics.Greenwashing is a danger directly connected with green marketing that leads to customer skepticism and concerns.
Corporations should take demonstrable actions to minimize their environmental effect through ecologically friendly practices and reduce their environmental imprint.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Examples for negative appeals (disgust) and positive messaging (environmental facts) ads.

Table 1 :
Participants' gender, age group, educational background and green product preferences.

Table 2 :
Eye-tracking metrics for ads with negative emotional appeals (average values)

Table 3 :
Eye-tracking metrics for ads with positive messages (average values)