As consumers' concerns about environment are increasing and many companies are adopting environmental marketing, the importance of environmental marketing communications is also growing. Past studies have pointed out the risk of environmental marketing communications, especially of environmental advertising. This study adopts the perspective that to reduce the risk of environmental advertising is to raise the probability of obtaining expected results through environmental advertising execution. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the following variables on the consumers' evaluation of truthfulness in the image-oriented environmental advertising claims; 1) consumers' trust on the quality of a company's product and service, 2) their trust on the company's activities for social welfare, 3) the level of industry's involvement in the environmental issues, and 4) the specificity of advertising claims.
The results of this study are as follows. First, getting high level of trust from consumers on the company's activities for social welfare would be helpful to diminish the risk in executing image-oriented environmental advertising. Second, on this condition, the effect is more positive when consumers' trust on the product and service quality is low than when it is high. Third, on the same condition, the effect is also more positive when the level of industry's involvement in the environmental issues is low than when it is high. Forth, by making specific image-oriented advertising claims, the company could get higher belief from consumers on the fact that the company is really doing something to conserve environment, than by making general claims. As an additional implication, it can be suggested that environmental marketing strategy should be supported by environmental management for the company to get long-run positive results.