'Fly Responsibly': a case study on consumer perceptions of a green demarketing campaign

Although demarketing has a history of close to 50 years, it has not lost its unconventionality and otherness. Commercially-intended green demarketing promoting pro-environmental preservation is gaining scholarly attention amid a surge in green marketing activities and the incidences of greenwashing. Companies are constantly under suspicion of not being honest, of masquerading as environmentalists. With a qualitative interpretive approach, we examine in-depth one single non-hypothetical green demarketing case and employ interviews in the field. We systematize a broad spectrum of consumer responses that includes but does not focus on the motives that consumers attribute to companies. A thematic analysis reveals spontaneous responses advocating the topic of the campaign on the category level, as well as how consumers deal with the inherent contradiction of green demarketing that arises from the sender-message combination on the brand level. In addition, we discover that consumers' environmental concerns in response to green demarketing differ depending on contextual effects.