The role of environmental-related message on consumer acceptance of novel food production technology: an experimental investigation on artificial meat products

This study investigates the effects of environmental-related message on consumers' acceptance of artificial meat products in China. By focusing on the introduction of plant-based and cultured meat, a novel dataset involving 3441 research participants was collected in China through the online platform with randomized controlled experiments. The results show that for promotion-focused participants, gain-oriented message is effective while avoidance-oriented message is not in improving their acceptance of artificial meat. For prevention-focused participants, both gain- and avoidance-oriented messages are found to increase their acceptance of artificial meat effectively. To quantify the average impacts of environmental-related message and consumers' regulatory focus fit on the acceptance of plant-based meat and cultured meat, a seemingly unrelated regression model is applied. The results reveal that for a randomly selected individual, exposing with both gain- and avoidance-oriented messages would increase his or her acceptance of artificial meat comparing to exposing with neutral message. In addition, we find participants who use promotion focus more tend to have higher acceptance scores for both kinds of artificial meat on average.