Consumer awareness towards eco-friendly product through green advertising: Environmentally friendly strategy

Climate change has become a controversial issue because people need to make massive lifestyle changes to mitigate global warming. Companies have started to shift their marketing strategies to increase product value and sales towards environmentally friendly strategies. Green advertising often uses. aim to raise the consumers awareness for eco-friendly products. Based on environmentally friendly products, this study focus on examining the level of consumer awareness towards eco-friendly products based on green advertising. The research is conducted among consumers who have never purchased eco-friendly products, but they have received green advertising. Data of 241 consumers are taken through questionnaires and analysed through SPSS to determine the correlation values and analysis. The finding stated that there are three factors used as samples of green impact, green message, and green theme, where the level of consumer acceptance is quite good. Furthermore, it is also known that the level of consumer awareness increases after receiving green advertising. Finding of this study is useful for industries to adopt an environmentally friendly strategy, whereby it can improve from consumer perspectives based on impact, message, and theme.


Introduction
Climate change has become a controversial issue because of the climate change's impact on global warming and natural disasters [1], [2]. The impact of climate change cannot be avoided, so it requires cooperation from all parties, including companies which create products [3]. Consumers' concern for the environment continues to increase; it is the impact of global warming issue [4]. Consumer behavior can be seen from the consumption patterns that lead to environment, such as green consumerism movement [5]. Companies are currently required to pay attention to environment by producing environmentally friendly products [6]. With the issue of environment, so it appears green marketing strategy [7]. The objective of green marketing is to support the efforts to deal with the issue of climate change. The value of green marketing implementationis consumer's concern on brand conveyed by company [8], [9].
One of green marketing strategies is known as green advertising [10], which puts forward environmental and sustainability issues during advertising process. Advertising is delivered to consumer in various ways, either online (e.g. social media and websites), or offline (e.g. billboards or flyers) [11]. However, products delivered through advertising are not entirely environmental friendly, and sometimes it's either partially or none at all [12]. Thus, the implementation of green advertising only cope with the issue of environmental friendly and sustainability. Nowadays, consumers are increasingly wise in sorting information from advertising; consumers' concern for environment is the basis for product selection [13]. Based on the current phenomenon of green advertising, this study focuses on examining 2 the relationship between green advertising and consumer green awareness. The purpose of this study is to examine green advertising as part of green marketing towards its ability to control green awareness. This study demonstrate an effort to deal with the issue of climate change; started with education which relate to sustainability in green advertising.

Green advertising
Companies use advertising through media which aim to improve product and company image [14]. There are many ways to convey advertising that have a positive impact to consumers, including through unexpected places, unconventional methods or unusual communication delivery [15]. One thing which can be done in a different way is the implementation of green advertising, which is collaborating environmental and sustainability issues in advertising [16]. The main purposes of implementing green advertising are attention to product value and an environmentally friendly image [12], [17]. In theory, green advertising is define as advertising that promotes products, services, or ideas which have an impact on protecting the environment [12], [17]- [19]. The important thing from green advertising is a positive impact on environmental sustainability. However, not all products offered is purely environmental friendly, such as advertisements for car tires and fast food.
Green advertising can be done by several measurements. First, it must have an impact on three things, such as the biophysical environment, lifestyle, and environmental responsibility [20]. Second, the theme used by green advertising is considered good if it contains ecological, environmental sustainability, and nature-friendly [21]. Third, the message conveyed by marketers to consumers, must relates to environmental issues, and should be able to provide pleasant, convincing, believable, favorable, and good messages [22] from the product or service advertised.

Green awareness
Green awareness is defined as consumer's awareness of environment; which is associated with the product or service they choose [10]. It consists of components of knowledge, attitudes and actions in consuming products which have a positive impact on environmental sustainability [23]. The concept of green awareness emphasizes customer's satisfaction in fulfilling customers' needs, and its impacts to behavioral intention [24]. The main expected behavior is consumer's trust and decision to be loyal for one brand. Previous research stated that green advertising has a positive impact to corporate [10], [12], [16], [25]. Green awareness is assessed from several behaviors including consumer's business, consumer's understanding of eco-labels, consumer's understanding of green slogan, consumer's knowledge of green symbol, consumer's knowledge of company's green image, and consumer's concern to environment [24], [26].
Consumer's green awareness is controlled by green marketing strategythrough the implementation of green advertising [14], [16] in which image of products and brands are concern with environmental sustainability issue [18]. Based on previous research, it can be determined that the research hypothesis is as follows:

Hypothesis:
Green advertising has positive correlation to green awareness

Methodology
The study was conducted through a surveyof 250 consumers, who have experienced with advertisement on sustainability issue. Data from consumers were taken by a quantitative questionnaire with predetermined values through a Likert scale approach. Data were then processed through SPSS with a series of validity and reliability tests, linear regression, and research hypothesis test. The variables focused on two things, namely green advertising and green awareness. Green advertising was assessed through green impact, green message, and green theme, while green awareness was measured through five indicators.

Result and discussions
A usable data from 241 consumer were sought. Validity and reliability test was carried out to measure the research instruments. Linear regression which intended to obtain the correlation value and the significance of the research results was conducted.

Statistic results
The first stage is to test the validity and reliability where the results are shown in Table 1. The validity of research instrument is examined for each indicator with an evaluation of Pearson Correlation value; acceptable value exceeds 0.300. Meanwhile, to evaluate the reliability using Cronbach's Alpha value, it is stated that acceptable value is above 0.700. Based on the test results, it appears that all Pearson Correlation and Cronbach's Alpha values are above the provisions and it is concluded that the research instrument can be accepted for further multiplication.  Table 1, there are three dimensions in measuring green advertising, namely green impact, green message, and green theme. The next stage is to test a model with linear regression analysis with reference to two variables, green advertising and green awareness, as illustrated in Table 2. There is a positive correlation value between green advertising and green awareness which is 0.569. Furthermore, to find out whether the correlation of the two variables is accepted; evaluation is carried out through research hypothesis test. The test results are presented in Table 3, where there is a t-value of 10.695 or it is above t-statistic value with a significance of 0.000. Table 3 explained a positive correlation between green advertising and green awareness; thus, it explained the impact of green advertising implementation on changes of customer awareness on environmentally friendly products.

The impact of green advertising to green awareness
Results of the study found that green advertising can be formed from three dimensions, which are green impact, green message, and green theme. The three dimensions has a positive impact in the change of consumer green awareness. It means that a green marketing strategy through the implementation of green advertising is appropriate, because it can cultivate consumer green awareness towards marketers' products and brands. The findings of this study are in line with previous research on eco-friendly products [10], [12], [14], [16], [27]. It is stated that there are several affected factors onconsumer green awareness, including paying attention to green advertising used. This study has supported previous research by demonstrating that green advertising is able to control green awareness. This study has highlighted the importance of information in relation to green advertising and consumer behavior, which are part of green marketing strategy. By understanding green marketing, it is hoped that company will be able to encourage to deal with climate change issue. This study is hope to encourage company's attention to support environmental sustainability.

Conclusions
The purpose of this study is to examine green advertising in controlling consumer's awareness. The findings stated that green advertising can influence consumers green awareness. There are several dimensions of concern in assessing the implementation of green advertising, including green impact, green message, and green theme. This study comes with certain limitations especially it does not discuss about consumer's profile, whereas by understanding consumer's profiles, several characteristics of consumers' behavior in eco-friendly products can be found. Furthermore, the discussion of this study limited to the impact of green advertising on consumer awareness, hence further research should examine other behavioral intentions, such as consumer's trust for environmentally friendly products.