A ‘dog’s breakfast’ If and how marketers can about-face the ecological paw print consumers leave on the pet food industry

The emergence of trends such as veganism and vegetarianism have promoted the reduction of meat consumption and thus agricultural production worldwide, about-facing the ecological footprint of humans. However, this progress gets continuously overruled by the worldwide increasing ecological paw print of the pet food industry. Ecological paw print refers to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions by meat production for the pet food industry. In an era of Internet and great communication technologies, online advertisements have the power to facilitate a shift in consumer purchase intentions towards more sustainable pet food. To promote the reduction of meat production for the pet food industry and about-face the worldwide growing ecological paw print. This study examined the potential influence of brand-specific claims in online advertisements, social norms and trust on consumer purchase intentions towards dog food brands. An online survey was conducted including an experiment as participants were randomly assigned to either one of two manipulations or a control group, measuring the effect of health claims and environmentally beneficial claims in online advertisements on purchase intentions towards dog food. Within the survey, dispositional trust and anthropomorphism regarding dogs were measured as personal traits. The concepts social norms and situational trust were included in the analysis as potential mediators. Overall, the findings revealed that health claims lead to higher purchase intentions towards dog food brands amongst dog owners regardless of any further information on the product and the pressure of social norms compared to environmentally beneficial or neutral claims. Situational trust in a brand was found to be independent of brand-specific claims but does positively influence purchase intentions as an independent variable. Furthermore, a potential relation between anthropomorphism towards dogs and purchase intentions was not found to be significant.