Plant-Based is the New Meat

With meat consumption being identified as a key contributor to climate change and the degradation of public health, there have been calls to reduce the consumers’ intake of meat and motivate them to transition to more plant-based diets. Against this background, plant-based meat alternatives (PBMA) have entered the market as a way of facilitating the transition to more plant-based diets. Nevertheless, at the same time, consumers are still hesitant to purchase PBMA, which is why in light of the need to reduce global meat consumption there is a need to investigate strategies how PBMA consumption can be promoted. As past research studying meat reduction strategies identified persuasive messages as effective in prompting attitudinal and behavioural change among consumers, this study focusses on three persuasive communication strategies from the nutrition and health communication (information provision highlighting environmental or health motives for PBMA consumption, message framing, endorser type) and tested which strategies led to more positive consumer outcomes. Moreover, as past research found that the effectiveness of information provision using an expressed motive may be contingent on a person’s average meat consumption, this study explores whether this relationship is also present in the context of enhancing the consumption of PBMA. As a result, the following research questions were examined: To what extent do expressed motives for eating PBMA (health vs. environment), message framing (gain vs. loss) and type of endorser (expert vs. influencer) affect consumers’ attitudes and purchase intention to buy PBMA? How is the effect of motives on purchase intention of PBMA moderated by people’s average meat consumption? To answer the research questions, a between-subjects factorial quasi-experimental design with eight experimental conditions was conducted, for which 312 participants were recruited through Prolific. The results revealed that for high-level meat consumers purchase intention of PBMA can be better influenced by communicating health instead of environmental motives, whereas for consumers eating less or no meat, the effect was not significant. Nonetheless, since health motives were not less influential than environmental motives for meat reducers or abstainers, it can be said that health motives should predominantly be utilized in advertising. In addition, the results also indicated that influencers had a stronger positive effect on consumer attitudes and purchase intention than an expert endorser when source expertise was adjusted for, which points to the fact that other source characteristics associated with influencers may be more persuasive in the context of PBMA promotion. In contrast, message framing did not yield a significant effect on consumer attitudes or purchase intention. Overall, the results contribute to the growing field of plant-based food promotion by showing that persuasive messaging strategies from a meat reduction context can partially also be applied to the promotion of PBMA. At the same time, the results also highlight the need for further research, so that the promotion of PBMA can be enhanced and global meat consumption reduced