O QUE AS PROPAGANDAS AMBIENTAIS FALAM E COMO O PÚBLICO AS COMPREENDEM?

Abstract

Considering the environmental problem that permeates our daily lives, different strategies to mitigate, remedy or prevent its aggravation have been used by institutions, organizations, governments, media, among others. One of these strategies refers to the performance of environmental advertising campaigns, which use creative and eye-catching advertisements as part of environmental communication strategies, incorporating activities aimed at the dissemination/promotion of the environmental cause. However, there are no studies that have evaluated how efficient these campaigns are in relation to their aspirations, the public's reaction to the marketing strategies used in these advertisements and how people interpret/understand them. Thus, inspired by these knowledge gaps, we carry out a systemic assessment of different environmental advertisements (whether or not disseminated within the scope of advertising campaigns), focusing on their linguistic characteristics and specific content, emotional reactivity induced in people and the understanding of advertisements by the target audience. For this, 367 advertisements were evaluated and 350 volunteers responded to an online questionnaire, which allowed the evaluation of the individuals' reactions to some pre-selected advertisements and how they interpret/understand them. Our data reveal a great diversity of advertisements, whose characteristics provoke different reactions in the public, whose linguistic structure can facilitate or hinder their understanding and understanding of their implicit objectives. We observed that advertisements that exploit strong images arouse melancholic and fearful feelings in people. Those who use subjective or more robust linguistic resources - which require prior knowledge from the public - do not facilitate their understanding by the public. On the other hand, those who explore the issue in a more pleasant and creative way, can arouse greater public interest in environmental issues. As far as our knowledge goes, this is the first study dedicated to conducting a comprehensive assessment of environmental advertisements spread around the world, indicating how the advertisements can collaborate with the processes of environmental education, awareness and awareness, in addition to greater engagement of the population in for the environmental cause.