Characteristics of effective battery recycling slogans: A Swiss field study

An initial survey (N = 183) revealed that overall impressions of 10 different slogans for the promotion of battery recycling were significantly correlated with participants’ survey judgements of their effectiveness. Estimates of slogan effectiveness were positively related with ratings for good and ecological argumentation, creativity, humour, and easy comprehensibility. The overall impression of the slogan was also positively related to these characteristics and, additionally, negatively related to an authoritative wording. The behavioural effectiveness of a humorous slogan urging people to return used batteries, and a prosaic factual slogan informing people that batteries are separately collected were then investigated in a 9-week field experiment in supermarkets (N = 21). The informative and easily comprehensible factual slogan achieved an increase of 35.8% in the weight of returned batteries. The prescriptive humorous slogan did not show a positive effect as compared to the pre-intervention baseline. These results contradicted the judgements of the initial survey, where the humorous slogan was better liked and was expected to be more effective than the factual slogan. The results are consistent with previous research, which suggests that factual communication avoids the elicitation of reactance, thereby facilitating behavioural effectiveness.