Framing Green Marketing Messages for Museums and Art Galleries: An Empirical Research in Italy

Museums and art galleries may benefit from creating an image of environmentally responsible organizations using green marketing messages. However, the effectiveness of these messages often depends on how they are framed, an aspect that may impact message recipients’ perception of and intentions toward such organizations. The present research addresses this issue with an experiment that assessed how recipients react to a negatively- versus positively-framed message from the Italian National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Arts. We found that using a positively-framed green marketing message may adversely impact the gallery’s perceived reputation. However, reputation exerts a positive effect on the intention to spread positive word of mouth about such an organization. Notably, the effect of message framing on reputation holds only for recipients who are less concerned about the environment.