Many consumers express concerns about the welfare of animals in agriculture, but often refrain from purchasing animal‐friendly alternatives that address their concerns. To support consumers in making choices in line with their values and attitudes, this study approaches consumer animal‐friendly product choice as a dilemma between maximising the buyer’s self‐interest and maximising societal interest. To address this social dilemma, we developed and tested positioning strategies that reinforce the animal welfare label with complementary consumption values (functional, emotional, social and epistemic). The results from a choice experiment with Dutch chicken meat shoppers showed that two strategies ‐ emotional and epistemic ‐ effectively increase consumer value perceptions. These insights imply that animal‐friendly products positioned to invoke emotion or curiosity drive consumers towards animal‐friendly product choices, and that these strategies are most effective for consumers who base their choice solely on maximising either self‐interest or societal interest