Misleading Consumers with Green Advertising? An Affect–Reason–Involvement Account of Greenwashing Effects in Environmental Advertising
By Desirée Schmuck, Jörg Matthes, Brigitte Naderer. 2018
414 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Drawing from the affect–reason–involvement model, we examine how misleading advertising about the environmental features of products, or greenwashing, affects how consumers perceive ads and brands. Using data from two experimental studies with quota-based samples in the United States (N = 486) and Germany (N = 300), we compare nondeceptive claims with two types of claims often used in greenwashing: vague claims and false claims. We also identify the presence of pleasant nature-evoking images and test for interaction effects with two types of environmental involvement: environmental concern and environmental knowledge. Results indicate that while vague claims do not enhance consumers' perceived greenwashing regardless of their environmental knowledge or concern, false claims do, which consequently harms consumers' attitudes toward those ads and brands. In the United States, consumers' environmental knowledge moderates that effect, whereas all consumers in Germany could identify false claims as attempts at greenwashing. Moreover, associating greenwashing claims with nature-evoking images activates an affective persuasive mechanism that appeals to consumers' affinity for nature, which not only positively influences their evaluations of ads and brands but also influences their attitudes toward ads and brands more strongly than perceived greenwashing. In closing, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.
Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Marketing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3649be04b1da643793ceb4a32a2733ac4b533812
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In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
In Marketing
Citations in the corpus
- Green apparel buying behaviour: A Stimulus–Organism–Behaviour–Consequence (SOBC) perspective on sustainability‐oriented consumption in Japan (2021, background): “This is very easy to put into action, particularly as a strategy to overcoming the challenge of greenwashing, wherein consumers feel that firms' claims about the pro-environmental nature of the concerned products are not authentic (Schmuck et al., 2018).”
- What Do We Mean by Sustainable Finance? Assessing Existing Frameworks and Policy Risks (2021, background): “In this respect, the literature has already observed that greenwashing or sustainable washing can take many forms, ranging from changing the name of a product to inducing the perception that it comes from a natural environment to the launch of marketing campaigns by polluting industries in order to ”