Can evoking nature in advertising mislead consumers? The power of ‘executional greenwashing'

Abstract

This paper examines the ‘executional greenwashing’ effect, defined as the use of nature-evoking elements in advertisements to artificially enhance a brand's ecological image. Using classic models of information processing and persuasion, the research tests whether ‘executional greenwashing’ differs as a function of consumer knowledge about environmental issues in the product category and whether environmental performance information can counterbalance the effect by helping consumers form an accurate evaluation of the brand's ecological image. Three experiments with French consumers reveal that evoking nature does mislead consumers in their evaluation of a brand's ecological image, especially if they have low knowledge of environmental issues. Two indicators of environmental performance, based on current international policies, are tested to counteract ‘executional greenwashing’. Whereas a raw figure is not sufficient to help non-expert consumers revise their judgment, accompanying the figure with a traffic-light label eliminates ‘executional greenwashing’ amongst both experts and non-experts. Theoretical and regulatory implications are discussed.

Keywords:

• greenwashing
• advertising execution
• environmental labelling
• environmental policy

Acknowledgements

This research received support from the Chair Performance des Organisations financed by the AFNOR group, from the program MOVIDA Consommation et Modes de Vie Durables financed by the French Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy, and from Toluna QuickSurveys for the pre-test data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This neologism was introduced by Jay Westerveld to describe hotel chains' hypocritical behaviour, inviting clients to reuse towels to preserve the environment, whereas they just want to save money (Orange 2010; Pearson 2010).

2. See http://www.dacia.fr/gamme-dacia/logan/ (last accessed 10 January 2014).

3. See http://www.skoda.fr/modele/skoda-fabia (last accessed 10 January 2014).

4. For this measure, the reliability coefficient is the simple correlation between the two items.