Nature of green advertisements in India: Are they greenwashed?

Abstract

This study performs a systematic content analysis of Indian English green print advertisements for the years 2010 and 2011 to verify if greenwashing is prevalent. Green advertisements were analysed based on four dimensions – (1) claim specificity, (2) greenwashing category, (3) incidence of associative claims and (4) presence of certifications. The results indicate that 51.7% of the claims were greenwashed and most of them were vague or ambiguous (37.7%). Most claims lacked specificity (67.0%) and image claims (60.0%) were widely used. Very few advertisements (3.3%) employed certifications to substantiate their claims. Interestingly, we also found that more than half of the image-related claims (55.8%) were categorized as misleading and highly specific claims were considered acceptable. We suggest that either the self-regulatory body – the Advertising Standards Council of India – or the legal regulatory framework accommodate well-defined provisions for regulating green claims in advertisements to curb greenwashing.

Keywords:

• green advertisement
• India
• greenwashing
• advertising regulation

Notes on contributors

Angeline Gautami Fernando is a doctoral student with the Department of Management Studies, Anna University, Chennai. She received her B.E. in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering from Annamalai University, Chidambaram and MBA from Anna University, Chennai. Her research interests include green advertising, social marketing and online advertising.

Bharadhwaj Sivakumaran holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests are variety seeking, impulse buying, search behaviour and issues concerning integrated marketing communications. His work has appeared in/is forthcoming in leading journals such as the Journal of Academy of Marketing Science, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Business Research and Journal of Marketing Management. He is the convener of the Great Lakes NASMEI Marketing Conference held every year near Chennai, India. He currently works at the Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai, India.

L. Suganthi is a Professor in the Department of Management Studies, Anna University, Chennai, India with over 20 years of experience in teaching and research in Information Systems, Quality Management, Organizational Behavior and Energy Management. She has more than 100 research papers to her credit. She is a certified Quality Lead Auditor. She has also received Commonwealth Fellowship for Post Doctoral Research which she carried out at the University of Leeds, UK.