Finding gold at the end of the rainbowflag? Claim vagueness and presence of emotional imagery as factors to perceive rainbowwashing

Abstract

Companies increasingly take a stance for the LGBTQIA* community. However, consumers often criticize the appropriation of this support for economic reasons, also called rainbowwashing. Building upon corporate hypocrisy and greenwashing research, we investigate under which circumstances participants perceive an ad as rainbowwashing in two experiments. In Study 1, we test the effects of claims (vague vs. concrete vs. no claim) and emotional imagery (imagery vs. no imagery). In Study 2, we replicate this design (comparing vague vs. concrete claims and imagery vs. no imagery). Results from Study 1 show that reading a vague claim elicited the highest perceptions of rainbowwashing compared to reading no or a concrete claim. Images did not show a main effect. In Study 2, claim vagueness had no direct effect, whereas imagery had a direct impact on perceived rainbowwashing. In both studies, involvement with LGBTQIA* issues was a significant moderator for the effect of imagery, so that highly involved individuals perceived less rainbowwashing when emotional and imagery was included. We discuss these findings in light of personal characteristics for the perception of rainbowwashing and draw conclusions for individual factors for the broader field of corporate hypocrisy.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2022.2053393 .

Keywords:

• rainbowwashing
• corporate hypocrisy
• LGBTQIA*
• deceptive marketing

Data availability statement

Data of both studies was originally collected by the authors and is fully available online provided via the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/kah62; DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/KAH62

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For more detail about the situation of the LGBTQIA* community in Germany see the following report by FRA and European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2014

2 We also accounted for LGBTQIA* knowledge as a second relevant moderator variable. To keep this manuscript concise, we include the measure and corresponding analyses in our supplement (Appendix C) for study 1&2.

3 For reasons of space, we include two models in this paper (Claim Vagueness → Rainbowwashing → Ad Attitude and Imagery → Rainbowwashing → Ad Attitude) and the other two models (Claim Vagueness → Rainbowwashing → Ad Attitude and Imagery → Rainbowwashing → Ad Attitude) in our online repository.

4 As in Study1, we measured LGBTQIA* knowledge and provide these measures and analyses online.

5 For full regression statistics, see TableS2 in the OSF repository.

Additional information

Funding

Part of this research (sample of Study 2) was funded by LMU Munich’s Institutional Strategy LMUexcellent within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative (there is no specific grant number to be reported).