It's not easy being green…Or is it? A Content analysis of environmental claims in advertising (2010)

Undergraduate: Lauren Baum

Faculty Advisor: Craig Carroll
Department: Journalism & Mass Communication

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As corporations seek to appeal to environmentally-conscious stakeholders, advertisements containing environmental claims have become increasingly prominent. A corporation’s desire for an enhanced corporate reputation, combined with lenient environmental advertising regulation, has created the perfect environment for corporations to use—and misuse—environmental claims, resulting in the recent phenomenon of “greenwashing.” Defined as the act of disseminating disinformation to consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service, greenwashing is an international issue. This study reports the results of a cross-national content analysis of 247 print ads from 84 issues of mainstream magazines from the United States and the United Kingdom. While 75% of ads analyzed contained one or more aspect of greenwashing, results suggest that firms advertising in U.S. magazines are significantly more prone to employ misleading/deceptive environmental claims than firms and magazines from the United Kingdom. When presence of misleading/deceptive claim and reputation were analyzed according to country, it was found that firms with reputation rankings from both countries used aspects of greenwashing in their advertising and did so in similar proportions. It is clear from this research that without increased environmental advertisement regulation, greenwashing will persist as a disingenuous means for reputation enhancement.