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The purpose of this paper is to offer some reflection on the importance of reliable green claims to encourage sustainable production. The role of market is fundamental. Businesses and consumers are both involved in achieving environmental protection objectives. There is the real risk of the phenomenon of so-called green washing or misleading marketing. The problem arises of verifying the reliability of green claims to prevent competitive elements from become distorting factors of competition.

Based on the analysis of a European programme, the author shows how in Italy there is a dangerous lack of consumer protection. For this reason the European and national authorities have provided that green claims must be true, reliable, verifiable and comparable, but it is necessary that consumers be protected, through a certification system that makes it possible to certify the veracity of green claims. The problem is that a number of certification systems have been adopted in Europe which undermine the competitiveness of the market for green products.

This work aims to identify the tools necessary to make green indications more reliable, but above all to create a common methodology on which to base them. In this direction, companies wishing to advertise the ecological characteristics of their products should be required to provide the supporting demonstrations on the basis of a standard methodology assessing their actual environmental impact.

This work will examine the problem of green washing and the importance of reliable green claims for environmental protection. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the original work of the author and has not been submitted elsewhere for publication.

Environmental claims in advertising (green ads) provide competitive advantage to firms. This study aims to understand what kinds of environmental claims advertisers make in a developing nation like India. Further, implications for policymakers and advertisers are discussed.

A content analysis of 279 green print advertisements was conducted using a comprehensive list of claim categories identified from the advertising literature. These categories included advertiser profile; ad promotions – type, sector, appeal; claim – nature, type, focus, validity, emphasis; executional elements – illustration setting, presenter, format/structure and environmental issue, identified from past studies and practitioner interviews.

The findings suggest that majority of the advertisers using green ads are manufacturers. Consumer durables, real estate and power sector together constitute one-third of the total green ads. Further, most of the green ads are aimed at influencing consumer behaviour. Though most of the ads contain strong emphasis on environmental attributes, they are ambiguous. A large proportion of claims are credence in nature and lack product identification through environmental certifications. This study also identifies areas of concern including interpretation of the term green, use of multiple certifications, greenwashing and advertisers showing environmental responsiveness through event-based green advertising. Policy recommendations are made based on green advertising regulations governing them across developed and other developing countries.

The content analysis of the green advertisements in this study was limited to newspaper advertisements within the print media. Future studies may use advertisements from different media types, such as the internet ads and television commercials, to examine the effect of media type on the nature of green advertisements. It would also be interesting to examine the role of regulations as a moderator, influencing the claims made in green advertisements.

The findings of this study provide a comprehensive overview of the nature of green advertisements in India. Marketers may use these insights to design effective green advertising strategies.

Most of the extant literature has examined environmental claims in the context of developed nations, where regulations are well established. Very few studies have examined this issue in the context of developing countries. In addition, most of the previous studies have focused on specific issues like greenwashing, appeals and execution elements. The present study contributes to green advertising by examining environmental claims in case of a developing nation like India using a comprehensive list of claim categories. This study also identifies areas of concern and suggests recommendations for policymakers and advertisers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of rational green packaging claims vs emotional green packaging claims on consumers’ purchase propensity for organic coffee.

Three within-subjects experiment were carried out (N=87, N=245, N=60). The experimental design encompasses packaging with rational green claims, emotional green claims, as well as a neutral (control) claim. Measured variables are introduced to assess participants’ environmental commitment and information processing ability. A manipulated between-subjects variable is introduced to test how distraction interacts with preference for the claims.

Overall, consumers prefer products with green claims over those with neutral (control) claims, and products with emotional green claims to those with rational green claims. The studies also reveal that this effect is moderated by participants’ environmental commitment, information processing ability and by distraction. The findings were statistically significant (p<0.05).

As a lab experiment, the study provides limited generalizability and external validity.

For most organic FMCG products, it is advisable to employ emotional packaging claims.

The presented findings provide marketers with tools to influence consumer behavior toward sustainable choices.

The paper validates previous contributions on the effects of product claim types, and extends them by introducing comprehensive empirical data on all the Elaboration Likelihood Model’s criteria for rational decision-making; motivation, opportunity and ability.

This paper aims to examines whether firms’ eco-friendly advertising claims are supported by environmentally friendly behavior.

The paper develops a game theory model to determine the circumstances under which firms’ environmental claims will be supported by the adoption of best environmental practice. Least squares regression is used to test major theoretical implications.

The theoretical model suggests that the credence good nature of un-monitored environmental claims prohibits consumer validation; firms have an incentive to advertise green but no incentive to adopt best environmental practice. Third-party monitoring transforms the game, making eco-friendly outcomes possible. Empirical models based on North American data suggest that firm profit rates are related to verifiable environmental claims and to easily accessible external ratings of environmental performance.

Unlike previous game theoretical models for similar goods, the eco-friendly outcome does not require a repeated game. The importance of the single period game is that continued patronage is not required for the firm to produce goods containing the desired attributes.

Given that many consumers are skeptical about environmentally based advertising campaigns, the purpose of this study is to propose an optimized message strategy to facilitate consumer engagement with green messages in social media contexts.

Four empirical studies are conducted using self-report questionnaires to test proposed hypotheses with a focus on the interplay between claim specificity and benefit appeals in green advertising on social media.

The current study examines the interaction effects of claim specificity and benefit appeals on consumer engagement in social media. Specifically, the results reveal that when the message claim is abstract, using other-benefit appeals produces more positive consumer engagement than using self-benefit appeals. Moreover, the results illustrate that self-enhancement motivates consumers to engage with green product advertising messages when the advertising appeal is abstract and the advertising message is associated with benefits for others. Finally, it is found that consumers’ self-construal level moderates the interaction effect of claim specificity and benefit appeals type on consumer engagement on social media.

This paper has practical implications to both social media managers and advertisers in the green product industry: a match with advertising claim specificity and construal level (i.e. social distance: self-benefit vs other-benefit) should be ensured to increase consumer engagement on social media. In addition, self-enhancement and self-construal should be considered for a better message strategy in social media contexts.

The findings make important contributions to the literature in that we extend the applications of construal level theory to social media contexts as a valid theoretical tool to identify optimized green message strategies. As such, it provides future researchers and practitioners in the domain of green campaigns with useful guidelines to boost more consumption of green products.

Consumer scepticism about the credibility of green advertising around the world is growing. The article aims to provide a comprehensive assessment and trend analysis of green advertising practices of international firms over a 20‐year period.

The study identifies 473 international green advertisements during the 1988‐2007 period and content‐analyses them on five major axes: advertiser profile, targeting features, message aspects, copy characteristics, and situation points.

The content analysis reveals significant trends in all major areas examined and identifies important interaction effects between certain dimensions of green advertisements.

The findings could be augmented by combining them with changes in the external environment, input from consumers about advertising effectiveness, the views of advertisers and advertising agencies, and secondary data referring to the performance of the specific company/product advertised.

Green advertising research mainly focuses on domestic rather than international advertisements; examines important issues in isolation from other issues; partially analyses message, copy, and situation characteristics; and covers a short period. This study fills these gaps by systematically evaluating international green advertisements over a long period and using an integrated framework of analysis that is based on the extant literature. It also explores potential interaction effects between key dimensions describing these advertisements.

This study aims to investigate the ecological awareness of Chinese consumers towards fast fashion and examine the effect of social sustainability claims on green brand image and purchase intentions in China, considering China’s unique environmental policy landscape and its significant role in the global fast fashion industry. The study explores the role of altruistic values in promoting sustainability within the well-known fast fashion brand “H” and how they shape brand image, consumer satisfaction and brand equity.

The study collected data from 257 Chinese participants and used a serial mediation model through the PROCESS macro in SPSS to analyse the correlation between green brand image, created through sustainability claims and consumer purchase intentions. The model also assessed the intermediary effects of brand image, satisfaction and equity.

The findings of the research indicate a direct and positive relationship between green brand image and consumer purchase intentions, emphasising the need for clothing and textile industry marketers to strategically promote altruistic values in their sustainability efforts and highlighting the importance of ecological awareness in shaping consumer behaviour in the Chinese context. This approach enhances green satisfaction and green brand equity and ultimately leads to higher green purchase intentions.

This study provides significant insights into the effectiveness of incorporating social sustainability claims in advertising to improve a brand’s green image and influence consumer behaviour. It emphasises the importance of altruistic values in sustainability strategies, offering valuable guidelines for marketers in enhancing green satisfaction and brand equity, thereby boosting consumer purchase intentions in the context of green branding and sustainability advertising. Focussing specifically on the Chinese market, this research sheds light on the impact of ecological awareness among Chinese consumers within the fast-fashion industry. Given China’s substantial role in shaping global fast-fashion production and its evolving environmental policies, this focus adds significant depth to our understanding of sustainability claims’ influence within this crucial consumer base.

As huge environmental impacts caused by the coffee industry are significant and controversial in the course from cultivation to consumption, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether or not different types of green claims based on the product lifecycle can lead to different extents of green psychological variables including purchase intention.

The green claims of Starbucks were chosen as the research target for this study not only because the coffee chain store is working on the “Starbucks” Shared Planet’ program, which makes a commitment to do business in ways that are good for people and the planet, but also because such a program can be categorized into three major green message elements on the basis of the product lifecycle. A total of 920 valid self-reported questionnaires collected in Taiwan were used for this empirical analysis.

One-way ANOVA results reveal that all of the three green claims of Starbucks can lead to consumers building up the same level of green brand image of this company, with “ethical sourcing” significantly possessing more impacts on the other green psychological variables (i.e. green trust, green satisfaction, green brand equity, and green purchase intention).

The empirical results and findings from this study are helpful to the coffee industry marketers if they, in formulating various promotion campaigns, can communicate with the consumers with an eye to increasing their green brand image and other green psychological variables, including green purchase intention.

This study is among the first to introduce different types of green claims on a basis of the product lifecycle to examine whether or not consumers’ green psychological variables will be different.

This study aims to investigate the impact of environmental responsibility (ER) on consumers' green customization intention (GCI), as well as the separate and joint moderating effects of consumers' negative perceptions and environmental claim type (ECT) on the relationship between ER and GCI.

In this study, two online experimental questionnaires and one between-subject lab experiment were conducted to test all hypotheses.

This study found that high-ER consumers are more likely to choose environmental options in the product customization process (versus low ER). The effect of ER on consumers' GCI is moderated by consumers' negative perceptions of green consumption (e.g. green skepticism and perceived environmental premium (PEP)). Additionally, ECT's joint moderating effect and consumers' negative perception of green customization consumption can be decreased by a substantive (versus associative) claim type in message framing.

The findings provide new insights into the factors affecting consumers' GCIs and have significant practical implications. First, consumers' different ER levels should not be neglected when examining the value of green customization. Second, consumers' green skepticism and PEP could reduce consumers' GCI. Third, the use of substantive environmental claims may also be particularly helpful for companies' communication strategies regarding consumers' low-level negative perceptions of green options.

While previous studies state “environmental responsibility” as a key characteristic of general green consumption, the authors extend that to a green customization process and connect that with consumers' negative perceptions and ECT. In addition, the separate and joint moderating effects of consumers' negative perceptions and ECT were examined. Thus, these findings refine the existing understanding of the relationship between ER and green customization.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how consumers respond to environmental claims of three types contained in promotional messages attributed to one respected “green” brand and one mainstream leisure clothing.

A mall‐intercept questionnaire‐based survey in one city in Australia collected responses from 380 respondents, who rated environmental claims contained in promotional messages delivered via garment tags attached to T‐shirts.

Shoppers responded more positively to product‐related messages than cause‐related messages. They found environmental claims to be more credible if attributed to the green brands than to the neutral brand.

Future research might focus on the “green” market segment rather than interacting with the general population, and devise niche marketing strategies to clothes retailers. There is also room for more vivid pro‐green statements as test stimuli, perhaps generated by in‐depth qualitative research.

Though consumers are becoming increasingly green‐minded, the result is not necessarily more consumption of green products, but “better” consumption behaviour in general. Retailers should build a store image that clearly transmits their green credentials, as a proxy for the quality and nature of merchandise they carry.

Relatively little is known about green brands and environmental message appeals in clothes marketing, and no study has yet focused on Australia.