Can Evoking Nature In Advertising Mislead Consumers? The Power of ‘executional Greenwashing’

‘Executional greenwashing’ refers to the use of nature-evoking elements in advertisements to artificially enhance a brand’s ecological image. Based on classic models of persuasion, a first experiment reveals that evoking nature does mislead consumers, especially if they have low knowledge of environmental issues in the product category. Two complimentary experiments, based on current international policies, show that whereas a raw figure featuring the product objective environmental performance is not sufficient to help non-expert consumers revise their judgment, accompanying the figure with a traffic-light label eliminates the ‘executional greenwashing’ effect amongst both experts and non-experts. Theoretical and regulatory implications are discussed.