GREEN SKEPTICISM : How green intentions can lead to brown choices

Sammanfattning: Although much is known about the conscious consumer, very little is known about green advertising. Given the growing attention placed on environmental issues and the heavy reliance of the consuming public on mass media, the dire lack of credibility in green advertising is in a shocking state. In fact, there has been a pronounced increase in green messages in advertising since the 1960s. This increase in green messages does not inherentlymean that there is a favorable consumer brand attitude formation. Instead, consumers have become increasingly skeptical of the environmental claims made by some of these organizations. The existence of consumer skepticism, together with perceived deception, hashad a negative impact on credibility. The purpose of this essay is to understand how marketing efforts on product labels thathighlight environmental, social and ethical problems (known as green product labels) might increase the customers' skepticism. The chosen method to conduct the data collection was a survey. The survey was distributed through online forms through facebook and other socialmedia platforms and thus limited to focus on the consumers of a more connected kind, mainly those who partake in social media on a daily basis. Results show that the consumers are skeptical towards green efforts and green product labeling, but the perception of green labels are not directly influencing the amount of skepticism as these notions seem to come from outside sources. While not directly influenced by product labels the increase in skepticism towards these kinds of ads displaying green efforts implicates both practical and theoretical relevance. Consumers are becoming more aware of false claims and companies need to be aware of what influences consumer skepticism to be able to better match their ads with the target audiences.