– Building Green Trust Through Advertising – How can companies build green trust through advertising in a world of greenwashing chaos? The moderating role of green involvement and green skepticism.

Abstract

The trend of companies implementing green marketing to differentiate their brands by turning towards environmental sustainability is increasing (Chen & Chang, 2012). However, not all green marketing claims accurately reflect firms’ environmental performance. This type of corporate behavior is called greenwashing and weakens consumer trust towards green advertising (Chen & Chang, 2012). This has led to consumers being more skeptical about environmental marketing (Kisielius & Sternthal, 1984). In marketing, trust is thought to be an important ingredient to a successful relationship between company and consumer towards building brand equity (Chen & Chang, 2012). Thus, the present study aims to investigate how corporations can build green trust through green advertising, and, if individuals' overall green skepticism and green involvement has a moderating effect on green advertisement and green trust. To do so, an A/B experiment was conducted in the form of a survey, to test the effect of different dimensions of ad greenness on green trust and investigate the moderating effects. The empirical results revealed that deep ad greenness positively affects green trust, meaning, the more informative the ad, the higher the trust. However, it was not statistically proven that green skepticism or green involvement fully moderates the effect between ad greenness and green trust. Nevertheless, these findings will assist managers and corporations to acknowledge that green advertising must be concrete and provide objective information to avoid being perceived as untrustworthy. Keywords: Green trust, Green advertising, Ad greenness, Green involvement, Green skepticism, Greenwashing, Green marketing