”Walk the talk och inte bara talk the talk”: En studie om studenters medvetenhet om och attityder till greenwashing i reklam

The purpose of this study is to clarify university students’, between the ages of 18 and 25 years, awareness of and attitudes towards greenwashing in advertising as well as understand a potential connection between their awareness and attitudes and their perceived environmental engagement. One quantitative method and one qualitative method were used to collect data; an online survey with 148 respondents was conducted, and three separate focus group interviews were held and later transcribed and analyzed through a qualitative text analysis. Two theoretical frameworks were used: Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model to process audience reception and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to process the topic of greenwashing. The results of the study showed that the students’ awareness of greenwashing was high and that their attitudes were almost exclusively negative towards it. The students’ awareness of greenwashing was shown to possibly affect their decoding of advertisements, as they tended to have more positive attitudes towards advertisements in which they judged greenwashing to not be very prominent. The students’ perceived environmental engagement could be linked to their awareness of greenwashing but no clear connection between their perceived environmental engagement and their attitudes towards greenwashing could be found. Our conclusion states that greenwashing may become an increasingly ineffective advertising strategy in the future, as current students, who have the ability to see through and not be deceived by greenwashing, will be in decision-making positions within a couple of decades and may demand stricter regulations