ArticleAuthors: Angeline Gautami Fernando; Bharadhwaj Sivakumaran; L. Suganthi (2014)
This study performs a systematic content analysis of Indian English green print advertisements for the years 2010 and 2011 to verify if greenwashing is prevalent.
Green advertisements were analysed based on four dimensions – (1) claim specificity, (2) greenwashing category, (3) incidence of associative claims and (4) presence of certifications. The results indicate that 51.7% of the claims were greenwashed and most of them were vague or ambiguous (37.7%). Most claims lacked specificity (67.0%) and image claims (60.0%) were widely used. Very few advertisements (3.3%) employed certifications to substantiate their claims. Interestingly, we also found that more than half of the image-rel... 
