Consumer Perceptions of Green Advertising Claims: The Influence of Corporate Claims, Psychological Factors, Scepticism, and Transparency and Authenticity

green advertising, environmental claims, claim quality, transparency, authenticity, consumer scepticism, consumer evaluation.

Although green advertising is becoming more commonplace, its ability to influence communication of environmental commitments is reliant on the quality and credibility of the environmental claims. This study explores the influence of perceived quality of green advertising claims on perceived evaluation of green advertising claims and explores the role of perceived transparency and authenticity in parallel with the role of green advertising scepticism. A cross-sectional design with quantitative data was used, and data were analysed through partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with 406 consumers of the sample. The perceived transparency and perceived authenticity were treated as a higher order construct (reflective–reflective). The results show that perceived quality of green advertising claims is positively correlated with consumer evaluations and significantly improves perceived transparency and authenticity. Then perceived transparency and authenticity positively affects consumers’ evaluation, which constitutes an important partial mediating mechanism. There is also a positive relationship between perceived claim quality and green advertising scepticism, but green advertising scepticism does not mediate the perceived claim quality–evaluation relationship and does not significantly influence consumer evaluation. The model accounts for about 50% of the variance in a consumer's evaluation. The findings here indicate that positive consumer reactions to green advertising are not only about the mitigation of consumer doubts, but are also about bolstering perceptions of the openness, authenticity and congruity of environmental communication with organizational behavior. The study advances the field of green advertising research by conceptualizing and empirically separating positive credibility-building and scepticism-eliciting mechanisms in a single parallel mediation model and emphasizes the need for specific, substantiated and authentic environmental communication.