Greenwashing and environmental communicationEffects on stakeholders' perceptions

Everywhere you look, there's a shade of green. Corporate logos sprout leaves, ads whisper about net zero, and annual reports are suddenly full of forests and future promises. Some of it is real progress. Some of it is theater. The tricky part is telling which is which, because greenwashing isn't just one thing. Depending on who you ask, it's disinformation meant to project a responsible image, mislabeling a product to look eco-friendlier than it is, or a mismatch between poor environmental performance and sunny communications. Underneath those definitions is a deeper question from legitimacy and signaling theory: when a company sends a green signal, what exactly is it signaling—and how do people read it? That's where a study by Francesca Torelli, Federico Balluchi, and Alberto Lazzini gets interesting. They argue that not all green talk is created equal, and they propose a taxonomy with four distinct levels of greenwashing—each a different kind of signal that lands differently with stakeholders. At the corporate level, the signal is about the firm's identity and standing: the name, the logo, the certifications that give a sheen of virtue. Strategic-level signals are future-facing: long-term goals, transformation plans, the big roadmap that says "trust us, we're on it." Then there's what they call the dark level, where the green talk is a cover around hidden or even illegal activity—think corruption dressed in sustainability language, or the eco-mafia imagery that some European reporters use when crime meets waste. Finally, product-level signals live on packaging and ads: a label, a tagline, the quietly placed leaf icon on a single product line. The idea is simple but powerful: different signals carry different fingerprints. A logo suggests permanence. A long-term target trades on aspiration. A product label rides on consumer heuristics. And a dark signal, if revealed, flips the whole story into scandal. The authors wanted to know whether those fingerprints change how people judge a firm's environmental responsibility, how much they see greenwashing, and how they react when a scandal breaks. So they built an experiment with a clean structure. Two levers. First, the level of greenwashing: corporate, strategic, dark, or product. Second, the industry context: an environmentally sensitive industry—think heavy emitters or resource extractors—versus a sector with lower environmental salience. That gives eight conditions, each one a pairing of signal type and industry sensitivity. Participants—undergraduate accounting students from two universities—saw a realistic signal first, then a set of serious environmental facts tying the company to a scandal, and then they answered questions. The measurement was straightforward: perceived corporate environmental responsibility, perceived greenwashing, and how they'd react to the scandal, all on seven-point scales. The scandal reaction scale had acceptable internal consistency—Cronbach's alpha came in at 0.77. After a pilot to refine the materials, one hundred forty-seven students completed the main study; nineteen failed a manipulation check and were dropped, leaving one hundred twenty-eight usable responses spread across the eight conditions. Let's start with the big perception question: does the kind of green signal matter for how responsible the company looks? Yes, and the pattern is nicely graded. When people saw a corporate-level green signal—logos, certifications, that aura of institutional responsibility—they rated the firm highest on environmental responsibility, averaging about 6.04 on a seven-point scale. Strategic-level signals followed at roughly 5.73, then product-level around 5.50, and the dark level trailed at about 5.25. That's not a small spread for a one-shot exposure. An analysis of variance confirmed the effect of level was significant, with a p-value around 0.0015. In plain English: how you frame your greenness changes how green people think you are. There was also a hint that industry sensitivity might tweak this relationship—the interaction approached conventional significance—but the headline is the gradient from corporate to dark. Now, what about the flip side: do people see greenwashing more in some signals than others? Descriptively, yes. The dark level stood out as the most suspicious, with perceived greenwashing around 5.25 on average, while corporate and product signals sat down in the fours, and strategic lived in the upper fours. Statistically, the picture is more nuanced. The overall model was significant and industry sensitivity mattered—participants in environmentally sensitive contexts were more attuned to greenwashing, with a p-value just over 0.03. But the main effect of level didn't cross the conventional threshold on its own, and the interaction wasn't significant either. Torelli, Balluchi, and Lazzini point out that the level differences are clearly visible in the descriptive pattern, especially in the non-sensitive industries, and they interpret the package as support for the idea that level shapes perceived greenwashing. Still, the strongest statistical anchor here is the industry effect: in high-sensitivity sectors, people's greenwashing radar is simply set higher. Then comes the stress test: what happens when the green story collides with a scandal? Here the gradient snaps into even sharper focus. The dark level produced the strongest reactions—on average about 5.77—meaning more loss of trust, greater willingness to rethink, and higher boycott intent. Corporate-level signals cushioned the blow the most, coming in around 4.71. Strategic sat near 5.16, and product at about 5.17. Again, the level effect was statistically robust; the p-value was roughly 0.0015. The industry effect by itself didn't clear the usual cutoff in this case, and the interaction didn't either, but the practical takeaway is pretty intuitive: when the green signal looks more like a cover, the backlash is sharper once the cover slips. If we pull those three outcomes together, a picture emerges. Signals with institutional heft—the name, the standards, the halo of corporate-level identity—buy you more perceived responsibility and, when things go wrong, a slightly softer landing. Signals that smell of concealment—the dark level—do the opposite on both counts. Product and strategic signals sit in the middle. When people encounter a scandal, they don't just react to the harm; they also react to what kind of promise feels broken. What about the context those promises live in? This is where industry sensitivity, the environmentally sensitive industry versus non-sensitive split, serves as the amplifier. On perceived greenwashing, industry sensitivity was a significant factor—participants were more likely to see through weak or misleading signals in high-sensitivity sectors. On scandal reactions, the industry effect trended toward significance, and on environmental responsibility there was that near-interaction hint, suggesting the gradient across levels might be steeper in sensitive sectors. The authors' qualitative read is unambiguous: when a scandal hits in a sector where environmental stakes are already front of mind, reactions get louder. They also note a shift in attention depending on the pairing—some conditions drew people to the environmental harm itself, while others pulled focus to the crime-tinged aspects of dark signals. That's a reminder that greenwashing isn't a single cognitive reflex; it's a bundle of inferences that change with context. Let's pause and translate that into stakes. If you operate in a high-sensitivity industry and your communications team leans hard on product labels or ambitious long-term promises without the backbone to match, you're playing a riskier game. People are already alert. They weight those signals more heavily. And if a scandal surfaces, you don't just take a hit for the harm—you take a hit for the perceived misdirection layered on top. There are a few caveats. The companies in the study were fictitious, the sample was students from one country, and the stimuli were stylized signals, not the messy blends you see in the wild. So we shouldn't over-generalize. That said, the experiment does something most debates about greenwashing don't: it isolates the signal, shows it to people, reveals a scandal, and asks them—right then—how they see the firm, how much they think it was greenwashing, and what they'd do next. The clean, graded patterns on environmental responsibility and scandal reactions are hard to shrug off. Two practical implications drop right out. First, choose your signal level with care, because the level is doing part of the persuasive work—and part of the damage control—whether you acknowledge it or not. Corporate-level signals come with borrowed legitimacy; if you haven't earned it, that's a dangerous loan. Product and strategic signals can be credible, but they're thinner ice in sensitive sectors unless they're backed by verifiable performance. And dark-tinged narratives? If there's even a whisper of concealment around environmental harm, assume that any exposure will spike perceived greenwashing and ignite stronger backlash. Second, match claims to evidence, and surface the evidence. The study measured responsibility and greenwashing on seven-point scales, but what those numbers really index is trust. Certifications without substance, timelines without traction, labels without lifecycle data—these feel different to people than audited disclosures or transparently, third-party-verified progress. In the experiment, the corporate-level pathway worked best when it looked like the firm had already built that scaffolding. There's also something here for watchdogs and researchers. The taxonomy—corporate, strategic, dark, product—gives regulators and non-governmental organizations a way to triage their attention. If you see a spike in crime-adjacent narratives dressed in green, treat it as high risk for public backlash and legitimacy loss. If a sector is environmentally sensitive, set a stricter threshold for proof. And for scholars, this is a map worth testing in the field: how do these levels behave when real brands and real money are at stake? What comes next? Two quick directions. One is validation at scale: replicate the level gradient in diverse countries, with broader samples, and with real firms' signals. Pair lab control with field realism and see if the same corporate-to-dark gradient shows up when people have skin in the game. The other is granularity: refine the dark category and the product versus strategic line, because in practice companies blend them. If the fingerprints get fuzzier in the wild, we'll need sharper instruments to tell earnest progress from artful spin. If we zoom back out to where we started—the forest of green claims—the lesson isn't to distrust everything. It's to listen for the level of the signal and ask what kind of promise it's making. In Torelli, Balluchi, and Lazzini's data, that one choice—the level—quietly reshaped how people judged responsibility, whether they smelled greenwashing, and how hard they'd push back when a scandal broke. Different shades of green carry different risks. And once you know that, you can choose more wisely which shade you want your name to wear.