Greenwashing

The specific trigger for our research on greenwashing in practice is that a B-corp. certified company knocked on our knowledge base with feelings of frustration by greenwashing competitors. The question: What can I do about it? They are taking market share away from a customer segment that values a more sustainable product, without actually fulfilling that need. This is how sustainable business becomes very difficult. In addition to delving deeper into the existing literature on greenwashing, interviews were held with a further four B corps companies to gain both theoretical and practical knowledge in order to make a first start in our research on the topic of greenwashing and thus determine direction for our follow-up research.

One of our main conclusions from this practice question exploration is that while studying greenwashing by organizations is useful, the dominant narrative of “the bad guys greenwashing and ruining the eco-market” makes the phenomenon too small, the frustration unproductive, and the fear of communicating about sustainable activities -which could potentially contribute precisely to transformation- large. What we are hinting at is that there is also a lot of unintentional greenwashing going on, and we suggest that there is a scale of the degree of greenwashing rather than a dichotomy of greenwashing and non-greenwashing companies. And no one is perfect, so of course it is true that even the best-performing companies, intrinsically driven well on their way to better social and environmental performance, are (unwittingly) not 100% transparent about the harmful effects of their operations.

Companies are also not 100% transparent about the positive impacts, which we call greenhushing. What we know from the literature on greenhushing is that companies are quieter about their green performance if they think what they are doing is normal (not blowing up too high), for fear of not living up to expectations based on expressions and then may be caught out on that: socially or legally (van Ommen, 2019), arouse suspicion among the target audience (Steenis, van Herpen, van der Lans, & van Trijp, 2023) or will not be appreciated, thus unintentionally communicating norm-affirming (no one cares about sustainability) (Font, Elgammal, & Lamond, 2017).

What we heard back in the interviews and what we did not yet come across in the literature about greenhushing is that more sustainable companies also do not address a (presumably) much more damaging competitor to avoid a tu quoque retort that could discredit them. A common way for a company to guard against greenwashing from competitors without direct confrontation and without needing the government is certification, but there is a need for a broader palette of possible actions, and if as a company you really mean sustainability, it is also interesting how precisely to communicate about sustainability so that the bar is raised across the industry (what is possible, what is desired, what is acceptable) (van Dijk, Hillen, Panhuijsen, & Sprong, 2020).

Follow-up research related to greenwashing places us – in line with, for example, Bowen (2014), Austin (2019) and Williams (2024) – in a broader critique of eco-friendly consumerism and sustainable entrepreneurship, and we are eager to engage with a critical coalition of well-wishers to explore currently unthinkable alternatives to greenwashing. These can be organizations, individual professionals and also students. In doing so, this research joins our research on other themes such as collective innovation, demarketing and planned obsolescence.