Exploring the Influence of Green Transparency Improvement on the Trust Repair after Greenwashing

Abstract

The growing rise in demand and consumption of green products has led to firms increasingly utilising green brands to derive competitive advantage and brand benefits (Chen and Chang, 2013). However, the growing manifestation caused by greenwashing has made successful brands to lose their consumers’ brand trust (Guo et al., 2018; Chen and Chang, 2013) as well as brand equity (Akturan, 2018; Chen, Tien, Lee and Tsai, 2016). This requires an effective brand strategy to be put forward to repair green brand trust after greenwashing (Guo et al., 2018). Previous research has explored different trust repair strategies including apologies (Pace, Fediuk and Botero, 2010), donations (Xia, Teng and Gu, 2019; Brown, Buchholtz and Dunn, 2016), denial (Fuoli, van de Weijer and Paradis, 2017), commitment (Schweitzer, Hershey and Bradlow, 2006), and excuses (Tomlinson and Mayer, 2009). Despite recent development of the prior literature, our understanding of trust repair mechanism after greenwashing is still limited (Guo et al., 2018). This study seeks to gain insights into the puzzle of organizational-level strategies for trust repair (green transparency improvement) and its influence on green brand authenticity, which plays a significant mediating role in the brand trust repair process. It contributes to the extant body of the literature by providing an authenticity perspective for understanding trust repair to green brands. Building on theory of organizational trust repair mechanism, our framework will explore the impact of green brand transparency on the green brand authenticity.

Keywords

• green brand
• brand authenticity
• green transparency
• green brand image
• trust repair