Why Being Green is Harder Than it Seems: Discovering the Effect of Green Brand Knowledge On the Perception of a Green Claim

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to quantitatively discover whether green brand knowledge has an effect on the perception of green claims with Swedish Millennial's and Gen Z. As to whether it is perceived as credible or greenwashing. This study builds upon previous brand knowledge and green claim literature. However, where previous research has green brand knowledge as the dependent variable and the green claim as the independent,this study changed the order of the variables. Establishing a more holistic perspective on green brand knowledge and its role within sustainable branding. Quantitative methods were applied in this research. Two identical online inferential surveys were created, study 1 Patagonia and study 2 H&M. The surveys were then distributed to Swedish citizens and residents within the Millennial and Gen Z group (n=154).To test the hypotheses a combination of Spearman’s rank correlation and Simple Linear Regression were deployed on the collected data. All four green brand knowledge facets were shown to have a negative effect on perceived greenwashing. Therefore, the study showed that green brand knowledge did affect perceived greenwashing. The strongest predictor being green brand image. Only green brand awareness was shown to have a positive effect on claim credibility. Therefore, the study could not show that green brand knowledge positively effects claim credibility.