How to Properly Communicate Sustainability: Redefining Claim Credibility with a PLS-SEM Approach

Abstract

Sustainability has become a prominent topic for companies in the last 15 years. Facing stricter regulations and ever-increasing pressure from stakeholders in many markets, many companies tried to take advantage of the high public attention given to this topic to differentiate themselves from competitors. However, increased scrutiny unveiled the hypocrisy of many companies that claimed to be sustainable but didn't put the required effort, leading to greenwashing. These events led to a long discussion on how to make a claim credible, especially to diffident individuals. In this manuscript, the author argues that sustainability claims should not be conceived as a tool for companies to increase their sales directly, but to share their sustainable values (or lack of) and to align final customers to the company's values. For this reason, 99 individuals answered a questionnaire regarding their stance toward sustainability claims and what makes a claim credible, with the ultimate goal of creating a new definition of credibility of sustainable claims. The results, computed using PLS-SEM, suggest that a greenwashing attitude, the perceived commitment and ability of a company to be sustainable and gullibility, along with other dimensions to a lesser degree, are significantly correlated with perceived claim credibility. In the thesis, the theoretical premises and the results are discussed along with a new definition of perceived claim credibility, at least in the green communication research field.