IV.

METHODOLOGY

In order to test the hypothesis developed in the prior section a survey was created. The
questionnaire included 3 parts: demographic questions, the experiment and its related
questions, and sustainability-related questions. The survey was created in Spanish to
reach a bigger audience as the population to be tested is the people living in Spain or
who usually shop for fashion in Spain. Furthermore, the questions related to the case
were formulated using a 5-point likelihood Likert scale. This method was chosen due to
being a more precise way of capturing respondents' attitudes towards the ideas
presented, also, it allows them to have a neutral standpoint without forcing them to
position, allowing for higher validity through the reduction of response bias (Johnson
& Morgan, 2016) . While some questions could not be subjected to a Likert scale, the
sustainability-related questions also adopted the 5-point scale for importance and
frequency questions.

Google forms was used as the tool to develop and share the survey due to its user-
friendliness and easiness to uses among respondents. Inside the survey, an in-between-
subject experiment was included. Half of the sample was presented with an example of
green marketing and the other half with an example of greenwashing. Due to the latter's
nature, many of the scenarios that could be presented would have been redundant or
invalid, considering normally someone understands a product is greenwashed by
learning about it on the news or social media. This is why two imaginary situations were
created, utilizing completely neutral vocabulary without qualifying adjectives, except
for colors.

The situation presented about green marketing was the following:

“Imagine you walk into a shop looking for a basic item. As you walk through the
door you come across a section called "Sustainable and Environmentally
Friendly Fashion", advertised on a large light green sign. There, you find the
garment you were looking for. Before you buy it, you decide to look at the label
with information about the item.

You find a cardboard label that reads:

 100% organic cotton
  Made in Spain
 Certified by Global Organic Textile Standard and EcoLabel EU
 QR titled "Get to know our commitment to the environment" and when you
scan it, more information about the materials' origin and the garment's
production appears.”

While the scenario about greenwashing was this one:

“Imagine you walk into a shop looking for a basic. As you walk through the
door you come across a section called "Sustainable and Environmentally
Friendly Fashion", advertised on a large light green sign. There you find the
garment you were looking for. Before you buy it, you decide to look at the label
with information about the garment.

You find a plastic label that reads:

 70% Cotton 30% Polyester
 Made in Bangladesh
 QR titled "Learn about our commitment to the environment" and when
you scan it, the online shopping page of the same brand appears.”

By presenting these two scenarios, the intention was to evoke a real-life situation. One
case where all of the information was coherent and matched with one another, and other
were doubts and confusion could arise. In both of them, the concept of sustainability
and environmental friendliness were presented, but in the second one, the information
on the label did not align with these two terms. In one, we have a garment made out of
organic cotton, which is considered to be the most sustainable and eco-friendly fabric
(Rauturier, 2022). Also, this piece of clothing is manufactured is Spain, which is a
signal for certain ecological and ethical standards being meet due to the applicability of
Spanish and European Union legislation, like the Law 22/2011 on Waste and
Contaminated Soil1 or the Energy Efficiency Directive2. In addition to this, two

1
The Law 22/2011 on Waste and Contaminated Soil, this law aims to establish a legal framework for the
management of waste by promoting measures to prevent waste generation and reduce its negative impacts
on the environment and human health (BOE, 2011).
2
EU member states are obligated to increase energy efficiency in all phases of the energy process,
ranging from energy production, transmission, and distribution to end-user consumption (European
Comission, 2012)
ecological certifications are presented, while they are two of the most popular eco-labels
(Dhanani, 2022), the respondents are not expected to know these certifications, but they
were included to support the sustainability statement and give more credit to the
authenticity of the organic cotton. The “EcoLabel EU” was expressly used because,
even though a person might not previously know it, they can understand that a
recognized authority is certifying the information presented. Finally, the QR statement,
was introduced to address one of the most common greenwashing techniques: to claim
something is sustainable without providing accessible information to verify these
allegations, which would not be the case here.

On the other hand, the greenwashing scenario was created having in mind the
TerraChoice sins of greenwashing (2013). The attributes of the product do not match the
description of the advertisement, which would make it false information and thus, the
sin of fibbing. Furthermore, with the inclusion of a QR which essentially does not work,
the sin of no proof is also included. The intention behind the design of these situation
was, as mentioned before, to create confusion, a sense dissonance, a scenario where
people could understand that something is wrong without necessarily telling them. A
test run was sent to a small sample in order to check the overall validity of the survey, to
evaluate if all the questions were understood and specifically to assess in the confusion-
creating objective of the greenwashing scenery worked. After the test run, this was
proven to be the case. To the question “Do you trust the “Sustainable and
Environmentally Friendly Fashion” promotion in this case?”, the people exposed to the
greenwashing situation answered from a 5-point scale from I trust it a lot to I do not
trust it at all, all of the respondents answered one of the two lowest scale points.

Along with the experiment, four questions were included to analyze how the scenarios
might affect several aspects: probability of purchasing, recommendation of the product
and probability of changing to another brand, and as mentioned before, trust in the
statement presented. These questions mean to address three wider concepts in consumer
behavior and decision making: purchase intention, brand trust and brand loyalty. While
the last two are highly intertwined, here, they are specifically separated to highlight the
nature of greenwashing and how it is essentially a way to mislead consumers and it can
highly impact their perception, in addition to the reason mentioned in the former
paragraph.

When it comes to the third and last section, this part was included to understand better
the fashion consuming behavior of the participants. A question about what are the
factors that most influence their purchasing decisions was included, in addition to three
questions to examine if they have in mind the environment when buying fashion
products and if they would be willing to pay more for those that are sustainable. Also, a
question specific to greenwashing practices was included without the term, but the
definition. It is a yes and no question on whether they would stop purchasing a product
if they knew a company was greenwashing. This question was introduced to examine
what people would do, once they had full information about a company being guilty of
greenwashing, and to see if they would be sufficiently affected by this so they would
change their usual behavior. Finally, a yes or no question was added to verify if
respondents identify themselves as environmentally conscious consumers. This query
allows to examine if there needs to exist a precondition of green self-perception in order
to behave according to certain green standards.

While the survey is about greenwashing, this term was not mentioned by name
throughout it. Due to the population chosen to survey is Spanish, introducing an English
term could induce to error due not having a guarantee that every respondent knows the
language. Moreover, greenwashing is not a widespread concept, while many people
understand its definition, they might not be able to label it under that same name, and by
avoiding the direct usage of the term confusion was avoided and the focus was placed
on the possible actions that greenwashing or green marketing could mean. Another
reason to do this is that there is not a unique name is Spanish that has intended to
register this phenomenon. According to FundéuRAE, a Spanish non-profit organization
that works for promoting the correct usage of the language in the media, the Spanish
words that could substitute the term greenwashing are ecoimpostura, lavado de imagen
verde, ecopostureo, impostura verde, or impostura ecológica (FundéuRAE, 2020).
Nevertheless, when introduced in Google trends, the search for Spain shows that there is
no sufficient data on these concepts to show results, giving away that these terms are not
popular among the Spanish population, at least yet.
To sum up, a survey with an in-between subjects experiment was created to try and shed
some light on how being exposed to greenwashing might affect several cosumer
variables differently than being exposed to green marketing. Furthermore, the survey
included demographic questions and others related to attitudes towards sustainability,
this was done in order to collect more information on how age groups, gender,
education level and occupation might interact with the two scenarios in addition to
sustainability when shopping fashion overall.