Analysis of consumer perception on greenwashing through NLP: Contributions to marketing strategy

• Autor(a) principal: Melo, Ricardo Filipe Salvador Pires de
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/30988
• topic: Systematic literature review; Greenwashing; Green marketing; Consumer perception; Processamento de linguagem natural - -- NLP Natural language processing; Revisão sistemática da literatura; Marketing verde; Perceção do consumidor

This dissertation addresses a critical literature gap by comprehensively analyzing consumer responses to greenwashing. Utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) distinguishes positive and negative reactions and identifies emotions like joy, sadness, and disgust. This research sheds light on consumer sentiments toward greenwashing, offering actionable insights for businesses to enhance marketing and prevent greenwashing perception. The literature review, guided by the PRISMA approach, concentrates on greenwashing, consumer behavior, and environmental communication. The selection of literature adhered to rigorous criteria sourced from Web of Science and Scopus databases, leading to the analysis and evaluation of 23 scientific articles. Following the CRISP-DM methodology, this dissertation collected data from Twitter, focusing on corporate tweets suspected of greenwashing. A comprehensive examination of responses to these tweets included considerations such as industry sector, claim presentation, praise type, and mentioned actions. Leveraging the BERT language model, responses were categorized based on sentiment and emotions. Various analyses were conducted, encompassing bivariate assessments, tag cloud visualizations, logistic regression, and chi-square tests. The results indicate that climate-related topics were not the primary concern for consumers. Negative sentiment was present in responses, but joy was also expressed. Compensation claims and net-zero terms had limited influence on sentiment. Substantive actions generated more positive responses. Some industry sectors, like Communication Services, Energy, Financial Services, and Industrial sectors, received notable negative responses. Corporate praise triggered stronger negative reactions than consumer praise. In conclusion, substantive action and consumer praise are more effective in cultivating positive reactions and mitigating greenwashing.