Beyond greenwashing: Addressing 'the great illusion' of green advertising

This article critically reviews how marketing research has investigated green advertising and greenwashing over the past three decades. First, we present how the mainstream literature initially considered green advertising primarily as a branding project, until the greenwashing debate emerged in the 1990s and became the key focus of marketing research on climate change in the late 2000s. Adopting a more critical stance, we then argue that the unanimous and uncritical condemnation of greenwashing in the marketing academic literature actually helps to perpetuate the legitimacy of green advertising, and so prevents challenge to the foundations of the neoliberal agenda. We call this phenomenon the "great green illusion."