Secret sustainability: A case study of why a company might go silent with its green achievements

Sammanfattning

Greenhushing is acknowledged as a growing concerning behavior referring to when companies deliberately avoid communicating their green achievements. Thus, while companies do substantial work within sustainability, these efforts are strategically or involuntarily not communicated, but why? The research field on greenhushing remains nascent, and scholars have inadequately explained why greenhushing occurs, particularly has previous literature overlooked the strategic perspective and company- specific circumstances. Hence, this study aims to investigate and identify the drivers for greenhushing and the company-specific circumstances conducive to greenhushing, which can give reason for why some companies or situations are more or less prone to adopt the behavior. Thus, the theoretical lenses of strategic brand positioning and institutional theory have been applied to advance the explanations for why greenhushing occurs and how it can be better understood by a brand's positioning strategy and company's institutional environment. Through a qualitative case study with semi-structured interviews at a FMCG company, it has been possible to revisit and improve previous findings on greenhushing but also expand and deepen the research by capturing several new explanations for why greenhushing occurs. The findings propose six drivers for greenhushing; (1) Fear of being accused of hypocrisy or greenwashing, (2) Low level of importance, (3) Level of internal motivation, (4) Avoid detrimental inferences, (5) Low level of brand fit and (6) High level of sustainability complexity. Further, the circumstances conducive to greenhushing have been established by the following three parts: external circumstances (regulators, media, trends, industry, competitors, consumers, market gatekeepers and technical development), organizational circumstances (size, structure, processes, and culture) and strategic brand positioning circumstances (portfolio, target consumer, competitive advantage, and message hierarchy). The study has developed a theoretical framework that later emerged into an extended framework which can be used as a basis for other greenhushing studies in the future.