The Importance of 'Green' Web Communication: Analyzing Corporate Environmental Disclosure and Company Reputation.
Open Access
- Author:
- Thorpe, Brenna Catherine
- Area of Honors:
- Interdisciplinary in Advertising/Public Relations and Communication Arts and Sciences
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Dr. Susan Mary Strohm, Thesis Honors Advisor
Lori Ann Bedell, Thesis Honors Advisor
Denise Sevick Bortree, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Susan Mary Strohm, Thesis Honors Advisor
Lisa Shawn Hogan, Thesis Supervisor
Lori Ann Bedell, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Green
Environment
Communication
Fortune 500
Public Relations
Corporate communication
Website design
Credibility - Abstract:
- The current state of global media and an incredibly prominent web-based landscape of information allows for data about companies to be posted, disclosed and dispersed frequently and across many platforms. With the advent of social media, many researchers look toward the impacts those channels have on maintaining corporate reputation. The basic corporate website, however, is still a vital form of communication that enables companies to post important information about themselves at will. With numerous publications releasing lists of ‘bests’ – greenest, most respected, and most admired companies – companies can use their websites as a means to disclose information in order to sculpt their public communication and reputation. At the same time, many citizens and stakeholders are increasingly concerned with impacts that individuals and companies have on the environment. Environmentalism first took prominence in the early 1960’s with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, continued through the founding of the Green Party in the early 1990’s, and came to the forefront again this past decade through the climate change debate, gas price crises and calls for the conservation of natural resources. Companies are responsible for massive environmental footprints, and it has become common for these companies to provide information about their environmental initiatives. These disclosures are subsets of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a set of actions that help fulfill responsibilities companies have conduct themselves in ways that are beneficial to their societies, stakeholders and surroundings. Some companies fall victim to the idea of ‘greenwashing’, meaning that companies sometimes publish statements about their positive environmental relationships that are either untrue or unsubstantiated by evidence. ii The objective of this research was to analyze the methods that companies use to disclose data regarding environmental initiatives via their corporate websites. A codesheet was created to act in part as a rubric that scored individual companies on the quality of environmental information available on their webpages. Frequency counts, bivariate correlations and independent sample T-tests were run to determine the relationships between many of these variables in an effort to detect patterns in communication and identify possible areas of improvement. These websites were then analyzed in an effort to examine the role of classic communications theory in website construction, with a particular focus on the Elaboration Likelihood Model and on the three primary credibility cues: Expertise, Trustworthiness and Goodwill. Overall, the study found significant correlations between environmental disclosure and Newsweek’s Environmental Disclosure score, but no significant relationships to other reputational indicators. The study also discovered that companies aren’t currently greenwashing, at least via their environmental websites. Finally, this study recommends that companies blend thorough data disclosure with visually appealing photographs and appeals to credibility to create the most effective and impactful environmental messaging for stakeholders.