Greenwashed Cigarette Ad Text and Imagery Produce Inaccurate Harm, Addictiveness, and Nicotine Content Perceptions:...

The tobacco industry has a long history of circumventing regulations to present their products, inaccurately, as less harmful. Greenwashing (portraying a product as natural/eco-friendly) is increasingly used by tobacco companies and may mislead consumers to believe that certain cigarettes are less harmful than others. This study assesses the effect of some common greenwashing tactics on consumer product perceptions.

We conducted an online experiment with 1504 participants ages 18-29, randomized to view a cigarette ad manipulated for presence-absence of a combination of four different greenwashing techniques: greenwashed ad text, greenwashed ad imagery, recycled paper ad background, and image of greenwashed cigarette pack. Participants rated perceived absolute harm, relative harm to other cigarettes, absolute addictiveness, relative addictiveness, and relative nicotine content.

Participants who viewed ads containing greenwashed text were more likely to have inaccurate perceptions about absolute harm (AOR = 1.72), relative harm (AOR = 3.92), relative addictiveness (AOR = 2.93), and nicotine content (AOR = 2.08). Participants who viewed ads containing greenwashed imagery were more likely to have inaccurate perceptions of relative harm (AOR = 1.55), absolute addictiveness (AOR = 1.72), relative addictiveness (AOR = 1.60), and nicotine content (AOR = 1.48). Forty-two percent of those who saw an ad with all greenwashed features believed the product was less harmful than other cigarettes versus 2% of those who saw an ad without greenwashed features.

We found that greenwashed text and imagery produced inaccurate risk perceptions. More active U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) enforcement against such greenwashing and new FDA rulemaking to prohibit unnecessary imagery in tobacco advertising and establish plain packaging requirements would help protect consumers and public health.

These findings provide evidence that greenwashing tactics used by the tobacco industry increase inaccurate product risk perceptions. These tactics could be a way for the industry to make implicit modified risk claims, despite applicable U.S. Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act prohibitions. Findings from this study support the need for prohibitions on these tactics, and the potential for such prohibitions to help protect public health.