The purpose of this study is to clarify university students’, between the ages of 18 and 25 years, awareness of and attitudes towards greenwashing in advertising as well as understand a potential connection between their awareness and attitudes and their perceived environmental engagement. One quantitative method and one qualitative method were used to collect data; an online survey with 148 respondents was conducted, and three separate focus group interviews were held and later transcribed and analyzed through a qualitative text analysis. Two theoretical frameworks were used: Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model to process audience reception and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to process the topic of greenwashing. The results of the study showed that the students’ awareness of greenwashing was high and that their attitudes were almost exclusively negative towards it. The students’ awareness of greenwashing was shown to possibly affect their decoding of advertisements, as they tended to have more positive attitudes towards advertisements in which they judged greenwashing to not be very prominent. The students’ perceived environmental engagement could be linked to their awareness of greenwashing but no clear connection between their perceived environmental engagement and their attitudes towards greenwashing could be found. Our conclusion states that greenwashing may become an increasingly ineffective advertising strategy in the future, as current students, who have the ability to see through and not be deceived by greenwashing, will be in decision-making positions within a couple of decades and may demand stricter regulations.

This paper analyzes sustainable investments of Swedish mutual funds. Morningstar’s CarbonRisk Score (CRS) - funds exposure to a future of low-carbon economy - is analysed in termsof returns, management fees and flows. The CRS measure was introduced March 2018 with ahistorical series from March 2017, without the market being aware. Analysing CRS before theintroduction is therefore greenwashing-bias free. An empirical approach with regressions findthat there is a payoff between return and alignment with a low-carbon economy future, CRS.A 1% increased abnormal return causes a 0.13 standard deviations higher CRS. Regressionsalso find no relationship between management fee and CRS. A correlation between flow andCRS is found but no causality. The shown payoff between return and CRS implies that fundswhich are well-performing are less sustainable. Fund managers maximising their returnthereby lead to unsustainable investments. To handle this, a policy of tax relief or subsidyshould be implemented for investing sustainable. The tax relief or subsidy should beproportional to the increased return renounced when investing sustainable.

Context:Over the years, India has evolved as a leading powerhouse of economic growthbut belongs to the nations that are most significantly affected by anthropogenicenviron-mental changes. As part of the Paris Agreement, India has formulated a national climate agenda, but a large gapprevalentin the green financialmarket as well as other deficien-cies in the general bondmarket and the underlying infrastructure restrain the country from attaining those goals. Purpose:Earlier scholarly works, and green bond reports, in particular, have foreground the number of green bond issuances in India but do not take a critical look at the stagnat-ing development of the market and have not scrutinised the market and its actors in the context of scientific frames of reference yet. Thus, this thesis aims to identify the chal-lenges India faces in scaling the green financial market up while taking the demands and potential contributions of stakeholder groups into consideration. Methodology:This thesis is grounded in the author’s assumptions of interpretivism and subjectivity. Following these initial considerations, an inductive approach was followed, and a qualitative study was conducted, mainly based on a literature review in areas like sustainable finance,green financialmarkets and theirparticipantsas well asgreen debt securities and the associated issuers, investors, costsandverificationmethodsin India. Findings:The main challenges India faces in developing the green financial market fur-ther are the missing transparency provoked by the fragmentary green bond regulation as to disclosure and verification requirements as well as illiquidity caused by a small number of and little environmental awareness among investors. The market relies heavily on the banking sector and green investment projects are slanted towards renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. Moreover, green debt securities lack clear pricing advantages compared to conventional bonds but bear risks for greenwashing activities. Research Limitations:This thesis was not able to bridge the research gap on challenges for scaling India’s sustainable financial market up. The examination was further initiated by the author’s experiences with the topicand is based on an interpretive approach, thus, argumentations and findingsmight be value-laden. The small sample size of interviews taken and the limited information on greenwashing within financial activities might have not deliveredfull insightsinto the research topic

Capital markets have changed profoundly since green bonds were first introduced in 2013 as a way of financing programs benefiting social and environmental sustainability. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether green bond issues are related to value creation as compared with conventional bond issues, and how the relative size of a bond issue may impact this relationship. Using bonds issued on Nasdaq Stockholm from 2014 to 2020, our study finds no significant abnormal returns for green bonds, the benchmark of conventional bonds nor the comparison of the means. Further, we could not find an interaction effect between the relative issue size and the green bond. Hence, this study finds no indication that green bonds create value. However, we show that relative size has a positive and significant regression coefficient in all models, meaning that the ​larger the relative size of a bond issue, the more the stock price is expected to increase.

Abstract Background   The furniture industry is depending on natural resources, which are threatened by both consumption and climate change. Therefore, companies need to understand their responsibility for sustainable development and preserving the resources to operate in the future. Moreover, the consumption behaviour within the furniture industry has changed drastically over the last decade. For this reason, companies could utilize ‘Green Marketing’ as a marketing tool to promote and provide consumers with the environmental benefits of products and services. However, companies need to be careful since they are at risk of being accused of greenwashing and lose consumer trust.   Purpose                      To examine how furniture companies in Sweden are using green marketing to make an impact on consumer behaviour. The research seeks to create a deeper understanding of how furniture companies are attempting to influence consumers towards a sustainable behaviour.   Method A qualitative approach was implemented by conducting five semi-structured interviews with marketing managers at furniture companies in Sweden.   Conclusion The authors have found that furniture companies aim to influence consumers towards making more sustainable choices. Furthermore, the respondents aimed to do this by applying sustainable marketing practices with an environmental focus. However, considering the theory of green marketing provided in this study, it is possible to confirm that the companies’ sustainable marketing practices cannot be defined as green marketing.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how Max Burgers construct themselves as an environmentally friendly company through their video advertisements. Additionally the purpose is to investigate how young, loyal customers can perceive Max’s attempt to portray  themselves as an environmentally friendly company, in the fast food industry through their advertisements. The two research questions are as follows: 1)   How does Max construct their advertisements in the campaign “Climate Positive Burgers”? 2)   How do Max’s young, loyal customers perceive Max’s video advertisements in the campaign “Climate Positive Burgers”?   The chosen theoretical framework incorporated into the study are Stuart Hall’s theory of Encoding/Decoding and Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification.  Data has been collected through an online survey, individual online semi-strucuted interviews and multimodal analysis. The study found that the way Max constructs their video advertisements can vary. With one video being constructed around being relatable and embracing humor, while the other was constructed on seriousness and artistic elements. In addition to this, it was found that all three types of readings according to Hall’s theory were perceived by the loyal customers interviewed. However, oppositional and dominant readings were more frequent. Finally, it was concluded that idealistic identification is present in consumers, due to loyal customers sharing some of the same values that Max are communicating in the video advertisements.

Problem: I takt med högre politiska målsättningar kring klimat- och miljöfrågor samt ökade krav från samhället tvingas allt fler företag att ställa om sin verksamhet till att bli mer miljövänlig. Detta kan förklaras med institutionell teori och legitimitetsteori. För att genomföra den gröna omställningen på ett konkurrenskraftigt sätt krävs innovativa entreprenörer som skapar nya metoder, processer och rutiner. Ett led i detta är att utveckla och förnya kapitalanskaffningsmetoder för finansiering av den gröna omställningen. Det finns sparsamt med studier som beskriver en nyskapande process i en etablerad verk-samhet utifrån ett perspektiv av institutionellt entreprenörskap. Syfte: Syftet med denna studie är att beskriva och analysera utfärdandet av gröna obligationer som finansieringsmetod, som en nyskapande process i en etablerad organisation. Metod: Detta görs genom en fallstudie på LKAB som var först i världen i sin bransch att emittera gröna obligationer i syfte att finansiera en grön omställning. Empirin inhämtas genom intervjuer med de centrala aktörerna i processen. Resultat: Resultatet besvarar frågan om huruvida organisationer eller aktörer kan förnya sig och vara innovativa om deras handlingar bestäms och begränsas av den institutionella miljön som de vill förändra, samt om denna process är institutionellt entreprenörskap.  Resultatet beskriver processens olika steg och identifierar viktiga händelser, svårigheter och lärdomar i och av processen att emittera gröna obligationer. Slutsatser: Slutsatserna visar att en process att emittera gröna obligationer kräver resurser i termer av tid och kompetens. Det är avgörande med ett välfungerande tvärfunktionellt samarbete och vikten av att känna sin egen verksamhet samt kommunikativ förmåga betonas. Lärdomar från processen är att ett lyckat resultat underlättas av ett bra case och ett starkt internt stöd. Externt tryck från politik och samhälle skapar legitimitet och trovärdighet i processen. / Problem: In step with higher political goals regarding climate and environmental issues and increased demands from society, more and more companies are forced to change their operations to become more environmentally friendly. This can be explained by institutional theory and legitimacy theory. Implementing the green transition in a competitive way requires innovative entrepreneurs who create new methods, processes and routines. One part of this is to develop and renew capital raising methods for financing the green transition. There are few studies that describe an innovative process in an established business from a perspective of institutional entrepreneurship. Aim: The aim of this study is to describe and analyse the issuance of green bonds as a financing method, as an innovative process in an established organization. Method: This is done through a case study at LKAB, which was the first in the world in its industry to issue green bonds in order to finance a green transition. The empirical data is obtained through interviews with the key actors in the process. Results: The result answers the question of whether organizations or actors can innovate and be innovative if their actions are determined and limited by the institutional environment they want to change, and whether this process is institutional entrepreneurship. The result describes the various steps in the process and identify important events, difficulties and lessons learned in and of the process of issuing green bonds. Conclusions: The conclusions show, among other things, that a process of issuing green bonds requires resources in terms of time and expertise. It is crucial to have a well-functioning cross-functional collaboration and the importance of knowing one's own business and communicative ability is emphasized. Lessons from the process are that a successful result is facilitated by a good case and strong internal support. External pressure from politics and society creates legitimacy and credibility in the process.

Background: Consumers are today valuing sustaible brands and products, and green advertising has become an important part of marketing. Sometimes brand do not live up to their green claims and perform what is known as greenwashing. Prior research has concluded that the act of greenwashing hurts consumers' attitude towards brands and this research further explores the effect of greenwashing on attitude formation. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how greenwashing affects consumers' attitude formation towards brands.  Methodology: For this research, a qualitative research approach with an exploratory nature was used. When gathering the empirical data, semi-structured interviews were conducted. The questions were designed to be open-ended in order to gain in-depth information. Before conducting the interviews, a pilot test through two semi-structured interviews was conducted in order to identify if there were any questions that could be improved. For the main study, seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants within generation Z, both men and women.  Findings: The key findings is that greenwashing only has a short-term effect on attitude formation which resulted in consumers avoiding the accused brand. The participants' attitude formation changed from the experiential hierarchy to the standard learning hierarchy when greenwashing was discovered.  Conclusion: Cognition had the largest impact on attitude formation as greenwashing was discovered, since it created negative feelings towards the brand. However, the acccusations were seen to be easily forgotten and consumers would go back to old behaviour (experiential hierarchy) in the long-term.

Greenwashing is a frequent issue within the FMCG industry, such as vague ecological claims and misleading communication. When a brand is accused of greenwashing it is important to understand how to manage this transgression, since both forgiveness and loyalty are concepts that are affected. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis was to investigate how brand forgiveness influences brand loyalty, within the FMCG industry, with the aim of contributing to limited research in this area. Ten interviews were conducted with loyal customers to examine how they felt and experienced two brands after perceived transgressions. The critical incident technique was used during the interviews to remind the customers of the transgressions and obtain a comprehensive view of their narratives. The results indicated that the lack of repair efforts influenced the customers to perceive the brands as dishonest and untrustworthy, which affected their unwillingness to forgive and damaged their trust. Based on the customer's perceptions and feelings regarding the brands and the specific transgressions, brand forgiveness and loyalty were influenced differently. In addition, the customer places high importance on the product quality and their relationship with the brand and would rather stay with the brand instead of switching to another if the quality and/or the relationship is strong.

Problemformulering och syfte: Med den nuvarande konsumtionstakten av konsumenter i dagens samhälle påverkas jorden och klimatet, därmed måste produktföretag ta ett miljömässigt samhällsansvar så kunder kan konsumera hållbart inom planetens gränser. Syftet med denna studie är därför att undersöka och analysera hur IKEA Sverige kommunicerar sina miljömässiga CSR-initiativ. Studien undersöker hur IKEA som produktföretag balanserar deras vinstdrivande kärnverksamhet med att inte bidra till dagens överkonsumtion. Metod och material: I studien används en kvalitativ innehållsanalys med specifikt dataanalys som analysmetod. Materialet består av texter från IKEA:s hållbarhetsrapport och pressmeddelanden från 2020. Huvudresultat: Resultatet visar att IKEA:s CSR-kommunikation till stor del består av envägskommunikation, med inslag av interaktion mellan företaget och konsumenter i olika miljömässiga initiativ. Resultatet visar även på att IKEA:s miljömässiga kommunikation kopplat till företagets CSR-initiativ, fokuserar till stor del på att påverka och förändra konsumenternas konsumtion i en mer hållbar riktning.