A Content Analysis Of Green Advertising

Green advertising is defined as the advertising that includes green issues or green claims. Corporations, noting the green current and the importance of their environmental image, have attempted to improve their image and promote products through the presentation of green advertising. Since green advertising emphasizes the pro-environmental characters of the products and corporations as well as spreads the concept of environmental protection and green consumption, the improvement of it can benefit our society, our economy, the corporations and consumers themselves, thus knowing the whole condition of it and assist it to improve means a lot.Green advertising is relatively young. As is the case for any young field of inquiry,very little has been researched. So in this paper, 980 green advertisements from Southern Weekly, XinMin Evening Newspaper & Economic Daily which span the year 1996 to 2005 were chosen to be the samples of the research. 14 variables were set up by objective standard and the collected data was analyzed by the method of content analysis.The results of the research shows the followings:Firstly, the amount of green advertisement is limited and green adverting did not develop regularly. Most of them are product oriented ads rather than company image ads, which shows that for most of the time during the 10 years, green message was used just as a selling point and is not so important for the long-term development of the corporation. Secondly, green adverting in the past 10 years was not green enough. Mass messages without highlighting green appeals as well as fuzzy information are big problems for many green advertisements. Thirdly, green advertisements came from different industries ,Auto Industry and Electrics Industry are two industries which use green advertsing more frequently, the development of green advertising from this two industries were both effected by the government environmental policy and the situation of the industries. Lastly, The amount of pure green advertisements which use green appeal as single appeal in an advertisement is limited. Pure green advertisements tended to be deep and addressed environmental issues in much greater detail, emphasize the image of products is the most common appeal, 1/4 size was chosen for most of the time and symbolic pictures of environment was not universal.