Greenhushing: the deliberate under communicating of sustainability practices by tourism businesses

Abstract

Greenhushing selectively communicates fewer pro-sustainability actions by businesses than are practiced; based on a perception of customers' rights to consumerism. We first studied the gap between the communication of sustainability practices in the audits and websites of 31 small rural tourism businesses in the Peak District National Park (UK). The analysis showed that businesses only communicate 30% of all the sustainability actions practiced. Their websites emphasised customer benefits, using explicit, affective, experiential and active language that legitimises the customers' hedonistic use of the landscape, while downplaying complex issues and normalising sustainability to reduce customer guilt. Just one website mentioned climate change. We found that greenhushing results from a low moral intensity, masking potentially negative consequences of perceived lower competence, whilst protecting business from more cynical consumers who may interpret their statements as hypocritical. Subsequent textual analysis and interviews were used to understand how communication constitutes these organisations. We propose that greenhushing reshapes and constitutes tourism businesses through their communications. Moreover, greenhushing is a form of public moralisation that adopts communication practices similar to greenwashing, reflecting the social norms expected from a business; however, in this case, located in a moral muteness, rather than moral hypocrisy, that businesses accept but resent.

Influencing altruistic tourist behaviour: Persuasive communication to affect attitudes and self‐efficacy beliefs

“…Earlier research has shown that sustainability messages, even from sustainability award‐winning firms, are not persuasive (Villarino & Font, ). This has been deemed to stem from their lack of belief that their messages will be effective (Borden, Coles, & Shaw, ; Font, Elgammal, & Lamond, ). Recommendations for subsequent research are therefore two‐pronged: (a) to study how the degree of collectivism vs individualism affects the ATTs and approaches of staff in tourism firms to writing sustainability messages and (b) to conduct experiments manipulating sustainability messages on the basis of appealing to one's ATTs and SEBs in order to understand how staff in tourism businesses respond to the proposed new communication methods and to measure tourists' actual behaviour change and compare this with behavioural intention.…”

Research in Sustainable Tourism: A Longitudinal Study of Articles between 2008 and 2017

“…It has even been identified as the major reason tourists conduct last chance tourism [19], but tourism businesses seldom mention this concept in their daily operations [20,21]. Hence, tourism has actually become a major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide [22] despite the many forms of tourism, such as coastal tourism [23], ski tourism [24,25], and animal watching tourism [26,27] Major studies have examined the climate change that tourism brings from the perspective of tourists.…”

Sustainability and marketing in tourism: its contexts, paradoxes, approaches, challenges and potential

“…The nuanced account they provide gives a candid understanding of the importance of conservation to tourism professionals' social identity as professional safari travel agents, how selecting suppliers with conservation efforts has been normalised, and yet how these choices are not verbalised as part of the sales process for fear that they will jeopardise a focus on the hedonistic benefits of a unique experience, that just happens to be sustainable. This moral muteness and customer-centred experiential understanding (Kreps & Monin, 2011;Malone et al, 2014) was elaborated in the study by Font, Elgammal and Lamond (2017) as greenhushing, that is, the deliberate underplaying of sustainability attributes in the marketing process, for fear that consumers will see the company as less competent or the product or service of lower quality. What they have in common is that they report on businesses that are not prepared to wait for the marketplace to demand sustainable products, and have found methods to take the initiative in supplying them as part of a better consumer experience Mossaz & Coghlan, 2017).…”