Green advertising practices in Turkey; a semiotic analysis of advertisements in magazines

Due to increasing environmental problems, ecologic balance is disturbed throughout the world and thus environmental problems have today turned into global problems. Corporations, as well as consumers, play a significant role in these problems. Consequently, it has become more and more important that corporations and consumers adopt responsible behavior on this issue. Corporations, as members of society, have gained awareness on ever –increasing environmental problems and started to act responsively and responsibly on environment. They try to convey this change of perspective to their customers through green advertisements by using terms such as environment friendly, nature friendly, recyclable, energy saving, reusable, etc. Having emerged from this point, green ads are of paramount importance in bringing environment friendly products and activities to consumers. The purpose of this thesis study is to examine the green ad elements in magazine advertisements in Turkey. In parallel with this purpose, all of the magazine ads were handled in integrity with visual and textual contents. The magazine ads that are the samples of the thesis were analyzed using semiotic mehtod. As a result of analysis on 30 magazines, there were green ads only in 11 magazines and total number of green ads was calculated as 15. It was seen that 6 green ads were repeating. In this context, semiotic analysis of 9 green ads was performed. In conclusion, environmental message and environmental visual criteria, which are some of the green ad elements analyzed in the thesis, do not add clarity whether that advertisement is green or not. However, it is striking that these elements are used together in many advertisements. The green myth, which is one the green ad elements analyzed in the study, in used in all advertisements as a common element. Another important conclusion of the study is that product advertisement claims are quite vague. This conclusion brings the question whether these ads are really green or painted in green. Another conclusion of the thesis study is that green ads or not covered sufficiently in magazines that are one of the most important media for printed media in Turkey and green ads are not attached sufficient importance in Turkey.