Green advertisement practises: An analysis on television and magazine advertisements

Today's increase in environmental problems and their growing presence on our agenda have led to a greater awareness of both consumers and companies. One of the main influences on the purchasing behaviour of both current and potential green consumers', i.e. those who have environmental consciousness is whether or not the product benefits the environment during production, distribution even at the post consumption process. Companies have therefore adopted green promotional activities to present the product or service as meeting the environmental expectations of consumers, in order to achieve a long-term competitive advantage and create, maintain or present image of the company as environmentally sound. The purpose of this study is to analyse the relationship between environment and advertisement, based on the notion of the green advertisement, which is one of the elements of green promotional activities; to examine how this relationship is reflected in magazine and television advertisements, and in this context to present some of the features of green advertising. To this end, 109 samples have been analysed using the quantitative content analysis method. These comprise 47 printed advertisements which are published in Eko IQ, Atlas and National Geographic Turkey magazines between January-May 2014, and 62 television advertisements. The results of the study demonstrate that 33,9% of the total ads classified as green, followed by, 28,4% as green brown, 22,0% as light green, 9,2% as brown and 6,4% as extra green. The majority of companies were found to build a relationship with the environment in the "looks green" category. In the environmental claims category "product orientation" claims had the highest rate, and for the green terms category "inferential terms" had the highest rate. According to the results of the present study the level of focusing on the environment mostly emphasises the "shallow" category and the ads' environmental objective had the highest rate with 45,0% in "promotion of a product or service as being gren" category. Keywords: Green Advertisement, Green Marketing, Green Marketing Mix, Sustainability