Green Claims, Thin Evidence: Sustainability Marketing and Greenwashing Risk in Indonesian Consumer Brands

Abstract

Environmental claims now perform ordinary brand work: they differentiate products, give campaigns moral meaning, and signal values that consumers cannot verify at the point of purchase. The evidence behind those claims is usually less visible. This study examines claim-evidence alignment across six consumer-brand organizations operating in Indonesia: Unilever Indonesia, Danone-AQUA, Indofood, Paragon/Wardah, Garudafood, and Nutrifood. A qualitative comparative content analysis separates consumer-facing claim artifacts from corporate evidence used to substantiate them. Individual environmental claims were coded for semantic breadth, specificity, quantitative substantiation, boundary clarity, temporal alignment, and claim-evidence proximity. Greenwashing risk is treated as a communication risk rather than an allegation of deception or a measure of environmental performance. The findings show that "thin evidence" is relational. Evidence can be real, detailed, and still too narrow for the meaning carried by a marketing claim. Product-level recycled-content statements tend to be easier to substantiate than umbrella positions such as green beauty or sustainable living. Program-based claims create a different weakness when visible activities lack a denominator that shows their material scale. The study develops claim-evidence distance as a practical marketing-management lens and argues that sustainability communication requires an evidence architecture designed alongside the claim, not assembled after it.