Green marketing and demarketing: Ecolinguistics, ecotranslation, and brand credibility in tourism and hospitality

Abstract

Tourism businesses increasingly ask customers to reconcile enjoyment with environmental responsibility. Green marketing encourages the selection of environmentally preferable services, while green demarketing asks people to reduce particular forms of consumption. Both depend on language, yet their credibility becomes especially uncertain when environmental commitments move between languages. This conceptual article connects ecolinguistics, ecotranslation, and brand credibility to explain that uncertainty. A focused synthesis of verified scholarship provides the basis for examining how promotional discourse represents ecological relationships and how translation preserves, weakens, or enlarges environmental claims. The article proposes ecological claim continuity as an analytical construct: the preservation across languages of a claim’s referent, scope, evidential status, attribution of responsibility, and requested action. Six propositions explain how continuity may influence perceived credibility through comprehension and judgements of accountability, subject to operational evidence, translation visibility, and the fairness of consumption restrictions. Constructed examples demonstrate how modest linguistic changes can convert a limited commitment into an unsupported promise or turn voluntary conservation into an obligation. A research agenda combines aligned multilingual texts, audience experiments, and independent operational evidence. The central argument is that credible environmental communication requires consistency between what a brand says, what different audiences understand, and what the organisation can substantiate. Translation therefore belongs within sustainability governance as well as promotional practice. The proposed agenda supports SDG 12 and 13 and Saudi Vision 2030 RDI priorities in sustainable tourism, green marketing, and responsible cross-linguistic environmental communication.