Pink Deception Across Borders: How Pinkwashing Erodes Consumer Trust and Brand Equity in Emerging Markets

Breast cancer awareness campaigns are increasingly exploited by corporations through “pinkwashing”—linking cancer-risk products to pink ribbon branding for market gain. Grounded in Signaling Theory, this study examines how pinkwashing perception affects purchase intention across two culturally distinct emerging markets. Consumer trust and brand equity serve as parallel mediators, reflecting cognitive and evaluative pathways through which credibility failures propagate to behavioral outcomes. Health consciousness and cause-brand fit serve as moderators, representing signal receiver conditions that amplify pinkwashing’s negative effects. Using a cross-national survey of 478 respondents from India (n = 261) and Malaysia (n = 217) and structural equation modeling (SEM) with multi-group SEM (MG-SEM), findings confirm that pinkwashing perception significantly erodes consumer trust and brand equity, thereby reducing purchase intention. Cross-national differences are notable: trust erosion is stronger in India (β = −0.461) than Malaysia (β = −0.352), while cause-brand fit amplification of brand equity damage is stronger in Malaysia (β = −0.251) than India (β = −0.192). These asymmetries demonstrate that a single standardized pinkwashing risk-mitigation strategy is insufficient for institutionally and culturally distinct markets. Findings offer global marketing managers actionable, country-specific insights to address pinkwashing’s credibility crisis and build authentic cause-related marketing strategies across diverse emerging markets.