Research Insight | Is Sustainability a Liability? How Consumer Beliefs About Eco-Friendly Products Have Shifted
In recent years, brands have increasingly promoted their sustainable production and environmental commitments—doing so despite the concern, based on prior research, that consumers think sustainable products perform worse than traditional products. This “sustainability liability” effect occurs, researchers have said, because consumers think strong performance in one area means weak performance in another.
Yet some of those findings are decades old, and markets evolve. As technologies have improved and consumers gain more and more experience with sustainable products, this common wisdom may no longer hold true.
In new research, the authors look at how consumer perceptions of sustainable products have shifted over time. They revisit scenarios adapted from prior studies and show that, now, the effect is relatively small and unlikely to be meaningful. What’s more, the effect differs by product attribute. For example, for products associated more with gentleness than with strength, sustainability boosts overall consumer preferences and strengthens product performance beliefs.
To explain these findings, the authors look at large media datasets, from Google News through 2013 and Wikipedia through November 2021, demonstrating that the link between sustainability and inferior product performance has indeed decreased.
For public policy makers, these findings provide important evidence that designing and promoting eco-friendly products can benefit society without detracting from perceived product performance.
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What You Need to Know
- Consumer perceptions of eco-friendly products have shifted.
- Sustainability is no longer a universal liability—it can even be a positive.
- Especially for products associated with gentleness rather than strength, sustainability can bolster consumer preferences and strengthen product performance beliefs.
Abstract
Alexander Chernev, Sean Blair, Ulf Böckenholt, and Himanshu Mishra (2024), “Is Sustainability a Liability? Green Marketing and Consumer Beliefs About Eco-Friendly Products,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. doi:10.1177/07439156241264286
Prior research has suggested that consumers believe sustainable products tend to underperform compared with those made using traditional methods, a phenomenon referred to as the “sustainability liability.” Despite early conceptual justification and evidence supporting this argument, recent research has not attempted to validate this effect and assess its practical relevance. By employing a variety of scenarios adapted from prior studies, the authors quantify the magnitude of the sustainability-liability effect and show that it is relatively small and unlikely to be meaningful. This research also estimates the boundary conditions to identify scenarios in which a significant sustainability-liability effect might occur. Using archival data, the authors demonstrate that the association between sustainability and inferior product performance has decreased over time, explaining the discrepancy between their findings and prior research. These findings have important public policy implications, providing decision makers with empirical evidence that designing and promoting eco-friendly products can benefit society without detracting from the perceived performance of the company’s offerings.