This phenomenon is often called “viability responsibility”. Since a company needs to change certain features of its product to make it environmentally friendly, logic goes, the business must have sacrificed performance. Because it sounds intuitive, “we tend to accept it without questioning it,” he says Alexander CertevProfessor of Marketing at Kellogg.
But in one study, Chernev and his colleagues found that consumers may not eventually think in this way. His team watched people about their views on the possible effectiveness of traditional and sustainable products – and found that there was no much difference between the two.
“The intuition of the responsibility of sustainability may not be as strong as one could think,” says Chernev.
This does not mean that the result is never present, but it does not seem big enough to substantially influence companies’ performance or the warrant that affects their decisions. The finding can mitigate the concerns of managers about investing in environmentally friendly technology.
Chernev can only think about why consumers no longer see viability as a weight in the quality of the products (if they did so), but one possible reason is that ecological products have just improved over time. As people have tried them and were pleasantly surprised, they could think, “maybe this green material is not so bad,” he says.
An unexpected turn
Chernev began to wonder about this question in previous research when Sean Blair, a Graduate of Kellogg now at the University of Georgetown, investigated whether they told customers that a dedication to environmental protection could help reduce the effect of responsibility.
In the process of conducting the experiments, the researchers found it difficult to determine the base – showing that participants believed that green products were running worse. “We assumed it would be very easy,” says Chernev. But “we couldn’t repeat that.”
So they decided to carry out a follow -up study to look for the result by working with Ulf BöccenholtProfessor of Marketing at Kellogg and Himanshu Mishra at Utah University. In general, it is difficult for researchers to prove the absence of a result. Instead, they can evaluate if the result is big enough to make sense.
“Is it administratively relevant?” Cherkef asks. “Does it matter?” After all, one result could be and still is too small to make a real difference.
How good is this dish soap?
Regarding the productive academic platform online, the researchers presented 3,342 participants with scenarios and questions about 10 types of hypothetical products, including cleaners of all uses, disinfectant hand and a set of tires.
For each product type, a group of people received information indicating that the product was designed to be environmentally friendly. The other group received a product description that did not include viability between its features. For example, in the description of a cleaner general, a group read that “it was worded to be environmentally friendly”, and the other group read that “it was worded in a way that is very similar to other cleaners generally available in stores”. The participants then evaluated, on a 7 -point scale, various features related to the effectiveness of the product.
On average, the performance rating for standard products was almost the same as for ecological products. In other words, the impact of the responsibility of sustainability was negligible. The only category of environmentally friendly products that received a lower performance score was cleaner.
A surveillance analysis has shown that any possible result of the reliability of sustainability is more likely to occur when consumers attribute high value to the power of a product. For example, consumers usually prefer a face cream to be soft, which can make an environmentally friendly version more attractive. On the contrary, when choosing a product designed to remove hard stains, they may be more willing to choose a traditional choice.
An extreme scenario
But even in situations where the power seems to be primary, sustainability was not necessarily a weight.
Through the team’s research, the Covid-19 pandemic blow. People launch the shelves of hand disinfectant stores and other pathogen products closest. If there was ever a time when consumers really cared about functionality, that was it. Would the impact of the responsibility of sustainability be stronger, the team wondered?
To find out, the researchers ran a similar online study of 3,292 people, focusing on hand disinfectants, cleaners for all users and dish soap. And they spread the experiments in three periods, in April, August and in October 2020.
When the team analyzed the perceived performance difference between standardized and ecological products, “again, there was virtually no difference,” says Chernev, confirming that the result “didn’t appear yet”.
Consumer attitudes evolve over time
Finally, the team explored how people think of sustainable products changed over time. They analyzed two existing sets of data: Google News Corpus, which includes articles published until 2013, including 100 billion brands and a second set of data including all the English Wikipedia text from 2021, with more than 2.7 billion brands covering a wide range of issues.
The group found that words related to sustainability, such as “ecological” and “recycled”, were more closely linked to terms that indicate positive performance, such as “effective” and “reliable” rather than those involving negative performance, such as “fragile” or “ineffective”.
Most importantly, Chernev notes, is that the relationship between sustainability and positive performance was stronger in the latest Wikipedia database than in the older Google News database. While this was not definitive evidence that people’s views on ecological products had become more positive over time, it was in line with the results of online experiments.
Environmentally friendly for all
Understanding the shades of the effect of sustainability is important because it can shape consumer market behavior-a crucial step in tackling climate change, Chernev explains. The concern that consumers could see environmentally friendly products as a lack of performance may have owned some companies behind the complete adoption of sustainable technologies.
However, if viability is no longer regarded as responsibility, companies that have previously hesitated to develop green products may no longer have to worry about rejection by ordinary customers.
While individual market decisions may not seem significant, customer choices eventually form corporate actions. “This is what drives the behavior of companies,” says Chernev.
