“The Sustainability Liability”

The screenshot above was tweeted this morning by Dr. Rebecca Reczek, Professor of Marketing at Ohio State.

In 2010, she co-authored a paper in the Journal of Marketing, “The Sustainability Liability: Potential Negative Effects of Ethicality on Product Preference.”  The paper concludes that being eco-friendly can be a drawback for certain consumer products.

According to an Implicit Association Test, consumers associate sustainable/green products with gentleness.  Therefore, when you are looking for strength – as in, a cleaning product in the time of coronavirus – you probably are less likely to choose the eco-friendly option.

On the other hand, when you are looking for gentleness-related benefits (a detergent for washing your baby’s blanket, for example) that makes you more likely to choose the more eco-friendly option.

How to bridge the gap?  The paper shows explicit cues about product strength can help. So, if you are making a tire out of recycled rubber (which is one of the hypothetical examples tested in the research) can you say something about recycled rubber’s superior gripping power, or depict it in a way that emphasizes its superior strength?