[MPWG] Certification Consideration: When going green backfires

[De Angelis, Patricia]

With the growing number of non-regulatory certification schemes and
questions about whether such certifications could help to enhance the value
of raw botanicals so that harvesters can reap more benefit, this research
looking at consumer responses to social marketing may be of interest.

To sum:  Consumers seem to take a dimmer view of going green when it has to
do with product quality (i.e., content, ingredients), because they feel
there must be a trade-off in quality to offset the cost of the change. But
when the certification is separate from quality (i.e., Fair Trade),
consumers are more likely to view the certification favorably.

“Companies improving a basic product feature (making something more
environmentally friendly or better tasting) should either position the
improvement as unintended or emphasize that the primary goal is improving
the quality of the product. On the other hand, companies looking to
advertise their fair trade or sustainable production practices or their
donations to charity can advertise those actions without worrying that it
will affect perceptions of their products,” the authors conclude.

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When Going Green Backfires: How Firm Intentions Shape the Evaluation of
Socially Beneficial Product Enhancements
George E. Newman, Margarita Gorlin, and Ravi Dhar, Electronically published
August 15, 2014Many companies offer products with social benefits that are
orthogonal to performance (e.g., green products). The present studies
demonstrate that information about a company’s intentions in designing the
product plays an import role in consumers’ evaluations. In particular,
consumers are less likely to purchase a green product when they perceive
that the company intentionally made the product better for the environment
compared to when the same environmental benefit occurred as an unintended
side effect. This result is explained by consumers’ lay theories about
resource allocation: intended (vs. unintended) green enhancements lead
consumers to assume that the company diverted resources away from product
quality, which in turn drives a reduction in purchase interest. The present
studies also identify an important boundary condition based on the type of
enhancement and show that the basic intended (vs. unintended) effect
generalizes to other types of perceived tradeoffs, such as healthfulness
and taste.
Full text: http://www.jstor.org/stable/full/10.1086/677841
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