Is Sustainability a Liability? Green Marketing and Consumer Beliefs About Eco-Friendly Products.

This article examines the "sustainability liability" hypothesis, which suggests that consumers perceive sustainable products as underperforming compared to traditional products. Through a large-scale empirical study involving over 6,500 respondents and multiple product scenarios adapted from prior research, the authors find that the sustainability-liability effect is very small and unlikely to have practical significance. They further identify that this effect may only appear modestly for products emphasizing strength-related attributes, while products associated with gentleness may even benefit from sustainability perceptions. Archival linguistic analysis comparing word associations from Google News (up to 2013) and Wikipedia (up to 2021) corpora indicates that over time, sustainability has become more positively associated with product performance, suggesting a shift in consumer beliefs. These findings imply that promoting eco-friendly products does not detract from perceived product quality and support public policies encouraging sustainable product development and marketing without fearing consumer resistance based on performance concerns.