Friday Research: Do You Have to Sacrifice Quality Figurine to be Green?

When Will You Use This?  

Creating and developing positioning strategies for your new and improved products.

What’s The Red-Letter Bite Today? 

Nowadays it's quite common for companies to upgrade and add new product features in order to increase the desirability of a product. Many companies choose to redesign popular products using materials that are more environmentally-friendly. But do consumers really respond better to the "greener" products?

Current research* puts focus on green product enhancements and specifically, how the communication of environmental benefits as intended or unintended affects consumers’ purchase decisions

As authors explain, "in a series of studies, consumers learned about a company that manufactures household cleaning products and were told that the company either intended to make the product better for the environment or that the environmental gain was the result of another improvement. Consumers thought the products were higher in quality and were more likely to purchase the cleaning products when the improvement was unintended. Even when the company’s intentions were not disclosed, consumers thought the products suffered from a quality control problem, suggesting that consumers automatically perceive green products as being lower quality even when a company does not specify its intentions."

Green works for environment, but will it work on my stains?, consumers worry.

Addition To Your Bag of Tricks    

This research suggests a few communication tips for companies, manufacturing green products or thinking of improving some basic product features to become more friendly to the environment. As one of the most important issues for consumers when deciding whether or not to purchase green products is "whether the quality of the green product is undermined", the authors suggest to either position the improvement as unintended or emphasize that the primary goal is improving the quality of the product.

*Newman G.E., Gorlin M., Dhar R. “When Going Green Backfires: How Firm Intentions Shape the Evaluation of Socially Beneficial Product Enhancements.” Journal of Consumer Research: October 2014 {Thanks for the material}

P.S. When you’re done reading, I’d love for you to share your experience with redesigning a product ? Leave a comment or Tweet me, let's chat!

P.P.S. Need some help on crafting your marketing message? Let's do this together.