Sustainable Purchasing Patterns and Consumer Responsiveness to Sustainability Marketing

Abstract

Do on-package sustainability claims lead to both better product performance and category growth (and thus to a better world)? We conducted a large-scale study of actual consumer purchasing behavior using IRI retail scanned barcode data at point of sale from 2013-2018. We analyzed 36 consumer packaged goods (CPG) categories, representing 41% of total CPG dollar volume. We used this to calculate that 51% of the growth in the in-sample CPG market came from sustainability-marketed products. Shares of sustainability-marketed products grew across categories, and at the expense of conventionally-marketed products and in some categories are moving from niche to mainstream. In a detailed analysis of sustainability messages from five select categories representing high and low market shares, the most salient messages were category specific, with organic being the most pervasive. Legacy brands that adopted sustainability messages were benefiting from much of the sustainability marketed dollar share. Finally, while higher efficacy products with sustainability claims had lower market shares than lower efficacy products, that too is changing, and our analysis shows that messaging combining performance with sustainability can increase consumer purchasing.