Do people really want to buy sustainable products?

I’ve seen a lot of reports in recent years stating that consumers want to buy more eco-friendly and socially responsible products and services. Just as examples, a 2020 report from McKinsey ¹ found that two thirds of consumers consider sustainability when making a purchase, and research from YouGov ² in 2021 found that more than half of consumers in the UK, US, Europe and Australia are prepared to pay more for products that are better for the environment. This is great news.

But there’s a catch. These types of reports are not actually that new. I’ve been seeing surveys saying that consumers want sustainable products and services since I first started researching sustainable design at university two decades ago. At first, I believed these statistics at face value and assumed that businesses would follow consumer demand and develop more sustainable offerings as a priority. However, as the years have gone by, I’ve been wondering why so many businesses have been so slow to catch on.

I've come to believe that there is something missing from these reports and that they don’t accurately reflect how consumers really think and behave. I believe there's a caveat hidden in the responses that people give to these surveys. The caveat is “all things being equal”. Consumers would like to buy more environmentally and socially responsible products, if all other things were equal. If you put two products side by side that are identical in appearance, functionality, brand appeal, quality and price but one is more environmentally friendly, then most people would choose the more environmentally friendly one. I mean, why wouldn't they if all other things were equal? And as the surveys report, some people might even pay a bit more, if all other things were equal.

On reflection, to say that consumers would like to buy more eco-friendly products is not a ground breaking research finding at all. What we really need to ask is, if all other things are not equal, are there things that people will prioritize over the environment?

The short answer to that question is yes.

We simply need to follow the logic, starting with the fact that the most eco-friendly product is no product at all. Therefore, as soon as someone has made a decision to buy something, they must be motivated primarily by something other than protecting the environment. There is a need or want, practical or emotional, that they're looking to fulfil. We can question the validity of these needs and wants but it won’t change the reality that when someone goes to buy something, they are prioritising their requirement to make the purchase over their desire to protect the environment.

The thing is that humans, even indecisive ones, always have a priority. We don’t value all things equally and when push comes to shove, our priority will always win out. The word priority is after all a singular word, meaning “the very first thing”. You can only have one first thing. These days, we talk about priorities as plural and it's common to make entire lists of them. Protecting the environment is the sort of thing that will often appear on a list of someone’s priorities, but our modern culture has lost sight of the fundamental truth that you cannot have more than one priority in a given scenario. If you're forced to make a choice, there is always something that you will choose over everything else. For most people, protection of the environment or even social responsibility is not that thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this to be judgemental about consumers. On the contrary. What I am trying to highlight is that all customers are real human beings who have needs of their own that they are trying to fulfil.

In my business, Wholegrain Digital, we design and build low energy websites. Many people assume that the majority of our clients come to us primarily because we build websites with a low environmental impact but the truth is that 99% of our clients hire us to ensure that their online presence meets the needs of their organization. That is their priority. It is the reason that they are spending money on their online presence. Making their online presence eco-friendly is often not even on the list of requirements but if it is, it's a nice to have and not the priority. I've reluctantly come to accept that as much as I wish it was different, this is only reasonable.

If the client's true priority was to minimise the environmental impact of their online presence, they would get rid of their online presence entirely. Even for clients who come to us for our digital sustainability consulting services, what they really want is to figure out how they can reduce their digital carbon footprint without compromising other things that are more important to them as an organisation.

This is why so many businesses don’t treat sustainability as a priority, because it is not the priority of their customers. The reality is that most businesses know that so long as they deliver on the priority of the client, people will buy their products even if they are not the most eco-friendly or socially responsible. This holds true so long as more eco-friendly or ethical competitors are inferior in ways that customers care more about.

So what does this mean for companies who genuinely care about their impact and want to offer more sustainable alternatives? It means that in order for our products to be successful, we must offer the customer more than just eco-friendliness or social responsibility. If we want to be a market leader, then we must keep in mind the concept of “all things being equal”.

Elon Musk has been clear since the early days of Tesla, that for them to be successful as a car company, their vehicles must be better than gasoline vehicles on every metric - styling, performance, practicality, safety, user experience and more. Of course, they haven't truly achieved this on every metric yet, but they've excelled in enough areas that demand for their vehicles has sent ripples through the entire automotive sector and triggered an industry wide shift to electrification. This has happened because Tesla produce truly incredible vehicles, not because their is huge consumer demand for eco-cars.

An Ecover refilling station being trialled in a Sainsbury’s supermarket alongside mainstream cleaning brands

Similarly, Ecover and it’s sister brand Method, have played a leading role in making more eco-friendly cleaning products mainstream by ensuring that they are as good or better than competing mainstream products. Both Tesla and Ecover now come under some criticism from deep green consumers who feel that these brands are not green enough, and perhaps they are right, but it’s important that we don’t overlook their achievements in changing mainstream perceptions, putting pressure on the incumbent industry giants to improve, and raising the baseline to the point that new challenger brands can imagine even higher levels of sustainability.

The key to making more sustainable products and services popular is to find out what customers actually prioritise and then excel on those things, while also being more socially and environmentally responsible. We learned this the hard way at Wholegrain a number of years back when our pursuit of low environmental impact led us to adopt a design approach that was too utilitarian and compromised. It taught us an important lesson and focussed our minds on finding ways of creating websites that excel on every metric that matters to our clients while also minimising environmental impact. It turns out that while this is a harder challenge, it is also a more interesting one that has the potential to create far more positive impact.

Why does all of this matter? Because if we want to use business to drive large scale social and environmental progress, we need to understand that we cannot ask our customers to compromise. Yes, we might dream of a world where people consume less and always choose the most responsible options, but that is not the world we currently live in. So long as businesses need to sell something and people need to buy something, we will need to develop products that can hold their own against competitors who care less about their social and environmental impacts. This is the big challenge that we face - to develop offerings that can compete head to head with mainstream options while also being more socially and environmentally responsible. If we can deliver that, we’ll be forces to be reckoned with.

That won’t be easy, but it’s a challenge worth pursuing.

Thanks for reading this week’s issue of Oxymoron and joining me on this journey to explore the complex challenges of trying to run a sustainable business. Please do share your thoughts with me and if you like it, please do subscribe and share with your friends and colleagues. See you next week!

1. McKinsey report on the State of Fashion 2020

2. YouGov report on consumer willingness to pay more for environmentally friendly products