Environmental and Social Sustainability Methods in Online and In-Person Shopping
In this article, co-authors Emelie Fröberg, Svetlana Kolesova, and Sara Rosengren reflect on the catalyst of their recently published research article, “Does the Label Fit the Channel? How “Bricks” and “Clicks” Influence Demand for Environmental and Social Sustainability Labels,” found in the Journal of Service Research. Their article can be found below the paper’s abstract.
Service firms are increasingly trying to make their offers more sustainable. In this paper, we contribute to the literature on sustainability in service by investigating the impact of the shopping channel on consumer purchases of alternatives labeled as environmentally and socially sustainable. We theorize that the salience of self-oriented (vs. other-oriented) motives in the online (vs. in-store) channel has a higher fit with self-oriented (vs. other-oriented) benefits signaled by environmental (vs. social) labels, especially for utilitarian (vs. hedonic) products. To test this expectation, we conduct three studies using real-world grocery and beauty retailer datasets that include almost 900,000 purchases either in-store (“bricks”) or online (“clicks”). Using both between-consumer and within-consumer analysis, we find empirical support for our hypotheses. Our conceptual framework and findings suggest that service firms that want to promote environmentally and socially sustainable alternatives will benefit from adapting their strategies to different domains of sustainability labels and shopping channels.
Service firms are increasingly trying to make their offers more sustainable, but does the same solution work the same way both online and offline? And does it matter if the focus is on environmental or social sustainability? Our research sets out to answer these questions using behavioral data from retailers. We were particularly inspired by related research, showing that consumers purchase healthier alternatives online compared to in-store and wondered if consumers also differed in terms of purchases of alternatives with sustainability labels.
Research on sustainability is growing in importance. When starting this project, the SHIFT-framework by Kate White and colleagues had just gained traction and inspired us to study environmental sustainability-labeled alternatives (e.g., organic label) separately from social sustainability-labeled alternatives (e.g., fairtrade label) to assess their fit with different consumer motives in the two channels. Using different methods and data sets of actual purchase behaviors, we found that consumers purchased more alternatives labeled as environmentally sustainable online compared to in-store. We also found the opposite for alternatives labeled as socially sustainable.
We hope that our research will impact both practitioners and future research to consider the importance of (a) the shopping channel and (b) the two domains of sustainability. It is also our hope that our research contributes with innovative ideas related to how different situations might encourage different kinds of sustainable consumption. In our research, we focused on the shopping channel and sustainability labels using field data. Complementary research using lab experiments would be beneficial for understanding the underlying mechanisms and, ideally, future research can continue to identify ways to efficiently promote various kinds of sustainable consumption in various situations.
