with Anocha Aribarg

Center for Brand Leadership Best Brand Paper Award, Haring Symposium, 2026

Abstract

Firms increasingly use sustainability claims and marketing campaigns to promote sustainable consumption. Designing effective messages requires understanding not just whether consumers value sustainability, but why, because different motives call for different persuasive content. This paper develops an empirical framework to recover and quantify the relative importance of primary latent benefits driving sustainable choices: Do Good (environmental impact), Feel Good (warm glow), and Look Good (social image). We first design an incentive-compatible conjoint study that elicits both consumers' choices and perceived benefits. We then estimate a hierarchical Bayesian choice model linking sustainability features, latent benefits, and choice, while allowing the importance of these benefits to correlate and vary among consumers. Applied to coffee capsules, the model shows that Feel Good dominates for downstream features, such as recyclable packaging (60%), while Do Good dominates for upstream features, such as carbon footprint (57%). Look Good matters little on average but rises to 14% among consumers with high sensitivity to social norms. A follow-up randomized experiment further confirms that advertising emphasizing relevant consumers' latent benefits raises willingness to pay more than advertising that merely mentions sustainability features. Our framework extends to other contexts, helping firms and policymakers identify the motives behind consumers' sustainable choices and design marketing strategies accordingly.

with Sherry He

Media attention: Harvard Business Review (2025)

AbstractSSRN

Companies are increasingly prioritizing environmental, social, and governance strategies, with sustainability labeling emerging as a prominent approach to inform consumers about a product's sustainability status. Despite the widespread adoption of sustainability labels, whether and why they affect product sales remains unclear. This paper quantifies the causal impact of sustainability labeling by leveraging a large-scale dataset from Amazon. Employing a difference-in-differences framework, we find that sustainability labeling leads to a 12.5% decrease in sales rank (indicating an increase in sales units) of labeled products within eight weeks. Furthermore, we show that the primary mechanism is the information effect—sustainability labeling influences consumers' decisions by conveying information that aligns with their preferences—rather than the salience effect (i.e., improved product listing salience owing to label salience or search filter availability) or platform endorsement (i.e., improved organic search ranking). Moreover, consumers are more responsive to easily accessible information on sustainability features than to hard-to-access details about certification processes, such as stringency and transparency. These findings suggest that consumers passively search for and purchase sustainable products. These insights carry implications for both firm-level sustainability strategies and platform-level information architecture.

with Anna Tuchman and Youngeun Lee

Abstract

This paper investigates product reformulation -- the adjustment of ingredients or composition of ingredients in existing products -- in the food and beverage industries. Using comprehensive data on product ingredients, nutrition facts, and store sales, we document the prevalence of reformulation, characterize the tactics firms employ, assess the impact of reformulation on product quality and differentiation, and evaluate consumer demand for reformulated products. We find that reformulation is a widespread and persistent practice, with reformulated products accounting for 26% of volume sales across categories and over time. Firms use a diverse range of tactics, including dilution and adjusting the compositional flexibility, leading to moderate shifts in nutrient density, but minimal change in the average nutritional quality within a category. We find that less healthy products tend to experience improvements in their nutritional profiles while healthier products are reformulated to be less healthy, suggesting a convergence toward average nutrient values within a category following reformulation. Finally, we find limited evidence of meaningful demand response, indicating that reformulated versions may serve as close substitutes for their originals -- even when nutrient density deteriorates without corresponding price changes. Such minimal responses suggest that reformulation may modify product quality in a way that is difficult for consumers to detect.

with Sherry He