Abstract
As evidence of the perils of climate change rises alongside the cultural divide on environmental issues and government solutions, The Green Bundle aims to offer an alternative view. This insightful and timely guide offers a managerially friendly take on how to convert the “convenient environmentalist” from occasional green purchases to consistent blending of “sustainability with private benefits” (p. 200). Delmas and Colgan deftly synthesize behavioral economics, psychology, and strategy research to offer insights for “managers, policy makers, activists, and students—anyone who wants to use market forces to lead organizations down a sustainable path” (p. 7). While their target audience is clearly not other academics, the book offers a useful summary of how the micro-mechanisms of consumer green decisions work. Further, by exploring how and why organizations, often unintentionally, engage in greenwashing, Delmas and Colgan provide potential insights into the underlying factors that may lead to surprising results in firm- and sector-level studies of pro-environment efforts and certifications (Gehman and Grimes, 2017; Carlos and Lewis, 2018).
The authors’ stated goal is to provide an evidence-based approach to packaging the private benefits of environmental goods into a green bundle including quality, status, health, money, and emotion. The book first summarizes the backdrop of increasing consumer awareness of environmental problems, disconnected from actual purchasing decisions. The authors argue that the primary driver of this disconnect is “excuse maker” consumers who don’t buy green products because they believe they are too expensive, lower in quality, and/or not authentically addressing the problem.
Of course, this is a rather well-known phenomenon dating (at least) back to McDonough and Braungart’s (2002) assertions that improved design (both in ecological and functional performance) is the key to moving toward more environmentally friendly consumption. And the excuse makers are not alone in their skepticism of “green” products; thoughtful academics have long pointed out that abused eco-labeling may create a false perception that we are addressing environmental problems effectively (Ehrenfeld and Hoffman, 2013). Yet the authors acknowledge these as challenges that will not be solved merely by greater education and information but by also effectively communicating the individual benefits of buying products that also protect collective environmental benefits.
To do so, they recommend framing environmental information in terms of private benefits and backing this information with credible claims. This overarching strategy is explored over five chapters, each dealing with one of the co-benefits of the “green bundle.” The chapters deftly blend together interesting, and often familiar, examples with citations linking to supporting research. For example, the “Quality” chapter illustrates how Tesla’s performance-based marketing effectively contrasted with Nissan’s early guilt-based efforts to promote the all-electric Leaf through “a wandering polar bear who cruises city streets and eventually hugs a man getting into his Nissan Leaf” (p. 48). Further, they describe the evidence for the economic success of the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED) building certification that has become synonymous with high-performance construction.
The “Status” chapter will be of particular interest to the growing number of scholars seeking to understand the influence of community on environmentally friendly behavior. While we are all familiar with how social pressures can affect behavior, applying this approach is notoriously difficult for altering consumption that is not as clearly conspicuous as driving a Tesla or putting solar panels on a house. The authors highlight their research on utilizing social norms to influence electricity usage: utilizing posters reporting each individual’s electricity consumption in a dorm reduced overall usage by 20 percent, whereas simply reporting the information to individuals had no effect. Further, the book highlights that political stances can strongly influence individuals’ perceptions of such tactics; another study reported political conservatives (and men) were far more likely than liberals to opt out of such reports. While the book focuses on providing a high-level summary and is a bit short on overarching solutions, it raises important questions for crossing political and gender divides to influence environmentally beneficial consumption.
In this insight and elsewhere, the book reflects, at a micro level, the observations emerging from recent work integrating environmental issues and institutional logics. A particularly destructive assumption in seeking market-based solutions to environmental challenges is that “altruistic values always conflict with the egoistic values of consumption, so the two cannot be bundled” (p. 26). Recent work on hybrid organizations (Smith and Besharov, 2019), category emergence (Lee, Hiatt, and Lounsbury, 2017), and the impact of regional institutional logics on both environmental and philanthropic decisions (Lee and Lounsbury, 2015) all suggests that this assumption need not hold. It is a convenient assumption, however, for those excuse makers among not only consumers but also policy makers and sometimes academics.
The overarching view of what behavioral economics and psychological studies tell us about consumer decisions regarding green products provides a potential springboard for organizational theorists to begin linking phenomena at the industry level to consumers’ individual actions and firms’ communication strategies. As such, although the book is not intended for an academic audience, I found it informative and thought provoking. In particular, it pointed me toward some of the more counterintuitive findings of the authors’ prior research that I have found useful in the classroom. For example, in the “Health” chapter, the authors report findings that “environmental messages that communicate the negative public-health outcomes connected with electricity production outperform those that focus on saving money” (p. 95). In other words, a community-based logic of care for others outperforms a market-based logic of economic savings. This is just one example of how the authors summarize and reveal the unexpected drivers of adoption for environmentally beneficial behaviors.
The book achieves the goals it sets out. For anyone researching how, when, and why new products, markets, and sectors can address environmental issues through market mechanisms, this book provides a useful understanding of potential strategies and examples of grand successes as well as massive failures. With a clear, pragmatic view, Delmas and Colgan offer organizations a road map for avoiding greenwash and linking green products to potential customers. I found it an excellent primer and would recommend it to students, managers, or colleagues who are interested in an approachable and insightful overview, as well as an actionable plan for converting the convenient environmentalist.