Researchers used a structured questionnaire and purposive sampling to collect responses from consumers who said they were concerned about the environment. They analysed the data with Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling using SmartPLS 4.0. The study also assessed model fit, non-response and common-method biases as part of its methodological checks, according to the accepted article’s abstract.

Environmental concern was significantly associated with sustainable purchase intention in the proposed model. The specific pathway from perceived consumer effectiveness to sustainable purchase intention through environmental concern was not statistically significant. That result does not establish that environmental concern cannot mediate the relationship under other conditions or among other populations. The abstract reports the ordering of the model’s predictors but does not provide their individual effect sizes, confidence intervals or exact statistical values.

The study examined a sample restricted to environmentally concerned urban consumers in metropolitan cities, so its findings should not be generalized automatically to all Indian consumers, rural populations or consumers without environmental concerns. Because the available evidence is an abstract of accepted research rather than a full assessment of the article, additional methodological details and numerical results cannot be evaluated. The authors characterize the work as a contribution to sustainability marketing in an emerging-market setting and identify marketers, policymakers and sustainability advocates as potential users of its findings.

Subject of Research: Survey analysis of environmental concern and sustainable purchase intentions among urban consumers in India

Article Title: Environmental concern as a mediator of sustainable purchase intention among urban consumers in India

Article References: Kumar, S., Yadav, A., Kumar, M., & Mishra, S. (2026). Environmental concern as a mediator of sustainable purchase intention among urban consumers in India. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04550-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04550-6

Keywords: sustainable purchase intention, environmental concern, consumer behaviour, urban India, questionnaire survey, PLS-SEM, perceived consumer effectiveness, green brand perception, eco-friendly packaging, social media engagement, Environmental, concern

The research, published in Discover Cities by Archiman Biswas of the World Resources Institute and the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, together with Purbita Samanta of IIT Kharagpur, combined geographic information system measurements with survey data from 484 consumers in Jamshedpur, a planned Tier-II industrial city in eastern India. The authors geotagged each respondent’s residence, mapped the city’s two dominant retail agglomerations — Bistupur and Sakchi — and computed the shortest motorised road-network route from every home to the retail centroids using ArcGIS and an OpenStreetMap-derived network validated against municipal records. Crucially, they rejected straight-line Euclidean distance, which systematically understates the actual travel burden in planned urban grids with restricted crossings, in favour of a measure that reflects how people actually move through the city.

The study’s methodological centrepiece is a data-driven threshold calibration. Rather than imposing an arbitrary one-kilometre or two-kilometre cutoff — the convention in prior work — the authors applied a Chow-test segmented regression, scanning 384 candidate thresholds across the 10th to 90th percentile of the observed distance distribution. The procedure identified a structural break at 1,844 metres, where the combined residual sum of squares of two sub-sample regression models reached its minimum. Substantively, this distance corresponds to roughly 20 to 22 minutes of walking, the outer boundary of the pedestrian catchment around the retail nodes. It is precisely where, the authors argue, the cognitive and physical cost of a spontaneous store visit transitions from negligible to non-trivial.

The behavioural discontinuity at that boundary is striking. Consumers living within 1,844 metres of the retail agglomerations — 105 of the 484 respondents — reported webrooming in an average of 6.54 of their last ten fashion purchases, compared with 4.15 among those living farther away. Showrooming showed the mirror image: distant consumers averaged 2.62 showrooming episodes per ten purchases, against just 0.64 among proximate consumers. Both differences produced effect sizes exceeding 1.75 in Cohen’s d terms, far beyond the conventional threshold for a large effect. Age, income, and digital literacy did not differ significantly across the two groups, supporting the interpretation that the behavioural gap reflects spatial rather than socioeconomic sorting.

Continuous regression analysis reinforced the pattern. In ordinary least squares models with heteroskedasticity-consistent HC3 standard errors — chosen because the bounded 0-to-10 outcome variables induce heteroskedastic residuals that inflate Type I error rates under homoskedastic assumptions — log-transformed road-network distance emerged as the dominant predictor in both models. Each unit increase in log distance reduced webrooming frequency by 1.749 units and increased showrooming frequency by 1.438 units, both highly significant. The webrooming model achieved an R-squared of 0.624 and the showrooming model 0.604, substantially higher than the 0.12 to 0.19 range reported in earlier spatial e-commerce studies that treated online and offline shopping as binary alternatives rather than directional sequences. Poisson and negative binomial robustness checks confirmed that the direction and significance of the distance effect persist across distributional assumptions.

The study’s most theoretically consequential finding concerns the cognitive pathway through which distance operates. Using bootstrapped mediation analysis with 5,000 resamples, the authors tested whether perceived accessibility — the subjective evaluation of how easy it is to reach and use retail outlets, measured with three Likert-scale items — mediates the distance-behaviour relationships. For webrooming, it does: the bootstrapped indirect effect was −0.310 with a 95% bias-corrected confidence interval of [−0.453, −0.167], excluding zero and accounting for roughly 18% of the total distance effect. For showrooming, the confidence interval [−0.058, 0.181] includes zero, indicating no significant mediation. The asymmetry suggests that spatial friction reaches the two behaviours through different cognitive routes.

The authors interpret this asymmetry through the Stimulus-Organism-Response framework and activity-space theory. Webrooming is a deliberate, pre-planned sequence: the consumer commits in advance to a store visit as the purchase endpoint, making anticipated accessibility cognitively salient at the moment of channel planning. Showrooming, by contrast, typically unfolds reactively during or after a store visit, with the online purchase decision emerging from in-store product comparison rather than prior planning. When a retail centre falls within a consumer’s habitual activity space, the in-store transaction can be appended to routine movement at low marginal cost, supporting webrooming. When it lies beyond that boundary, the visit becomes a discrete spatial effort justified only by the non-substitutable benefit of tactile evaluation — and the transaction migrates online to avoid a return trip, generating showrooming.

The findings carry direct implications for retail location strategy and urban planning in India’s rapidly urbanising secondary cities, which house an estimated 35% of the country’s urban population and contribute around 65% of its incremental online shoppers. The 1,844-metre boundary around a retail agglomeration represents not merely a trade-area edge but a behavioural inflection point: beyond it, the physical store shifts from transaction venue to evaluation venue, potentially reducing in-store conversion while raising the importance of experience quality. The authors suggest that retailers serving distant consumers might prioritise in-store product presentation and comparison support, while India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce initiative could consider last-mile transport and mixed-use zoning interventions that reduce effective friction beyond the threshold. The positive association between income and both channel sequences also introduces a spatial-equity dimension, suggesting that the benefits of combining digital and physical retail are disproportionately available to economically advantaged consumers.

The study’s limitations define its agenda. The cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, the single planned city may not generalise to organically grown morphologies, and the product scope is restricted to fashion and apparel, where tactile evaluation plays a distinctive role. Self-reported channel frequencies introduce recall bias, and car ownership, local retail density, and residential self-selection remain potential confounders. Still, the Chow-test calibration procedure offers a replicable, data-driven tool for future multi-city comparisons across the Global South. What the study establishes is that even as digital retail expands at over 25% annually in India, the spatial configuration of physical stores remains a structural force in consumer channel choice — placing distance, quite literally, back at the centre of omnichannel behaviour research.

Subject of Research: A GIS-based study of 484 consumers in Jamshedpur reveals that road-network distance, not attitude, is the dominant predictor of cross-channel shopping behaviour, with opposite effects on webrooming and showrooming.

Article Title: Analysing influence of retail accessibility and spatial organisation of in store retail on cross channel shopping behaviour in tier II Indian cities

Article References: Biswas, A., & Samanta, P. (2026). Analysing influence of retail accessibility and spatial organisation of in store retail on cross channel shopping behaviour in tier II Indian cities. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 202. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00381-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00381-2

Keywords: retail geography, webrooming, showrooming, spatial friction, perceived accessibility, Tier-II cities, India, consumer behaviour, Analysing, influence, retail, accessibility

The finding strikes at one of the most intuitive assumptions in modern marketing, namely that more eco-friendly products must equal more sustainability. Dr Diletta Acuti of the University of Bath School of Management, who led the work, argues that this equation is fundamentally flawed. Sustainability, she explains, is frequently about subtraction rather than addition: reducing what is produced, conserving resources, and avoiding goods that people do not genuinely need. An extra product does not become sustainable simply because it carries an eco-friendly label. Every item, however virtuous its materials or messaging, still requires raw inputs, manufacturing energy, transport and, eventually, disposal. The bias matters because it means the market may systematically reward the companies that produce more, not fewer, things.

The scale of the evidence behind the claim is considerable. The research, conducted by teams from the University of Bath, Audencia Business School, emlyon business school, the University of Portsmouth, ISM University of Management and Economics and the University of the Aosta Valley, drew on nine separate studies spanning hotels, consumer products, conferences, festivals and trade shows, together with a field study involving real hotel guests. Across these contexts the pattern held with striking consistency. People rewarded visible eco-friendly additions such as reusable bottles, organic toiletries and sustainable gift items, but gave almost no credit to businesses that reduced or removed products, even when the reduction was the more effective environmental intervention.

One of the most telling experiments involved 302 hotel guests. Participants evaluated rooms stocked with different selections of amenities. Rooms containing a larger array of eco-friendly amenities were rated as more sustainable than rooms with a minimal set, even though the pared-down room represented the lower-waste option. The result captures the paradox at the heart of the study: the room that looked greener was, in material terms, the less sustainable one. Guests were responding to what they could see, and what they could see was abundance, albeit abundance dressed in sustainable packaging. The absence of items, however deliberate and however beneficial, left no visual trace to be rewarded.

That visibility gap, the researchers argue, is the psychological engine of the bias. Adding something is inherently observable; removing something is not. Consumers can see the bamboo accessory, the reusable bottle or the eco-labelled hotel toiletry, and they interpret these objects as evidence of corporate effort. When a business removes unnecessary products to save resources, customers cannot see what is no longer there, so the action attracts little recognition and may even be read as a decline in service quality or generosity. In effect, the perceptual system that consumers use to judge sustainability is calibrated to detect additions, leaving subtraction invisible and unrewarded. Companies that genuinely minimise their footprint may therefore be outcompeted, in reputation terms, by rivals that simply add more green-looking products.

The implications extend well beyond hotel bathrooms. Dr Acuti points to the proliferation of reusable items as a case study in good intentions curdling into overconsumption. Reusable cups, water bottles and tote bags are all sound alternatives to disposable products, but many people now own cupboards full of them. She admits to having accumulated around twenty tote bags herself, many handed out free at conferences and events. One reusable bag is useful; producing and distributing far more than people need risks turning a sustainable idea into another form of overconsumption. Each additional tote, bottle or cup carries its own production and distribution footprint, and once the reuse threshold is passed, the cumulative environmental cost of these duplicates begins to rival the disposables they were meant to replace.

There is, however, an encouraging note in the findings. The studies showed that the sustainable additive bias can be reduced, and the remedies are practical. Clearly communicating the environmental effort behind removing products helps consumers understand that subtraction is a deliberate sustainability measure rather than a cut in service. Retaining highly recognisable sustainability signals, such as refillable bottles or other reusable products, also preserves the visible cues that consumers rely on when forming judgements. A hotel, for example, could replace several miniature toiletry bottles with one clearly labelled refillable dispenser, combining genuine waste reduction with a visible marker of environmental intent. The key insight is that reduction does not have to remain invisible; it can be made legible to customers through communication and design.

The authors argue that businesses, policymakers and environmental organisations all need to rethink the assumption that sustainability always means adding more environmentally friendly products. Companies should explain when items have been removed to save resources or prevent waste, and hotels in particular should tell guests when amenities have been withdrawn for environmental reasons, so that fewer products on the shelf is understood as a deliberate sustainability measure rather than a reduction in quality. Policymakers and environmental groups, meanwhile, should place greater emphasis on waste prevention, reduction and what the researchers describe as less but better approaches. Without clearer communication, organisations may continue to receive more recognition for handing out another green product than for avoiding the need to produce it in the first place, a perverse incentive that undermines the very goals the green products are meant to serve.

The study’s central message is deceptively simple: less can be better. People are accustomed to treating addition as improvement, but removing an unnecessary product does not mean reducing quality, and can in fact create a more efficient service and a genuinely better environmental outcome. Companies can and should produce individual items more sustainably, and that matters. Yet if overall consumption continues to grow, more resources will still be consumed, however green each unit of production becomes. Sustainable production alone cannot solve the problem of overconsumption. The deeper question, the researchers conclude, is whether another product is useful or necessary at all, and until consumers, companies and policymakers learn to reward restraint as visibly as they reward green abundance, well-meaning sustainability efforts risk feeding the very excess they aim to cure.

Subject of Research: Consumer perception of corporate sustainability actions, specifically the tendency to reward added eco-friendly products over product removal that reduces waste

Article Title: University of Bath study identifies harmful paradox behind well-meaning green efforts

Article References: University of Bath study identifies harmful paradox behind well-meaning green efforts. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: sustainable additive bias, overconsumption, consumer behaviour, sustainability, green marketing, waste reduction, hotel amenities, reusable products, University of Bath, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, eco-friendly products, environmental psychology

The scale of the phenomenon is staggering. Separate research by Material Focus found that in the United Kingdom alone, more than half a billion small Fast Tech electrical items were purchased in a single year, roughly 16 items every second. The term itself is a deliberate echo of fast fashion: products that are cheap, ubiquitous, used briefly and replaced without much thought. The survey suggests consumers have fully internalized that bargain. Fifty-eight percent of buyers could recall a Fast Tech product they used for no more than six months, including 39 percent who recalled discarding one unused, after a single use or within a month of purchase. Yet satisfaction remains remarkably high, with 61 percent of Fast Tech consumers saying they are content overall and only 8 percent dissatisfied. Low price, cited by 55 percent of buyers, and convenience appear to trump nearly every other consideration.

Perhaps the most revealing finding is a paradox at the heart of consumer attitudes. Shoppers understand perfectly well that these products are disposable. Forty-six percent expect Fast Tech to have a shorter lifespan than more expensive alternatives. But the environmental implications barely register: only 21 percent consider Fast Tech more environmentally harmful than costlier products, and just 16 percent simultaneously associate it with both a shorter life and greater environmental harm. As Dimitri Naczaj, co-founder of Bellegarde Scientific Consulting, put it, consumers understand that an inexpensive electronic product may not last forever; far less visible is what happens when millions of individual purchasing decisions become millions of discarded cables, earbuds, lights, toys and gadgets. That gap between awareness of fragility and awareness of consequence is precisely where the waste crisis grows.

So where do dead Fast Tech devices actually go? The survey found no single dominant route, and that fragmentation is itself part of the problem. Keeping devices at home was the most common outcome, reported by 29 percent of buyers, meaning drawers and cupboards across Europe are quietly filling with dormant electronics. Just 27 percent took products to recycling centres or municipal facilities, and 19 percent used in-store collection points. Incorrect disposal was widespread: 23 percent reported putting Fast Tech into household waste, 21 percent into plastics recycling, and 7 percent into street bins. Overall, 27 percent of buyers reported using only waste-disposal routes for unwanted devices, while 32 percent used only recycling or reuse routes. Some survey questions allowed multiple responses, but the pattern is clear: a large share of small electronics never reaches the systems built to recover their materials.

Strikingly, incorrect disposal is not always deliberate. Among respondents who reported using only waste-disposal routes, 21 percent said they did so to protect the environment, a figure that points to deep confusion about where small electronics belong. Habit was the most commonly cited reason for end-of-life choices overall, followed by environmental protection and convenience. The materials at stake are far from trivial. Fast Tech products contain plastics, metals and other recoverable resources that are simply lost when devices are thrown into general waste. And a growing proportion contain lithium-ion batteries, which introduce a hazard that extends far beyond wasted resources.

When battery-powered devices are discarded with household rubbish, they can be crushed or punctured inside collection vehicles, sorting plants and waste-treatment facilities, potentially igniting fires that endanger workers, damage equipment and disrupt waste services. The problem is not hypothetical. Findings from the WEEE Forum’s Batteries Roundtable show that 36 percent of e-waste operators surveyed reported experiencing a battery-related fire at their facilities during the previous year. In France, the number of fires at waste-treatment facilities linked to lithium batteries doubled between 2019 and 2023. Single-use vapes, wireless earbuds, small electronic toys and other battery-powered products are singled out as items of particular concern. As Magdalena Charytanowicz of the WEEE Forum and coordinator of International E-Waste Day warned, a tiny battery-powered gadget tossed into a household bin may seem inconsequential, but multiplied by millions of products it becomes a serious problem, both in lost resources and in fire risks for the people and facilities handling waste.

Behind the consumer behaviour lies a structural problem that the WEEE Forum argues deserves urgent regulatory attention: electronics sold online by companies that may not be registered under national producer-responsibility legislation. Where sellers fail to comply, the required recycling fees may never be paid, take-back responsibilities go unmet, and collection and recycling systems are left to handle the products at end of life without the corresponding financing. Public awareness of these obligations is strikingly low. Only 29 percent of those surveyed knew that online platforms selling electronics are legally required to contribute financially to e-waste collection and recycling; 14 percent had heard of the requirement but did not know the details, while 57 percent were entirely unaware of it. In effect, online marketplaces may be providing a back door through which electronics enter a market without anyone taking financial responsibility for what happens to them afterwards.

The WEEE Forum frames this as both an environmental issue and a question of fairness. Companies that comply with extended producer responsibility requirements bear costs that non-compliant competitors can avoid, potentially putting responsible businesses at a competitive disadvantage. Pascal Leroy, Director General of the WEEE Forum, argued that the principle should be straightforward: if a company makes money selling electrical and electronic products into a country, it should contribute to the cost of collecting and recycling those products when consumers are finished with them. He added that consumers shopping online this Black Friday should not have to investigate the environmental compliance of every seller, and that the platforms facilitating those sales are in a powerful position to ensure sellers comply with the rules and that recycling costs are covered. With 64 percent of surveyed consumers saying they do not intend to reduce their Fast Tech purchasing, the pressure on those systems is only set to grow.

The age dynamics embedded in the data suggest the trend will not reverse on its own. Ninety-three percent of respondents aged 18 to 29 had purchased Fast Tech during the previous year, declining steadily to 61 percent among those aged 65 and older. Nor is there much evidence of social pressure against the habit: only 14 percent expect people important to them to disapprove of buying Fast Tech, almost half of respondents believe more people are buying it than before, and nearly three-quarters of buyers encounter Fast Tech products at least weekly. Yet the survey also reveals an appetite for better products, with 80 percent saying they would have paid more for a longer-lasting alternative to at least some items, even as 59 percent would still replace a broken Fast Tech product with another inexpensive one. That tension between willingness to pay for durability and the gravitational pull of cheap convenience defines the policy challenge.

International E-Waste Day, which falls on 14 October and is now in its ninth year, is being used this cycle to deliver a simple three-part message: recognise, return and demand responsibility. Recognise that anything with a plug, cable, circuit board or battery is electronic waste at the end of its useful life, regardless of how small or inexpensive it is, and should never go into general household waste. Return unwanted devices to official collection points, retailer take-back locations or dedicated drop-off sites, with retailers in the European Union carrying take-back obligations, and donation, repair and reuse offering circular alternatives. And demand that regulators, retailers and online marketplaces ensure sellers meet producer-responsibility requirements and contribute to the collection and recycling systems their products rely on. The campaign has grown rapidly since its launch by the WEEE Forum and its members in 2018; in 2025, more than 140 organisations in 50 countries across six continents took part, generating an estimated 1.8 billion potential media impressions across 55 countries. As the holiday shopping season approaches, the message from the e-waste community is that the true cost of a two-euro gadget is not printed on its price tag, and that the drawer full of forgotten cables and dead earbuds in almost every home is where that hidden bill is quietly accumulating.

Subject of Research: Consumer disposal behaviour and environmental impacts of small, inexpensive electronics known as Fast Tech

Article Title: ‘Fast tech’ fuels growing e-waste concern as millions of small, low-cost electronics flood world markets

Article References: ‘Fast tech’ fuels growing e-waste concern as millions of small, low-cost electronics flood world markets. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: e-waste, Fast Tech, WEEE Forum, International E-Waste Day, lithium-ion batteries, extended producer responsibility, online marketplaces, consumer behaviour, recycling, Black Friday, waste fires, circular economy

The study, led by Pei Zhou of Cornell’s Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, together with Yuqing Zheng, Harry M. Kaiser and Miguel I. Gómez, is among the most comprehensive attempts to date to test whether packaging claims actually track with nutritional quality. The team used the Mintel Global New Products Database to capture every packaged food and beverage product launched in the United States between 2015 and 2024, spanning beverages and ten categories of processed consumer packaged goods. Rather than judging products on a single nutrient, they scored each item with the United Kingdom nutrient profiling model, a composite measure that balances components the model aims to limit, such as energy, saturated fat, total sugar and sodium, against components it aims to encourage, including fibre, protein and the share of fruit, vegetables and nuts.

The technical logic of the nutrient profiling model matters here. Each product receives points per 100 grams for the nutrients to limit, the so-called A points, and subtracts points for the nutrients to encourage, the C points, yielding a nutrient profile score in which higher numbers indicate worse overall quality. Products exceeding a threshold of four points for foods or one point for beverages are classified as less healthy. This framework, developed by the UK Food Standards Agency in 2004 and 2005, is used in real regulatory contexts, including advertising restrictions aimed at children, which makes it a policy-relevant benchmark rather than an arbitrary yardstick.

The sheer prevalence of claims is striking. More than half of all new products carried at least one of the four claim types examined, peaking at 61.1 percent in 2019 and 2020 before easing to 54.5 percent in 2024. Natural claims, which include organic, GMO free and whole grain labels, were the most common, followed by Minus claims such as low calorie or no added sugar, then Plus claims like added fibre or vitamin fortification. Functional claims, which tout physiological benefits such as cardiovascular support or probiotics, remained comparatively rare. Yet despite this flood of positive messaging, roughly two-thirds of all newly launched products were classified as less healthy under the nutrient profiling model, a coexistence the authors describe as revealing a fundamental gap between marketing salience and nutritional substance.

When the researchers compared products with and without each claim, the picture was inconsistent in ways that should trouble both regulators and shoppers. For foods, most claims were aligned with better nutrient profile scores, with one glaring exception: products boasting low, no or reduced trans fat actually scored worse overall than comparable products without the claim. In dairy and egg products, this discrepancy reflected lower protein alongside higher saturated fat, energy and sodium, while in meals and side dishes it was driven by elevated sodium and saturated fat. In other words, removing one notorious fat appears to have been accompanied by substitutions that eroded the overall nutritional profile.

Beverages told an even more troubling story. Four Minus claims showed significant discrepancies: low, no or reduced calorie, sugar free, low sodium and low saturated fat. Products carrying sodium claims in carbonated soft drinks, flavoured still drinks and ready-to-drink coffees and teas had worse overall scores than their unclaimed counterparts, and the component analysis identified the culprit: higher total sugar. Similarly, in flavoured still drinks, reductions in saturated fat were offset by increased sugar. The pattern suggests two complementary mechanisms at work. The first is reformulation trade-off, where cutting a targeted nutrient prompts changes elsewhere in the recipe that are less favourable. The second is selective signalling, where a claim truthfully highlights one improvement while remaining silent about the rest of the product’s composition.

Perhaps the most sobering finding concerns products whose claims were aligned with better scores. Even among these, many still exceeded the thresholds for classification as less healthy. A relative improvement within a category does not necessarily move a product below the regulatory cut-off, meaning a shopper comparing two items may reasonably choose the one with the claim, yet both may fall short of any meaningful standard of healthfulness. The authors note limited exceptions, such as vitamin and mineral fortification, added fibre and probiotic or prebiotic claims, which more often coincided with products clearing the nutrient profiling bar.

These results dovetail with a well-documented cognitive phenomenon known as the health halo effect, in which a favourable impression in one domain spills over into unrelated judgements. Earlier experimental work has shown that low-fat labels can increase consumption, that organic labels bias calorie estimates downward, and that natural labels inflate perceived quality, particularly among less experienced consumers. The new study adds a market-level dimension to this psychology: the claims that most strongly trigger halo effects, especially natural claims, also showed consistent within-category discrepancies, meaning products carrying them were often nutritionally worse than similar products without them. Because natural claims are not strictly defined within US regulatory frameworks, unlike nutrient content and structure and function claims overseen by the Food and Drug Administration, they operate with particular freedom.

Importantly, the researchers emphasize that none of these patterns implies regulatory violations. A claim that complies with FDA requirements is accurate about the specific attribute it addresses, but accuracy about one nutrient is not a complete or balanced representation of overall quality. The findings instead expose a structural limitation of attribute-based labelling: by design, such claims illuminate a single dimension while leaving the multidimensional profile in shadow. This matters for policy because current US dietary guidance, including the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025 to 2030 and the FDA’s sodium reduction initiative, targets individual nutrients in isolation. The evidence that sodium reductions in beverages coincide with higher sugar suggests that single-nutrient strategies may not translate into genuine improvements in dietary quality.

The international contrast is instructive. Interpretive labelling systems such as traffic light labels and Nutri-Score in Europe provide summary indicators of overall nutritional quality and have been linked to improved consumer choices and product reformulation, while Chile and Mexico have gone further with mandatory warning labels and restrictions on which products may carry claims at all. In the United States, survey evidence indicates that 83 percent of consumers read food labels and 78 percent prioritize health claims, yet only 16 percent find such claims highly trustworthy. Recent FDA moves, including the updated definition of the Healthy claim, which uses food-group criteria and limits on added sugars, sodium and saturated fat, and a proposed front-of-package Nutrition Info system, represent steps toward profile-based approaches. The authors caution that their analysis is observational, covers newly launched products rather than the full food supply, and does not directly measure consumer responses, leaving room for future work linking claims to purchasing behaviour. Still, the central conclusion stands: a claim on the front of a package is a signal about one attribute, not a verdict on the whole, and shoppers who read it as the latter may be buying less health than the label implies.

Subject of Research: The alignment between on-package nutrition claims and overall nutritional quality of newly launched US food and beverage products

Article Title: On-package claims are imperfect signals of overall nutritional quality

Article References: Zhou, P., Zheng, Y., Kaiser, H. M., & Gómez, M. I. (2026). On-package claims are imperfect signals of overall nutritional quality. Nature Food. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-026-01435-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s43016-026-01435-9

Keywords: nutrition labelling, on-package claims, nutrient profiling model, health halo effect, food policy, Nature Food, consumer behaviour, food marketing, front-of-pack labelling, reformulation, added sugar, public health

The study, published in The Scandinavian Journal of Economics under the title Sin taxes in a sealed market: dilution and leakage related to cross-border shopping, was conducted by Magnus Munk Bjerg, Carl-Emil Pless, Christopher Posselt and Sinne Smed, all of the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen. Rather than estimating what Danes buy in German border shops, the researchers took a different approach: they examined what happened to Danish households’ purchasing patterns when cross-border shopping became effectively impossible during the COVID-19 border closures of 2020 and 2021. The logic is straightforward. If the authorities are correct that purchases made in Germany would simply migrate back to Danish shops in the absence of the border option, then the closure periods should reveal a large surge in domestic spending on the affected goods. What the researchers found instead was a considerably smaller shift.

The numbers at the centre of the dispute are striking. According to the Danish Ministry of Taxation, the Danish state lost DKK 1.16 billion in 2019 due to cross-border shopping, excluding tobacco products, and the ministry’s broader annual estimate for sin goods stands at approximately DKK 1.5 billion. The ministry arrives at these figures by basing its calculations on what Danes are observed buying in Germany. The University of Copenhagen team’s estimate, by contrast, comes in at DKK 415 million, roughly a third of the official figure. The gap, the researchers argue, stems from a fundamental assumption embedded in the ministry’s method: that all purchases made in Germany would instead have been made in Denmark if the border had been closed. Their findings show that this is not the case. Danes purchase only a fraction of the products in Denmark that they previously bought in Germany, which means the actual financial loss to the state is substantially smaller than the official accounting implies.

Magnus Munk Bjerg, a PhD student at the Department of Food and Resource Economics and co-author of the study, explains the distinction between the two approaches. The Ministry of Taxation bases its calculations on what Danes buy in Germany, but if the goal is to understand what Denmark actually loses, the relevant question is what happens to consumption inside Denmark. That, he says, is precisely what the research team set out to measure. He also offers a behavioural explanation for why Danes do not simply substitute the same basket of products in domestic shops once the border option disappears. Once people have packed the car or trailer and driven a considerable distance, they are likely to buy a range of additional products to make the trip worthwhile. In other words, a substantial share of what is recorded as cross-border spending is not a one-for-one substitute for domestic purchases at all, but rather additional consumption that would not otherwise occur.

The empirical design of the study exploits a natural experiment created by the pandemic. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, the closure of the Danish-German border removed the cross-border shopping option for everyone, allowing the researchers to observe how domestic demand responded when the cheaper German alternative vanished. To isolate the effect, they divided Denmark into geographic groups based on distance from the nearest border shop. Households in postcodes within 150 kilometres of the nearest border shop lost access to cross-border shopping during the lockdowns and could therefore be expected to shift their spending. These households were compared with households in postcodes across the rest of Jutland and Funen, which were affected by the same lockdowns but lived too far from the border for a cross-border trip to be financially worthwhile. Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm were excluded from the analysis because residents of those regions can access cross-border shopping via bridges and ferries, complicating the distance-based comparison. Postcode districts with no households participating in the research panel were also set aside.

The results reveal that cross-border shopping is, above all, a local phenomenon. Households living within 30 kilometres of the border increased their spending on sin goods in Danish shops by 109 percent when the border closed, a dramatic shift indicating that for these communities, shopping in Germany had been a routine and significant part of household consumption. The affected category of sin goods was broad, encompassing sweets, chocolate, crisps, soft drinks, beer, wine and spirits. Averaged across all households living within 150 kilometres of the border, spending on sin goods in Danish shops rose by 21 percent as a result of the border closure. Perhaps most telling for national policy: beyond 120 kilometres from the border, the researchers could detect no change in household consumption patterns at all. Distance, in other words, is decisive. For most of the country, the option of shopping in Germany is simply too costly and inconvenient to influence behaviour, and taxes on unhealthy products operate on those households exactly as intended.

The researchers are careful to stress that cross-border shopping remains highly significant for people living close to the border, and their findings do not erase that reality. Nevertheless, the study carries an important message for the national debate. Carl-Emil Pless, a postdoctoral researcher and co-author, notes that if the policy objective of taxing these products is both to increase government revenue and improve public health, the findings suggest that those effects are likely to be fully realised for the vast majority of Danish households. If sin taxes on these goods were increased tomorrow, the results indicate that it would primarily be people living close to the border who would respond by shopping across it. Some residents of the border region might travel to Germany even more frequently than they already do, Pless observes, but this is a relatively small group overall, and the effect is therefore primarily local rather than national.

Methodologically, the study draws on data from the YouGov Shopper Panel, a panel of Danish households that continuously records grocery purchases, giving the researchers a detailed longitudinal picture of what households bought before, during and after the border closures. To guard against artefacts of a single data source, the findings were validated using an independent dataset from Spenderlog. This dual-source validation matters for a study whose conclusions contradict official government estimates, because the credibility of the result rests on the quality of the underlying consumption data. By observing actual household behaviour in a period when the cross-border option was removed, the researchers were able to measure the substitution between German and Danish purchases directly, rather than inferring it from records of what Danes bought abroad. That direct measurement is what allows them to conclude that the leakage of tax revenue is far more limited than the ministry’s method suggests.

Beyond the specific numbers, the study has implications for how policymakers think about the optimal level of taxation on sin goods. The researchers are explicit that they are not prescribing what the tax rate should be. But their results show, in Bjerg’s words, that cross-border shopping should carry less weight when policymakers decide how taxes on unhealthy foods ought to be designed. For a country that has long weighed public health goals against the fear of revenue draining south across the border, the message is that the fear has been overstated. The revenue and health benefits of taxing sweets, soft drinks and alcohol appear to reach nearly the whole population, with the dilution effect confined to a narrow band of border communities. As debates over sugar taxes and health-motivated levies continue across Europe, the Danish case offers a quantified reminder that the geography of consumer behaviour, not just the level of the tax, determines how much a national tax policy actually loses to its neighbours.

Subject of Research: The effect of cross-border shopping on the revenue effectiveness of Danish sin taxes

Article Title: Cross-border shopping dilutes public revenue less than previously thought

Article References: Cross-border shopping dilutes public revenue less than previously thought. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: sin taxes, cross-border shopping, Denmark, Germany, VAT, public revenue, Danish Ministry of Taxation, University of Copenhagen, COVID-19 border closures, consumer behaviour, unhealthy foods, tax policy

The research team set out to understand what actually happens when people turn to tools such as conversational AI assistants while organising a real trip. Rather than running a laboratory experiment, the researchers drew on interviews with a group of UK adults who had used generative AI to help plan a recent or upcoming journey. From these accounts, they built a framework explaining how the technology redistributes mental work during the planning process. The central idea is subtle but important: generative AI does not simply automate holiday planning. Instead, it takes over specific coordination tasks, such as organising information, tracking details and keeping options ordered, which frees travellers to concentrate on the judgements that matter most to them.

This distinction between redistributing mental work and removing it runs through the whole study. The researchers describe a planning process built from a series of interconnected decisions about transport, accommodation, budgets and activities. Each decision constrains the others, and the sheer volume of information available online can quickly tip an engaged planner into a state of overwhelm. In that state, people tend to procrastinate, abandon their plans or settle for the first acceptable option simply to end the strain. The framework shows how an AI assistant can provide structure at exactly these pressure points, helping travellers stay focused and making it easier to move forward without hijacking the final choice.

According to the findings, generative AI supports travellers in three main ways. First, it reduces the mental effort of organising, tracking and coordinating plans, which in turn eases feelings of overwhelm. Second, it creates room to pause, compare options and reflect before committing to a decision, a form of breathing space that many interviewees found difficult to achieve when planning alone. Third, it helps travellers get started, keeps the planning process moving and carries it through to completion. For some participants, this third function was transformative: a holiday that might have been delayed indefinitely or abandoned entirely became something they felt able to finish planning.

Dr Yoonjung Kim, a doctoral researcher in Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of Surrey and lead author of the study, explained the mechanics behind this effect. Planning a holiday, she noted, involves a series of connected decisions that can quickly become overwhelming, particularly when travellers face endless information and choices. The research finds that generative AI can provide structure, help people stay focused and make it easier to move forward without taking the final decision out of their hands. In cognitive terms, the technology acts as an external memory and organising layer, absorbing the clerical side of planning so that limited human attention can be spent on comparison and evaluation.

The benefits were most pronounced among travellers who found planning hardest to manage. The study suggests that AI turned holiday planning from a task they might delay or give up on into something they felt capable of completing. This is a significant finding because it reframes AI travel tools not merely as conveniences for tech-savvy users but as potential accessibility aids. The same properties that make generative AI useful for a busy professional comparing flight combinations, the ability to summarise options, hold context across a long conversation and keep multiple constraints visible, can make the difference between a possible holiday and an impossible one for someone who struggles with executive function or information overload.

Professor Iis Tussyadiah, Dean of Surrey Business School and co-author of the study, emphasised this broader implication. For some travellers, she observed, generative AI is more than a convenient shortcut: it can make a demanding decision-making process feel manageable and, in some cases, make planning feel possible. She argued that the findings show how travel technology could become more inclusive by being designed around the different ways people think, plan and make decisions. That framing points toward what the researchers call cognitively inclusive travel technology, systems that accommodate diverse cognitive styles rather than assuming a single idealised planner who processes information linearly and effortlessly.

The researchers highlight one group that could benefit substantially from such design thinking: neurodivergent travellers, for whom the open-ended, multi-constraint nature of trip planning can be especially taxing. At the same time, they are careful to note that cognitive overload is not a niche problem. Any traveller can hit a planning wall when a trip involves large amounts of information, multiple constraints and interconnected decisions. A family coordinating a multi-generational holiday, a traveller managing a medical requirement abroad, or simply anyone facing a saturated search-results page all encounter the same underlying difficulty: the working memory required to hold a trip in mind exceeds what is comfortably available.

Dr Bora Kim, Associate Professor in Surrey Hospitality and Tourism Management and co-author of the study, offered a forward-looking perspective on what this means for the travel industry. The real promise of AI in travel planning, she argued, is not simply speed or convenience. The same tool can support different travellers at different points of difficulty while allowing them to retain control over their decisions. She called for travel technologies designed to provide personalised cognitive and emotional support while protecting travellers’ autonomy, a formulation that treats AI as an assistant operating under human direction rather than an agent making purchases and itineraries on its own initiative.

The study’s conceptual framework arrives at a moment when generative AI is rapidly being woven into consumer travel platforms, from airline booking assistants to chatbot concierges. By identifying where AI support genuinely helps, reducing coordination burden, enabling reflection, and sustaining momentum through to completion, and where human control must remain, the Surrey research offers designers and travel companies a map of the terrain. It also offers travellers a reassuring message: the goal of AI in holiday planning is not to choose your trip for you, but to carry enough of the administrative weight that choosing becomes enjoyable again. For the overwhelmed majority who have abandoned a booking page at midnight, that distinction may prove to be the difference between another unrealised plan and a departure date on the calendar.

Subject of Research: Generative AI as cognitive scaffolding in travel decision-making and holiday planning

Article Title: AI could make holiday planning easier for overwhelmed travellers

Article References: AI could make holiday planning easier for overwhelmed travellers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: generative AI, travel planning, decision-making, cognitive load, University of Surrey, Journal of Travel Research, tourism technology, neurodivergent travellers, cognitive scaffolding, consumer behaviour, AI assistants, travel industry

The research team, led by Professor Ross Gordon of the UTS Business School, a Professor of Behaviour and Social Change, set out to understand not just what sceptical Australians believe about EVs, but how those beliefs are shared, interpreted and validated within their social worlds. The findings suggest that misinformation about electric cars behaves less like a series of factual errors and more like a community asset: a body of shared stories that people exchange through trusted networks, both online and offline. The researchers describe this phenomenon with a new concept, EV misinformation communities, which captures how loose, informal networks of people can collectively sustain and legitimise anti-EV narratives without any formal organisation or fixed membership.

A central insight of the study is that many of these myths grow from what Professor Gordon calls a kernel of truth. Battery fires, charging access, limited driving range and the environmental footprint of manufacturing are all legitimate subjects of scrutiny. The problem arises when a genuine limitation, an isolated incident or an unresolved concern is stripped of context, generalised to all electric vehicles, or recruited to support broader claims about the technology that are not consistent with the best available evidence. A kernel of truth, the researchers argue, can make misinformation far more credible and persuasive than an obviously fabricated claim, because it gives the listener something concrete to anchor their doubts to.

The interviews reveal how this dynamic plays out in practice. Participants repeated claims about the frequency and risk of EV battery fires, with one expressing fear of a car bursting into flames in the front yard. Others described electric vehicle manufacturing as raping and pillaging the earth, characterised EV drivers as people who cannot drive or are often in accidents, and worried that the absence of engine noise was going to lead to a lot of people getting run over. These are not the polished arguments of organised campaigns; they are colloquial, emotionally charged stories that circulate through social media feeds, family conversations and workplace banter, often beginning as jokes or memes that are later taken seriously.

Professor Gordon notes that some of this material originates as disinformation, meaning false or misleading content deliberately created and spread to deceive or disrupt. Once it enters circulation, however, it becomes misinformation when ordinary people encounter it and share it without any intent to deceive. This distinction matters for anyone trying to counter false claims, because it means the people repeating an anti-EV story are often sincere, socially embedded messengers rather than bad actors. Correcting them with facts alone can feel like an attack on their community or identity, and may even entrench the belief further.

The mechanics of validation are where the study breaks new ground. The researchers found that claims encountered on social media frequently became common currency for discussing EV safety in face-to-face interactions, creating a feedback loop between digital and physical social spaces. Repetition through trusted relationships and familiar media makes the claims appear credible, reinforcing concerns, fears of change and distrust of government and market actors. For some participants, these stories offered something more valuable than accuracy: reassurance. Believing that electric vehicles are dangerous, impractical or environmentally harmful provided an alternative to the message that the transition to EVs is inevitable, making hesitation or continued reliance on familiar petrol and diesel vehicles feel entirely reasonable.

This reassurance function helps explain why EV misinformation has proven so sticky in Australia specifically. Although electric vehicle uptake is increasing globally, adoption remains uneven across countries and consumer groups, and Australia has been comparatively slow to embrace the technology. Vast driving distances, genuine questions about regional charging infrastructure and a long national love affair with large combustion-engine vehicles all provide fertile ground for narratives portraying EVs as poorly suited to Australian lifestyles. The misinformation does not emerge in a vacuum; it attaches itself to real anxieties about cost, control, convenience and identity, and then amplifies them into sweeping claims about the technology as a whole.

The policy implications of the research are significant. The authors argue that addressing EV misinformation will require far more than fact-checking or simply providing additional information to sceptics. Because the false claims are sustained by social trust and emotional reassurance, corrections delivered through official channels may bounce off entirely. Instead, Professor Gordon says, policymakers and industry need to address people’s underlying concerns about cost, control, trust, fairness and lifestyle. They should also work through trusted messengers and networks, and give Australians opportunities to have positive, real-world experiences with electric vehicles, whether through test drives, community demonstrations or exposure to EV-owning peers whose lived experience contradicts the circulating myths.

Building that trust, the researchers contend, will require credible information delivered alongside practical responses to genuine barriers, including affordability, vehicle choice and charging access, particularly in rural and regional areas where range anxiety and infrastructure gaps are most acute. A fair and inclusive transition, they argue, must also create alternative sources of trust, validation and reassurance around electric vehicles. In other words, the answer to an misinformation community is not a lecture but a counter-community: networks of trusted voices and authentic experiences that can offer sceptics an equally credible social home for their doubts to be resolved rather than reinforced.

The study arrives at a critical moment for Australia’s decarbonisation agenda. Transport is a major and growing source of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, and the pace of EV adoption directly affects efforts to mitigate climate change and reduce the health impacts of air pollution. If misinformation continues to shape perceptions, judgements and purchasing decisions, even well-designed incentives and infrastructure investments may underperform. By mapping the social and cultural processes through which EV myths are shared and validated, the UTS team has provided policymakers, industry and communicators with a more realistic picture of the challenge: the battle over electric vehicles in Australia is being fought not in technical reports but in front yards, group chats and kitchen-table conversations, one repeated story at a time.

Subject of Research: Electric vehicle misinformation and consumer beliefs in Australia

Article Title: The electric car myths Australians can’t shake

Article References: The electric car myths Australians can’t shake. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: electric vehicles, misinformation, disinformation, University of Technology Sydney, consumer behaviour, Australia, battery fires, charging infrastructure, climate change, Energy Research & Social Science, social networks, EV adoption

The research, conducted by Bui Huy Khoi of the Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, set out to disentangle the psychological machinery that connects sustainability perceptions to buying decisions in the cosmetics sector. Rather than asking consumers directly whether they intend to buy green products, the study built a structural model in which four sustainability-related factors, green attitude, green subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and green advertising, were tested for their influence on brand trust, which in turn was tested as a driver of purchase intention. The design reflects a growing recognition in consumer psychology that intentions are rarely shaped by attitudes alone; they are mediated by layers of belief, social context and confidence in the seller.

Methodologically, the study took a mixed-methods approach. In the first, qualitative phase, the researcher refined and contextualised the measurement scales, ensuring that the survey instruments captured what green attitude, social pressure, control and advertising genuinely mean to cosmetics consumers in an emerging market rather than importing constructs wholesale from Western literature. In the second, quantitative phase, survey data were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling, or PLS-SEM, a statistical technique well suited to testing networks of hypothesised relationships between latent psychological variables. PLS-SEM estimates how strongly each construct predicts the next, allowing the researcher to quantify both direct effects and the indirect, mediated pathways that run through brand trust.

The results are striking in their asymmetry. Three of the four sustainability factors, green attitude, perceived behavioural control and green advertising, exerted a significant positive impact on brand trust. In plain terms, consumers who hold favourable dispositions toward environmentally friendly products, who feel capable of actually choosing and using green cosmetics, and who are exposed to credible green advertising, come to trust the brands behind those products. That trust then carries the weight: brand trust mediated the relationship between all three of these factors and purchase intention, acting as the bridge between what consumers believe about sustainability and what they decide to buy.

The fourth factor, however, refused to cooperate. Green subjective norms, the perceived social pressure from family, friends and reference groups to buy sustainable products, showed no statistically significant influence within the model. This null result is arguably the most provocative finding in the paper. Much of the classical literature on pro-environmental behaviour, rooted in the theory of planned behaviour, treats subjective norms as a core pillar of intention formation. The study’s finding suggests that, at least among the young, digitally engaged consumers surveyed in this emerging-market setting, the decision to buy green cosmetics is not primarily a social conformity play. People are not buying sustainable lipstick because their friends approve; they are buying it because they trust the brand and feel personally able to make the choice.

Why would social norms fail while personal attitudes and perceived control succeed? One plausible reading, consistent with the study’s framing, is that cosmetics are a highly personal, identity-laden product category. Choices about skin, scent and appearance are made at the level of the individual mirror, not the dinner table. In a digital-first consumer environment, information about a brand’s environmental credentials arrives through advertising and online content rather than through face-to-face social endorsement, which may weaken the channel through which subjective norms traditionally operate. The author is careful to caution, however, that this pattern should not be interpreted as broadly generalizable across consumer segments or markets; norms may matter far more in other cultures, age groups or product categories.

The mediation finding deserves particular attention because it reframes how sustainability marketing works. If green attitudes and green advertising influenced purchase intention directly, the managerial prescription would be simple: make consumers feel positive and keep advertising. But the model shows that these factors work on intention largely through trust. Sustainability perceptions are, in effect, an input into a trust-building process, and trust is the currency that gets spent at the checkout. This has a sobering implication for an industry plagued by greenwashing accusations. When a brand’s environmental claims are perceived as exaggerated or false, the damage is not confined to the credibility of the claim itself; it corrodes the very mechanism through which all sustainability messaging converts into sales.

For managers, the study’s practical message is pointed. In this specific context, building trust through credible green communication and enhancing consumers’ perceived behavioural control may be more effective than relying on social influence mechanisms. Credible communication means verifiable claims, transparency about ingredients and sourcing, and advertising that can withstand scrutiny rather than vague eco-imagery. Enhancing perceived control means lowering the practical barriers to green choices: clear labelling, accessible price points, easy availability and product performance that matches conventional alternatives. A consumer who believes a green cosmetic will work, can find it easily and can afford it is a consumer positioned to trust the brand behind it, and trust is what converts belief into a purchase.

The study also contributes to a broader scholarly conversation about emerging markets. Much of the sustainability marketing literature has been built on data from Europe, North America and developed East Asia, where environmental awareness has had decades to mature. Emerging markets present a different landscape: rapidly growing middle classes, younger demographics, high digital engagement and environmental concerns that often arrive alongside, rather than after, mass consumption. Understanding how green perceptions function in such settings matters not only for the cosmetics industry but for any sector betting that the next generation of consumers will pay for sustainability. The finding that trust, not social pressure, is the pivotal variable offers a testable hypothesis for researchers working in other emerging-market contexts.

There are, of course, limits to what any single survey-based model can establish. Structural equation modelling identifies associations consistent with a theoretical pathway; it cannot prove causation in the experimental sense, and the study’s own author flags that the limited role of subjective norms in this sample should not be over-read. The sample’s composition, young and digitally engaged consumers, means the findings may not extend to older shoppers or to markets where green consumption follows different social dynamics. Still, the study’s contribution is clear and well-earned: it clarifies the relative importance of selected green factors in shaping brand trust and, indirectly, purchase intention, and it elevates trust from a vague buzzword to a measurable, mediating mechanism. In an industry where green claims multiply faster than the evidence behind them, that is a finding worth trusting.

Subject of Research: The effect of sustainability perceptions and brand trust on purchase intention for green cosmetics

Article Title: Sustainability, brand trust, and purchase intent in the cosmetics industry

Article References: Khoi, B. H. (2026). Sustainability, brand trust, and purchase intent in the cosmetics industry. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04845-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04845-8

Keywords: sustainability marketing, brand trust, purchase intention, green advertising, green attitude, perceived behavioural control, subjective norms, cosmetics industry, PLS-SEM, consumer behaviour, greenwashing, emerging markets

The research, conducted by Luigina Canova, Andrea Bobbio and Anna Maria Manganelli of the University of Padua, rests on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, one of the most widely used frameworks in social psychology for explaining voluntary human actions. The theory holds that a behaviour is driven by the intention to perform it, and that intention is in turn shaped by three forces: attitude, the person’s evaluative judgment of the behaviour; subjective norm, the perceived expectations of family and friends; and perceived behavioural control, the sense that one has the means and ability to act. Crucially, the theory also allows for background factors, deeper values and dispositions that feed into these beliefs without acting on behaviour directly.

The Padua team selected two such background factors for scrutiny: the perceived environmental value and the perceived health value of green products. Green personal care products in the study included shampoo, soap and deodorants made from organic farming components free of synthetic pesticides, fertilisers and genetically modified organisms, while green home care products covered laundry detergents, floor and glass cleaners and dishwashing liquids. The market context is striking. The global green personal care market is forecast to grow by 12.37 billion US dollars between 2024 and 2029, and trade in household green cleaning products rose from 5.14 billion dollars in 2023 to 5.49 billion in 2024, with further growth expected to reach 8.49 billion by 2030.

To test their extended model, the researchers ran two parallel two-wave surveys between October and December 2023, distributed through the Qualtrics platform. Roughly one hundred master’s students in psychology at the University of Padua recruited friends, relatives and acquaintances, with each participant assigned to only one of the two studies. In the first wave, respondents answered questions measuring perceived environmental and health values, attitudes, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control and intention. One month later they reported their intention again and, crucially, whether they had actually purchased green products during the intervening weeks. After attrition, the final combined sample comprised 766 adults, 68 percent of them women, with a mean age of 37 years.

The statistical machinery behind the study was rigorous. Confirmatory factor analyses of six latent constructs and twenty indicators produced good fit indices in both studies, and tests for common method variance suggested it did not distort the results. Regression analyses conducted with the PROCESS macro, using bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals based on five thousand resamples, tested the direct and indirect pathways of the model, with gender and age included as covariates. The measurement work paid off: the models explained roughly half of the variance in purchase intention in both studies, and between 24 and 28 percent of the variance in self-reported future purchasing behaviour, respectable figures for a psychological prediction of real-world action.

The results were consistent across both product categories in their broad outlines. Perceived environmental and health values each explained about a third of the variance in attitudes toward buying green products, and both fed indirectly into intention and behaviour through the classic Theory of Planned Behaviour constructs. Attitude emerged as the strongest single predictor of intention, followed by perceived behavioural control and subjective norm. But one value clearly outshone the other: perceived health value showed a stronger association with attitude, and in the personal care study it also maintained a direct link to intention, suggesting that consumers who believe green products enhance well-being are especially primed to buy them, partly independent of their general evaluation of the behaviour.

The most theoretically interesting finding concerned the notorious intention-behaviour gap. Meta-analyses across pro-environmental and health behaviours consistently show that intentions explain far more variance in themselves, around 50 percent, than behaviours do, around 30 percent. The Padua team examined whether the temporal stability of intention, measured by comparing intention scores at the two waves one month apart, moderated this gap. It did, and dramatically. For green personal care products, the effect of intention on behaviour was strongest among people whose intentions remained stable over the month, with a standardised coefficient of 0.65, compared with 0.32 among those with unstable intentions. For household products the pattern was even starker: among low-stability participants the intention-behaviour relationship was not statistically significant at all.

Not every result was symmetrical across the two product categories. Perceived behavioural control directly predicted future purchasing only for green home care products, which the authors attribute to the difficulty consumers may face in finding and recognising these items in retail settings, a market that remains smaller than that for green personal care. Demographic patterns also emerged: women expressed more favourable attitudes and stronger intentions toward green personal care products, while women and older participants reported greater perceived control over buying green household products, a pattern the researchers link to gender roles and greater familiarity with household shopping. The authors caution, however, that some indirect effects were statistically significant but small, and should be interpreted carefully.

The study is not without limitations, which the authors acknowledge candidly. The samples were convenience samples dominated by young adult women with medium-high education and income in a culturally homogeneous region of north-eastern Italy, the design was correlational, all measures were self-reported and vulnerable to social desirability bias, and the analyses were not preregistered. Still, the practical implications are concrete. Marketers should emphasise both environmental and health benefits, with certified toxicity and dermatological standards bolstering perceived health value; campaigns should engage family and friendship networks, given the weight of subjective norms; and retailers should improve availability, placement and pricing to strengthen perceived control. Above all, the findings suggest that fostering stable, protected intentions, rather than fleeting enthusiasm, may be the key to converting green goodwill into green purchases, a small but measurable step toward sustainable development goals.

Subject of Research: Psychosocial determinants, including perceived environmental and health values and intention stability, of purchasing green personal and household care products under the Theory of Planned Behaviour.

Article Title: The Purchase of Green Personal and Household Care Products: The Predictive Contribution of Perceived Environmental and Health Values and Intention Stability in the Theory of Planned Behaviour

Article References: Canova, L., Bobbio, A., & Manganelli, A. M. (2026). The Purchase of Green Personal and Household Care Products: The Predictive Contribution of Perceived Environmental and Health Values and Intention Stability in the Theory of Planned Behaviour. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00524-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00524-9

Keywords: green products, Theory of Planned Behaviour, consumer behaviour, intention-behaviour gap, intention stability, perceived health value, perceived environmental value, sustainable consumption, household care products, personal care products, environmental psychology, Italy