Boosting Eco-Friendly Purchases with Behavioral Design

The Big Problem

In 2008, British supermarket Tesco launched an initiative to add carbon footprint labels to over 70,000 products.1 Starting with household basics like lightbulbs and laundry detergent, the goal was simple: empower shoppers to make greener choices by providing clear information about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with every product. But just four short years later, Tesco scrapped the program, citing high costs and an extremely slow pace of progress. Not only did the labeling initiative fail to drive real consumer behavior change, but other major retailers never caught on, leaving the multinational grocer questioning the value of leading its “revolution in green consumption.”1  

The takeaway? Even when consumers and companies hold pro-environmental values, information alone is rarely enough to translate intention into action. Despite global sustainability intentions increasing, we’re still not seeing significant shifts toward eco-friendly purchasing. Consumers remain hesitant to purchase eco-friendly products, even as environmental awareness grows—in one Korean study, 82% of consumers expressed a willingness to buy eco-friendly products, but only 25% actually did.2 On the corporate side, 64% of companies have a clear gap between their sustainability intentions and purchasing actions.3 While shoppers and brands largely care about sustainability, both often default to cost, convenience, and optics over real impact. For mission-driven organizations and forward-thinking companies tasked with driving sustainable consumption, it’s clear that traditional strategies—such as public awareness campaigns and eco labeling—fail to meaningfully shift behavior on either side of the market.

To drive real change, we need to reshape the decision-making environment itself. Rather than assuming eco-friendly decisions are born out of rational, objective evaluations of costs and benefits, behavioral design aims to reshape choices by tackling common points of friction and targeting key motivational barriers. In this article, we’ll examine behavioral science concepts like present bias, moral licensing, identity alignment, and psychological distancing to uncover practical ways to make eco-friendly decisions easier, more appealing, and better aligned with corporate and consumer identities.

TL;DR

  • The intention-action gap highlights how consumers and companies often struggle to follow through on their eco-friendly intentions, as cognitive barriers frequently outweigh impersonal, abstract, and distant sustainability goals. 
  • Reframing the costs and gains of eco-friendly purchasing can help mitigate our tendency toward short-term thinking, making sustainability seem less risky and more rewarding.
  • Increasing the visibility, urgency, and personal relevance of sustainable behaviors can shrink the psychological distance between individual actions and collective impact.
  • Aligning eco-friendly behavior with intrinsic consumer motivations can translate surface-level signaling into authentic identity-based buying.

What Are Eco-Friendly Purchases?

In this discussion, we refer to eco-friendly purchases as products and services that are designed, produced, and consumed in ways that intentionally minimize environmental harm. Since sustainable consumption relies on both individual shopping behavior and broader organizational decisions, efforts to boost eco-friendly purchases necessitate aligning values with actions at both the consumer and corporate levels.

The Intention-Action Gap Reveals Behavioral Barriers That Undermine Sustainability Goals

While most would agree that addressing the climate crisis is becoming increasingly urgent, sustainable purchasing remains surprisingly difficult to achieve.4 Unfortunately, modern consumption and corporate structures evolved without the environment in mind, leaving us with shopping behaviors that prioritize cost and convenience over eco-friendly purchases. By and large, customers want good value and low prices, while companies prioritize short-term costs and immediate efficiency. The problem is that eco-friendly options often cost more upfront and tend to be less convenient or accessible, so brands and consumers end up sticking with traditional options that are cheaper, widely available, and easy to use.

Despite a growing global interest in corporate Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, most companies still report a gap between their sustainability ambitions and real procurement practices.3,5 On the consumer side, shoppers largely want to fill their carts with eco-friendly products, but few follow up with their wallets. One survey found that while 65% of participants were eager to buy from brands that advocate sustainability, only 26% actually do so.6 As both consumers and companies trend toward stronger sustainability commitments, the challenge isn’t convincing people to care, but turning those well-meaning intentions into impactful actions.

A bar graph showing the intention-action graph for eco-friendly purchases.

Researchers frequently examine this intention-action gap by looking at psychological frameworks and cognitive biases that shape our decision-making processes.2 Although tangible barriers like cost and access certainly get in the way of sustainable consumption, cognitive barriers often play an equally powerful role. In the following sections, we’ll take a closer look at these psychological factors and explore how behavioral design can help shift perceptions, nudging everyone toward greener purchases.

Challenge #1: Short-Term Thinking Prioritizes Cost and Convenience Over Long-Term Sustainability

Many sustainable behaviors, including buying eco-friendly products, require an upfront cost for an uncertain future payoff.7 The problem is that we often prioritize immediate rewards over long-term gains, so those short-term costs tend to hold more weight than any potential benefits that may come in the future.

Present Bias Fuels Preferences for Instant Gratification

Our tendency toward short-term thinking means that we naturally prioritize immediate savings and convenience over future benefits like climate change mitigation, resource conservation, and even long-term economic gains. This is driven by several present-focused cognitive biases.7 Present bias, for instance, describes how we often prefer smaller upfront rewards to larger future rewards. We would almost always rather save a little money now than save more money later, and this often means buying cheaper products instead of investing in durable options that will last longer and reduce waste over time. 

Mental Discounting Diminishes the Value of Future Rewards 

Short-sighted decision-making is further reinforced by mental discounting, a concept that explains how the perceived value of rewards tends to decrease as they get further into the future. Even if delayed rewards are objectively worth more than whatever we’re getting right now, immediate rewards still feel more valuable. For example, the long-term energy savings associated with efficient appliances might not look as valuable as the immediate cost savings of buying cheaper, less efficient models today. Organizations can fall into the same trap, mentally discounting the delayed economic rewards of sustainable actions so they pale in comparison to the value of immediate cost savings. This is why simply telling stakeholders that sustainable practices can save them money in the long run doesn’t always work to shift corporate behavior.

Loss Aversion Increases the Weight of Potential Costs

At the same time, research shows that people are even more likely to overlook potential positive outcomes of eco-friendly actions (such as financial savings, environmental benefits, and health improvements) when they’re concerned about possible negative outcomes.8 These findings align with the concept of loss aversion, which suggests that losses often feel more painful than equivalent gains. As a result, people tend to care more about avoiding potential negative outcomes than gaining potential rewards.6 For executives facing performance pressures or consumers on tight budgets, eco-friendly purchases may feel like risky costs with minimal advantages. Due to all of these compounding biases, decision-makers are motivated to stick with the status quo instead of taking on the potential risks of change.

The overarching issue here is that short-term thinking makes sustainable behaviors seem overly expensive or inconvenient compared to unsustainable alternatives. These perceptions play an important role in shaping our actions, as described by the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). According to the TPB, behavior is shaped by three important factors: our overall attitude toward the behavior, how we think other people view the behavior, and how easy or difficult we believe the behavior is to perform. In one South Korean case study, researchers found that all three of these factors are crucial for building consumer confidence in making eco-friendly choices.9 This suggests that positioning sustainable options as more accessible, affordable, and overall rewarding could go a long way toward reducing the mismatch between perceived costs and benefits, ultimately driving adoption.

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Opportunity #1: Reframe the Costs and Gains Associated with Eco-Friendly Purchases

Framing, or the specific way in which information is presented, can be incredibly effective at changing the perceived costs and benefits of eco-friendly behaviors. Let’s explore some opportunities to incorporate framing into consumer and corporate communications.

Highlight Losses Instead of Long-Term Gains

Framing messages in terms of loss rather than gain can significantly influence consumer behavior when it comes to eco-friendly purchases. For instance, loss-framed messages based on energy costs tend to be more impactful at motivating consumers to buy energy-efficient appliances than gain-framed messages focused on energy savings.6 One study found that loss-framed messages are even more powerful when centered around environmental losses than financial losses.8 In the study, only 10% of participants said they would take improved air quality for 21 days over receiving $250, while 42% said they would rather pay $250 than have worse air quality for 21 days.8 Highlighting the environmental harm of inaction—such as poor air quality or garbage piling up in the street—can be a powerful motivator for convincing consumers to pay a little more upfront. 

This same principle applies to the business side as well. Framing sustainability initiatives as a strategic way to avoid future costs rather than an investment for future gains can help tap stakeholders’ drive to minimize potential losses. For instance, moving toward sustainable sourcing can help build company resilience and future-proof against resource scarcity, supply chain disruptions, and tightening environmental regulations.

Position Sustainable Options as the Easier Choice

Eco-friendly alternatives can also be framed as the easier option, reducing the barrier of perceived inconvenience for both consumers and companies. For businesses, framing sustainability as an efficiency-boosting business asset rather than an expensive moral obligation can help stakeholders acknowledge the immediate ROI of eco-friendly initiatives. For consumers, one of the simplest ways to do this is to pre-select sustainable defaults, requiring consumers to opt out rather than opt in.7 When something is framed as the standard option—like vegetarian meal options on a flight or consolidated shipping on an e-commerce store—consumers are more likely to go along with it. 

For instance, most consumers stick with sustainable electricity when it is offered as the default option.7 Similarly, shoppers may be more likely to select green products when they pop up first on e-commerce pages or when “eco-friendly” filters are automatically applied to search results. These defaults are prime examples of nudges, or subtle changes to the decision-making environment intended to gently “push” consumers toward a particular option. Nudges make the eco-friendly alternative feel like a no-brainer, subtly encouraging consumers to go along with it rather than placing the burden on them to make the greener choice. 

Leverage Subjective Norms and Emphasize Social Rewards

By tapping into the subjective norms dimension of the Theory of Planned Behavior, framing can also be impactful when it positions choices as “the right thing to do.” Descriptive norms—beliefs about what other people typically do—have been effective at promoting a wide variety of pro-environmental behaviors, including energy conservation, recycling, and purchasing eco-labeled products.10 For example, in one California experiment, telling participants that 77% of residents use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool during hot weather turned out to be the most effective messaging style to reduce energy consumption. Amazingly, even weak descriptive norms (describing low rates of eco-friendly purchasing) are effective at framing non-prevalent behaviors in a positive light.10 This suggests that even when eco-friendly purchase behavior isn’t widespread, highlighting positive trends can still encourage adoption by signaling social approval.

A similar subjective norms approach could work for businesses. This might involve sharing case studies from brands that have found success because of their sustainability initiatives. For example, Unilever’s Sustainable Living Brands, including Hellman’s, Dove, and Ben & Jerry’s, have grown significantly faster than the rest of the business thanks to their strong focus on environmental and social responsibility. By positioning sustainability as the norm for successful companies, businesses can encourage others to follow suit.

Challenge #2: Psychological Distance and Diffusion of Responsibility Reduce Individual Motivations to Buy Green

Even when we carefully evaluate the costs and benefits of eco-friendly purchasing, we often feel removed from the broader environmental consequences. This can make our individual purchase behavior feel insignificant. Unsurprisingly, much research shows that psychological distance plays a key role in consumers’ beliefs about eco-friendly products and their intentions to purchase sustainable goods.11 

The Disconnect Between Personal Actions and Collective Impact

This issue is often explored through the lens of Construal Level Theory, which explains how psychological distance shapes our behavior. The theory suggests that when an environmental problem—like climate change or air pollution—feels temporally, socially, or geographically distant, we experience less personal motivation to act on the issue. Psychological distance also creates a self-other trade-off, where sustainable actions require personal sacrifices for collective gains.7 As a result, consumers often feel that buying eco-friendly means choosing the well-being of others over their own interests. This disconnect between personal action and collective outcomes can weaken individual motivation, even for people who generally care about the environment and believe that everyone should buy eco-friendly products.

Shared Responsibilities Reduce Personal Accountability

Psychological distance also creates a diffusion of responsibility, where the responsibility to reduce environmental impact is shared with others. Consider the fast fashion industry, where manufacturers produce cheap clothing without any plan to keep it out of the landfill when it inevitably falls apart. Instead, brands pass the buck to consumers, who donate their cast-offs to thrift stores and charities to be repurposed, resold, or recycled. But many of these textiles end up in landfills anyway—or get shipped overseas to become someone else’s problem. In the end, no one takes full responsibility for the environmental burden, and the responsibility is continuously tossed back and forth between companies and consumers rather than being meaningfully addressed.

This can also happen within organizations and supply chains. In large systems, it's easy to delegate environmental issues to other departments or assume someone else is worrying about green procurement. The Decision Lab found that diffusion of responsibility was a major issue preventing the adoption of fuel-efficient cookstoves in Uganda. On the supply side, manufacturers assumed that distributors should run awareness campaigns while distributors thought that manufacturers should take responsibility for educating the public. Without a clear understanding of who was responsible for sharing information, consumers were left in the dark about the health risks of traditional stoves and the benefits of the improved alternatives. When consumers and companies don’t feel personally accountable for their environmental impact, it’s easy to see why many have little motivation to act.

Opportunity #2: Make the Impact of Eco-Friendly Purchases Immediate, Visible, and Personal

Behavioral design is key to closing the psychological distance between eco-friendly behavior and its environmental consequences by prompting people to think about the here and now. Believe it or not, one of the simplest ways to do this is to position eco-friendly products higher up on store shelves. Research suggests that product placement unconsciously activates moral assumptions, subtly cueing us to think that eco-friendly products are more important when they are positioned above other items.12 Not only that, but this effect seems to be strongest when shoppers feel psychologically distant from environmental issues.

Use Digital Tools to Share Real-Time Impact of Sustainable Shopping

Beyond making eco-friendly purchases more visible—and therefore, seem more relevant—consumers can also benefit from seeing the immediate personal impact of their buying behavior. While this can be difficult to do with physical products, digital products and services are excellent candidates for closing the psychological distance with real-time metrics. As an excellent example of behavioral design in practice, the Too Good To Go app provides users with quantified metrics to show users their very own ROI associated with buying surplus restaurant food, both in terms of their monetary savings and CO2 reduction.

A drawing of an app dashboard showing the user's personal impact of sustainable shopping in terms of CO2 reduced and money saved. For example, it could say "you've saved 25 lbs of CO2!" and "$10 saved this week by choosing eco-friendly shipping"

Again, the same behavioral principles apply to organizations as well. To better connect sustainability efforts to daily operations, companies could use interactive dashboards to track and visualize the real-time impact of eco-friendly procurement, focusing on either environmental KPIs or company-relevant benefits like the cost savings from reduced energy use. Creating role-specific sustainability goals and tying impact to individual team metrics is another way to make employees and departments feel personally accountable. For instance, IKEA’s Strategic Sustainability Council sets clear commitments and targets for each franchise, ensuring responsibility is distributed rather than diffused. 

Make Sustainability Feel Tangible with Community-Level Storytelling

Initiatives to make eco-friendly purchasing personally relevant can also be effective on a community level. As a strong case study, international supply chain sustainability advocate Solidaridad found that community discussions turned out to be an important motivator for convincing farmers to adopt sustainable farming practices in South Africa. 

When sustainable actions are shared through stories that resonate emotionally, they become less abstract and more personally meaningful.7 Local storytelling is an excellent way to share community-level outcomes. For instance, a neighborhood nonprofit might highlight how switching to reusable food containers reduced community waste, while a school district might share how eco-friendly procurement created healthier classrooms for students. In the same vein, using analogies—for example, likening buying single-use plastic products to throwing trash into your backyard—to compare abstract, global issues to familiar situations or experiences can make actions and outcomes feel more tangible.7 These stories shrink the psychological distance between consumers and the impacts of their actions by drawing on people’s attachment to their homes, workplaces, and public spaces.18 Connecting environmental consequences with these spaces also conjures up negative emotions like fear, guilt, and sadness, which can be highly effective at driving sustainable behaviors.7

Challenge #3: Symbolic Eco-Friendly Purchase Behavior Replaces Real Change

While behavioral design offers promising opportunities to make sustainable buying behavior seem personally rewarding and relevant, there is still the risk that actions remain surface-level and symbolic rather than driving meaningful impact. Across the board, performative gestures allow consumers and companies to give the illusion that they’re acting sustainably—and sometimes even justify other unsustainable habits. 

Sustainable Actions Are Frequently Used as Social Signals

The act of engaging in symbolic actions to give the appearance of sustainability is closely tied to Signaling Theory, which explains how both individuals and groups convey information about their qualities, values, or capabilities.13 For instance, consumers might carry reusable coffee mugs to signal their environmental values, while companies might slap trust badges on websites and wrap products in compostable packaging to communicate their sustainability efforts to the public. For organizations, these signals often take the form of camouflage, meaning they seek to divert attention from less ethical behavior or shield against criticism, rather than communicating genuine values.13 We see this frequently with companies that engage in greenwashing to gain public favor while still making operational decisions that are harmful to the environment. 

For individual consumers, making eco-friendly choices often takes the form of identity signaling. Research shows that consumers are more likely to make eco-friendly choices in public settings or when social status or reputation motivations are activated.7 Not only do these behaviors signal pro-environmental values, but they also convey a sense of altruism, signaling one’s willingness to take on additional costs for the benefit of others. For instance, when green products cost more than non-green products, status-based motivations tend to increase consumers’ desire for green products, but only when they’re shopping in public.14

Moral Licensing Can Justify Unethical Behavior

Besides signaling status, altruism, or pro-environmental values, symbolic acts of eco-friendly purchasing can also take the form of moral licensing. Moral licensing is a phenomenon where doing one good thing gives us justification to engage in other unethical behavior. Several studies have demonstrated this effect. In one, choosing green products made participants more likely to indulge in self-interested behaviors like cheating on a task or stealing money.15 Overall, performative gestures allow individuals and groups to feel like they’ve done their part without changing their patterns, creating a false sense of progress and undermining real, lasting behavior change.

Opportunity #3: Align Eco-Friendly Purchases with Consumer and Company Identities

Identity alignment occurs when sustainable actions go deeper than surface-level symbolic gestures, becoming integral to one’s sense of self. Building on this concept, associating eco-friendly purchase behavior with the consumers’ self-concept may help support lasting behavior change.7 

Driving Sustainability with Identity-Linked Shopping Behavior

Contrary to the idea of moral licensing, a wide body of research shows that sustainable behaviors often create a positive spillover, where sustainable actions in one domain make people more likely to make eco-friendly decisions in another domain.7 However, this is more likely when people are motivated to act consistently with existing sustainable values, suggesting that priming consumers to see sustainability as a values-driven choice may help counteract issues with signaling and moral licensing. Using identity-linking language is one good way to do this. For example, saying “Be a toxin-free parent” can be more powerful than saying “Buy this eco-friendly cleaner to reduce chemicals.” Interestingly, research shows that people are more likely to take care of identity-linked products—they’re also more likely to recycle them instead of throwing them out.7

Aligning Eco-Friendly Behavior with Existing Values

The aim with identity linking is to make consumers see eco-friendly purchasing as consistent with values they already hold, whether it's keeping their homes healthy or protecting the future well-being of their children. Research shows that consumers largely respond well to intrinsic goal advertising—focusing on life goals like health, belonging, and family—because it triggers a sense of personal satisfaction and meaning.16 For example, in an air quality initiative to ban diesel vehicles from the historic center of Rome, TDL decided on a messaging strategy that tapped into citizens’ existing values. Instead of talking about air quality or pollution, our messaging reminded Romans about the history of their city, tapped into their sense of national pride, and framed the ban as a way to ensure the city remains a safe and healthy place for their children.

A line graph comparing the impact of moral licensing and identity alignment on eco-friendly purchasing. 

Building a Brand Identity Around Sustainability

Linking sustainability and identity can also help brands signal that pro-environmental behavior is a core brand value rather than a one-off marketing stunt—and this move is clearly good for business. In an online experiment conducted by TDL, we found that consumers were significantly more likely to shop from brands investing in sustainable energy out of the company’s own volition rather than doing so simply to comply with regulations. Similarly, a recent joint study from McKinsey and NielsenIQ found that products making multiple types of claims about environmental and social responsibility (like being compostable, plastic-free, and organic) grew about twice as fast as those making only one claim.17 

By weaving sustainability into a brand’s very identity, companies can appear more genuine and authentic. This has the power to create a self-reinforcing cycle where consumers feel that their values are supported while brands continue to invest in sustainability to reflect the growing demand for green products. Patagonia is an excellent example here. By actively encouraging customers to buy less, repair worn products instead of tossing them, and demand sustainable practices from other companies, the outdoor apparel company has effectively aligned its values and actions, attracting a community of like-minded consumers who see their products as extensions of their eco-friendly identities.

Caveats to Consider

Behavioral design offers exciting new avenues to encourage sustainable purchasing. However, no solution is going to be effective across all brands, consumers, and shopping situations. While a lot of these interventions have been tried on a small scale, it is not clear how well they generalize to other areas—what works in one cultural context or product arena may not necessarily work in others. Prompting wide-scale behavior change requires testing, adaptation, and nuanced understanding of the unique barriers facing those involved. 

At the same time, even the best-intentioned interventions run the risk of sparking backlash when implemented in a way that feels manipulative or insincere. Whether it’s framing the benefits of eco-friendly purchases in terms of personal gains or building brand identities that align with consumer values, these moves must be backed by real action so as not to erode trust or trigger accusations of greenwashing. 

This leads us into the final issue: targeted behavioral design alone isn’t enough. While consumer behavior and company strategy play key roles, consumerism is ultimately shaped and supported by larger systems. As TDL senior consultant Jayden Rae puts it, climate solutions need to come from both the bottom and the top. This means consumer-focused interventions must be supported with broader structural shifts, such as policy incentives that reward sustainable business models and regulations that hold companies accountable.

From Shopping Carts to Supply Chains: Moving Toward Sustainable Consumption

Despite growing concern around climate change, there’s still a lot of work to be done to ensure consumers and companies walk the talk. Behavioral design interventions have the potential to support multi-level initiatives in this area. Reframing the costs and gains of sustainable alternatives can help individuals and institutions overcome the limitations of short-sighted thinking, individualizing impacts to consumers, communities, and brands can help shrink the psychological distance and encourage personal responsibility, and encouraging brands to focus on identity alignment can help move sustainability from surface-level signals to core values. 

But change doesn’t stop at the individual level. Unsustainable consumerism is a collective problem that requires global collaborative action to solve. As the Urban Sustainability Directors Network points out, cities and governments hold significant purchasing power to set new standards and create demand for more sustainable options. International initiatives, like SWITCH Africa Green, are also showing how coordinated efforts to support stakeholders in the private and public sectors can aid in the transition toward a greener economy—one based on resource efficiency and sustainable business practices that are both profitable and socially sound. To keep this momentum going, we need unified action from companies, governments, and global organizations to set strong sustainability standards, build greener supply chains, and make eco-friendly purchases the default rather than the alternative. 

At TDL, we specialize in applying behavioral design to prompt impactful decision-making in areas of sustainable purchasing, climate action, eco-friendly brand alignment, and consumer research. From policy makers and nonprofits to business owners and brand strategists, we’re always eager to work with forward-thinking innovators who share our vision for a green and socially responsible future. Get in touch today so we can explore meaningful ways to apply behavioral science to encourage eco-friendly purchasing!

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About the Author

Smiling woman with long hair stands in front of a lush plant with pink and yellow flowers, near what appears to be a house exterior with horizontal siding and a staircase.

Kira Warje

Freelance Writer

Kira holds a degree in Psychology with an extended minor in Anthropology. Fascinated by all things human, she has written extensively on cognition and mental health, often leveraging insights about the human mind to craft actionable marketing content for brands. She loves talking about human quirks and motivations, driven by the belief that behavioural science can help us all lead healthier, happier, and more sustainable lives. Occasionally, Kira dabbles in web development and enjoys learning about the synergy between psychology and UX design.

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