Consumer preference for sustainability labels in the context of China

Abstract

Sustainability Label (SL) have emerged as an important product attribute in recent decades, and have evolved into various types as products with social, environmental, and economic benefits have become more prevalent in the marketplace. With the information of SL in products, consumers are encouraged to embrace environmental sustainability principles and to make environmentally sustainable choices and actions. SL helps alignment between consumers and the industry by enhancing consumers’ understanding of company’s act, and serve as an effective marketing message. However, there is limited research on consumer preferences for different types of sustainable labels or benefits. This study addresses this knowledge gap by applying choice experiment method to assess consumers’ choice behavior for products associated with various SL. Choice experiment designs are separately developed for two most relevant sustainable products (i.e. soymilk and EV) in China. A stated preference method (SPM) consumer survey was conducted in 2022 across six major cities in China, namely Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Xi’an, and a total of 840 valid responses were collected for assessing multinomial logit (MNL) model. Findings show that Chinese consumers prefer SL with environmental benefits, foreign COO/Brand in consuming soymilk, and prefer SL with employee friendliness, domestic COO/Brand for Electric Vehicle (EV). These findings provide insights for marketers and researchers Chinese consumers’ preference for specific SL and brand for two selected product categories.