Marketing campaigns designed to encourage people to consume less may not change how people act and could even be counterproductive suggests new research from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Published in the journal PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, the study draws on online experiments with UK millennials exploring how framing sustainability as “degrowth” or “green growth” influences people’s attitudes, intentions and actions.

Researchers partnered with a sustainable toiletries start-up to create a series of Instagram-style adverts promoting products such as shampoo and conditioner bars. Participants were shown two types of campaign, one framed around “green growth”, which encouraged more sustainable choices without explicitly calling for reduced consumption, and another based on “degrowth”, which directly urged people to consume less.

Presented as short, visually engaging stories, the Instagram posts highlighted simple messages such as one shampoo bar replacing two bottles. After viewing the adverts, participants were asked how likely they would be to buy the products and how the campaign made them reflect on their own consumption habits.

The researchers found that there was little difference between the two approaches, with neither having a meaningful effect on what participants said they would buy or how they would change their behaviour.

Dr Fred Basso, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at LSE and co-author of the article, said: “Our research suggests that marketing-style campaigns actually do little to make ideas about reducing consumption feel relevant to people’s everyday lives and remain largely ineffective at encouraging people to cut back.

“Using marketing techniques, which are designed to drive spending, in order to promote consuming less may be fundamentally contradictory. As a result, these approaches are unlikely to support efforts to reduce overall consumption.”
The researchers also looked at how people responded to sustainability messages delivered by non-commercial sources, such as public campaigns.

They found that messages focused on green growth – emphasising environmental protection alongside continued economic growth – were more effective at building support for environmental policies and prompting practical action. By contrast, degrowth messages – focused on reducing consumption and moving away from growth – were more likely to change how people think, encouraging them to question the role of economic growth and consider alternative approaches.

However, while messages about degrowth did encourage people to question the idea of endless economic growth, their focus on large-scale problems and cutting back consumption may make people feel less able to get involved, and less motivated to take action.

Dallas O’Dell, the paper’s lead researcher and post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), said: “Based on our results, we advocate for degrowth communication strategies by non-commercial entities that empower groups or communities.”

Beyond these recommendations, the researchers also call for broader structural changes to support a shift away from a culture of consumerism. While regulations on advertising of high emissions and wasteful goods are beginning to emerge in countries like the Netherlands and France, the researchers go further by advocating for “expansive restrictions on advertising – not just on traditional marketing campaigns but also those that claim to encourage consumers to buy less.” They argue that more nuanced regulation is needed to prevent corporate co-optation of degrowth messaging.