Eco-Label

What it is

Lucy Atkinson and Sonny Rosenthal begin from a simple point: a buyer cannot see how a product was made, sourced or powered. That leaves the buyer to rely on signals, and the eco-label is the most visible of them. Drawing on signaling theory, the authors asked which features of a label's design produce more favourable effects.

The point echoes Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink in Your Money's Worth, who argued that buyers cannot judge technical facts for themselves and need independent testing. An eco-label is one way of passing such a test result to the shopper at the point of sale.

In effect

The 2014 experiment in the Journal of Advertising had 233 participants and varied three things: whether the label's argument was specific or general, whether the label came from a government or a company, and whether the product was low or high involvement.

Specific arguments consistently built more trust in the label's source. The source mattered only for low-involvement products, where company labels produced more positive attitudes.

For wording, the finding favours the specific statement over the general one. For choosing a label, it suggests treating the source as a decision to make product by product. Both readings are interpretations of the experiment.

What it does not say

The experiment measured trust in the label's source and attitudes. It did not measure purchases, so it does not show how much a label changes what people buy.

It compared government and company sources and does not rank labels or schemes, and it does not describe how any real label is governed.

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