In a pair of carefully designed experiments, researchers led by Dallas O'Dell at ICTA-UAB and the London School of Economics discovered something counterintuitive: when companies market their products as more sustainable, they activate the very impulse they're trying to temper—the urge to buy. The study, published in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, challenges the assumption that commercial advertising can ever meaningfully promote degrowth, the idea that wealthy nations should equitably reduce production and consumption to live better within planetary boundaries.
The research matters because it cuts through an increasingly common marketing strategy. As consumers grow more environmentally conscious, corporations have rushed to offer "greener" alternatives—sustainable bath products, ethical fashion, low-carbon flights—marketing them as responsible choices. But O'Dell and colleagues Frédéric Basso and Ganga Shreedhar found that this commercial framing, even when explicitly encouraging people to consume less, doesn't actually shift behavior or values the way non-commercial messaging does.
In their first experiment with millennial participants in the United Kingdom, the team tested marketing messages from a sustainable bath-products brand. They compared green-growth messaging—offering sustainable choices without limiting consumption—against degrowth messaging that encouraged consuming less in order to live better. The result was striking: the commercial setting produced almost no difference between the two approaches. Consumers exposed to sufficiency-oriented marketing didn't meaningfully reduce their purchase intentions or change their consumption-related behavior. The commercial frame, it seems, reproduces the logic of buying no matter what the message says.
The second experiment revealed what actually works. When a non-commercial organization presented the same frameworks through a citizenship lens—asking people to consider their values and their support for environmental policies—degrowth messaging shifted participants toward questioning economic growth itself, while green-growth framing generated higher support for environmental policies overall. The contrast was clear: degrowth appears more effective at reshaping values and worldviews, while green growth remains better at securing short-term policy buy-in.
Yet the findings also point to a paradox. When degrowth is framed around system-level problems and reduction-based solutions, it can leave people feeling helpless rather than empowered to act. The authors worry that critiques of the system, presented without pathways to collective action, might discourage people from activism, advocacy, or policy engagement.
Their solution is both structural and democratic. Rather than relying on commercial marketing, communication about degrowth should come from non-commercial institutions that speak to citizens rather than consumers—institutions connected to deeper shared values and visions of social change. But messaging alone won't suffice. The researchers call for tighter regulation of advertising itself, particularly campaigns around high-emission goods and services, and for policy tools that reduce consumption structurally: shorter working hours, limits on fossil fuels, and genuine constraints on extraction and production.
In other words, the burden of change cannot rest on individual choices in the checkout aisle. It requires regulation, institutional leadership, and political commitment to reshape the systems that shape our options. The study suggests that when people are invited to think as citizens rather than consumers, when institutions they trust lead the conversation, and when policy actually constrains the worst options, real shifts in values become possible. That's the kind of change that lasts.