Movement-Market Interactions: The Mixed Influences of Environmental Activists and Marketers over Green Products

• In Event: 307 - Regular Session. Economic Sociology: Markets, Movements, Metrics of Evaluation

Abstract

The environmental movement is one of the largest and most powerful social movements in the U.S., and organizational scholars have often studied this movement in their efforts to understand the influence of social movements on markets. However, environmentalists’ influence over products that invoke the movement’s own ideas is limited, as marketers are capable of reinterpreting and repurposing activists’ ideas. Through a comparative analysis of the growth of green products and related phenomena across markets and product claims, I uncover the mixed influences of activists and marketers. Environmentalists can encourage the growth of green products and of firms dedicated to these products but conventional producers also enter these niches to fulfill their own market goals, and they can respond to movement strength by using deceptive brands to evade activists’ objections to their presence. Further, activists’ ability to limit such abuses as greenwashing is only effective when producers are not deeply invested in the marketing claims. I support these findings with negative binomial regression models on a dataset of 273,601 new consumer products introduced in the U.S. from 1980-2012.

Author

• Todd Schifeling, University of Michigan