Counterproductive Environmental Performance Displays: Lessons From the Automotive Sector

This paper mobilizes classical models of information processing and persuasion (ELM) to examine the efficiency of a European Directive 1999/94/EC of December, 13, 1999 regarding automotive carbon emission information to convert consumers to more sustainable patterns of consumption. This Directive states that European carmakers have to prominently display their vehicles’ carbon emissions rate on advertisement or commercial brochures. Based on an experiment conducted on a representative sample of French consumers, the authors show that this obligation, far from guiding consumers’ choice toward environment-friendly vehicles, is ineffective, and even counterproductive, among non-expert consumers. They show that the display of environmental information should rather take a colored A-G scale to guide non-expert consumers towards sustainable consumption behaviors. The authors finally discuss implications for public policy makers.