The communication problem

Responsible consumption is not only an information problem. It is also a communication problem. Even when ethical or sustainability information exists, it does not automatically become part of the decision. Our initiative studies what has to happen for that information to feel meaningful, timely, and usable when people are actually shopping.

1. What is this problem?

The communication problem begins with a simple point: better disclosure alone does not guarantee better decisions. Facts, labels, and transparency reports can exist in the background without changing what people notice or what they choose. Ethical information often fails because it stays abstract, generic, easy to overlook, or difficult to connect to the choice at hand. Research in science communication, climate communication, and information behavior has repeatedly shown that people do not act on information simply because it is available; they act on information when it becomes credible, relevant, and meaningful in their own situation.

In responsible consumption, that means the challenge is not only to disclose more about labour conditions, sourcing, emissions, animal welfare, or durability. It is also to help people understand why this matters here and now, for this product, for this comparison, and for this decision. Without that step, ethical information can remain something people agree with in principle while leaving the purchase untouched. Communication matters because information has to enter the decision, not just exist in the background.

2. Why it matters in shopping and key works

This matters especially in product search, comparison, and purchasing because shopping is crowded with other signals. Ethical information competes with price, convenience, habits, branding, delivery, and time pressure. Product labels, certifications, and background facts may be present, but they often struggle to enter the actual decision because they are less visible, less familiar, or harder to interpret than standard shopping cues. Communication therefore has to make secondary information feel relevant, intelligible, and usable in the purchase context rather than leaving it as an abstract extra.

Wynne (1992) A classic foundation, Wynne showed that people do not simply reject or ignore information because they lack facts; trust, credibility, identity, and social context shape whether information is taken up at all. It matters for this theme because it gives the clearest early argument against the idea that “just giving people more information” is enough.

Savolainen (1993) Drawing on Brenda Dervin’s sense-making tradition, Savolainen helped establish the idea that information becomes useful only when it helps people bridge a gap in a real situation. It matters here because responsible shopping often fails not from total ignorance, but from a lack of support in making ethical information meaningful for the decision in front of someone.

Moser (2010) A landmark climate communication review, Moser explained why complex and distant problems do not become actionable through facts alone: they are hard to see, hard to feel, and easy to deprioritize. It matters because many ethical and sustainability issues in shopping have the same problem: they stay too far away from the immediate purchase context unless communication helps bring them closer.

Delmas & Burbano (2011) This influential paper on greenwashing showed that communication can fail not only because it is weak, but because it can also be strategically distorted. It matters for this page because it reminds us that the communication problem is not only about simplification or clarity, but also about credibility, selective framing, and the risk of misleading claims.

Majer et al. (2022) This systematic review of visual sustainability labels found that labels can have positive effects, but that those effects vary widely depending on the consumer, the label itself, and the purchase context. It matters because it captures the practical core of the theme: ethical information does not work in the abstract; it works, if at all, under particular conditions of attention, interpretation, and context.

Ritch (2022) Ritch’s study of fashion sustainability terminology shows that consumers often have to interpret vague terms such as “sustainable” or “responsibly made” for themselves. It matters because it turns the communication problem into something concrete: even when information is present, people still need help understanding what it means and how it should matter for this choice.

3. Initiative’s contribution

Search Changes Consumers’ Minds: How Recognizing Gaps Drives Sustainable Choices (van der Sluis & Azzopardi, 2025) adds a key empirical insight to this conversation. The study found that recognition and sense-making were the main drivers of change, rather than ethical intentions or raw search activity alone. People were more likely to increase the importance they assigned to ethical aspects when they recognized a gap in their decision-making and were able to make sense of the information they found. This matters because the communication problem is not solved by exposure alone; it depends on whether information becomes meaningful in the choice context.

Length Effects in Conversation-Style Sustainability Information for Ethical Consumption: An Eye-tracking Study (Sangoi & van der Sluis, 2026) takes a practical step toward addressing the communication problem. The paper explores how conversation-style sustainability explanations can help contextualize secondary information in a purchase setting, and examines how explanation length affects attention and evaluation. In the study, medium and longer explainers supported deeper processing and higher willingness to pay than very short messages. This matters because conversational systems and LLM-based shopping assistants may be especially well suited to connect ethical information to a user’s actual decision context and support sense-making at the moment of choice.

A related design exploration by Leon Junge extends this problem into a physical shopping setting. The prototype lets people set ethical preferences, place products into a shopping basket, receive immediate color feedback, and access short explanations for why a product does or does not align with those preferences. What makes this interesting is that it pushes beyond transparency alone: it asks how ethical information can become immediate, contextual, and experienceable at the point of choice. At the same time, the project also reflects critically on the limits of information design, since economic constraints and lack of alternatives can still restrict what people are realistically able to do. Explore the project.

4. Why this changes the conversation

This shifts the discussion in an important way. Instead of saying that people just need more information, it suggests that information has to be contextualized, recognized as relevant, and made sense of before it can influence a real decision. That opens a broader agenda for responsible consumption research: not only better disclosure, but better explanation; not only static labels, but contextual support; not only online transparency, but shopping systems, conversational assistants, and even physical retail prototypes that help ethical information enter the decision when it matters most.

Read more

1. Delmas, M. A., & Burbano, V. C. (2011). The Drivers of Greenwashing. California Management Review, 54(1), 64–87. https://doi.org/10.1525/cmr.2011.54.1.64
2. Majer, J. M., Henscher, H. A., Reuber, P., Fischer-Kreer, D., & Fischer, D. (2022). The Effects of Visual Sustainability Labels on Consumer Perception and Behavior: A Systematic Review of the Empirical Literature. Sustainable Production and Consumption, 33, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spc.2022.06.012
3. Moser, S. C. (2010). Communicating Climate Change: History, Challenges, Process and Future Directions. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 1(1), 31–53. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.11
4. Ritch, E. L. (2022). Consumer Interpretations of Fashion Sustainability Terminology Communicated Through Labelling. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal, 26(5), 741–758. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFMM-03-2021-0075
5. Sangoi, L., & van der Sluis, F. (2026). Length Effects in Conversation-Style Sustainability Information for Ethical Consumption: An Eye-tracking Study. Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, 448–452. https://doi.org/10.1145/3786304.3787884
6. Savolainen, R. (1993). The Sense-Making Theory: Reviewing the Interests of a User-Centered Approach to Information Seeking and Use. Information Processing & Management, 29(1), 13–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/0306-4573(93)90020-E
7. Wynne, B. (1992). Misunderstood Misunderstanding: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science. Public Understanding of Science, 1(3), 281–304. https://doi.org/10.1088/0963-6625/1/3/004
8. van der Sluis, F., & Azzopardi, L. (2025). Search Changes Consumers’ Minds: How Recognizing Gaps Drives Sustainable Choices. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, 195–207. https://doi.org/10.1145/3698204.3716456