When Going Green Backfires: How Firm Intentions Shape the Evaluation of Socially Beneficial Product Enhancements

Many companies offer products with social benefits that are orthogonal to perfor-mance (e.g., green products). The present studies demonstrate that information about a company’s intentions in designing the product plays an import role in consumers ’ evaluations. In particular, consumers are less likely to purchase a green product when they perceive that the company intentionally made the product better for the environment compared to when the same environmental benefit occurred as an unintended side effect. This result is explained by consumers ’ lay theories about resource allocation: intended (vs. unintended) green enhancements lead consumers to assume that the company diverted resources away from product quality, which in turn drives a reduction in purchase interest. The present studies also identify an important boundary condition based on the type of enhancement and show that the basic intended (vs. unintended) effect generalizes to other types of perceived tradeoffs, such as healthfulness and taste. One of the most common ways for a company to in-crease the desirability of a product is through the ad-dition of new product features. Typically, such product en-hancements are performance related (e.g., faster processor, better camera resolution). Increasingly, however, many com-panies offer socially beneficial product enhancements that are orthogonal to the product’s performance, such as benefits to the environment or benefits to the workers who produced it (e.g., fair trade). While previous research has examined George E. Newman is assistant professor of organizational behavior at