Corporate purchasing managers have trouble distinguishing vague sustainability claims from certified eco-friendly products, according to a new study. Researchers found that these trained professionals were willing to pay an equal premium for “greenwashed” products as for certified ones.
“Even highly trained procurement professionals—individuals we expect to make rational, well-informed decisions—can be just as vulnerable to misleading greenwashing tactics as everyday consumers,” says study team member Owais Khan, a sustainability researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Greenwashing, or deceptive marketing about a product’s environmental impact, has become ever more ever more prevalent, complex, and sneaky since its emergence in the 1980s. These phony claims are a barrier to a sustainable, circular economy.
In the past, most investigations of people’s vulnerability to greenwashing focused on individual consumers. But purchasing managers who make buying decisions for whole organizations have a big impact on large-volume sales, supply chains, and the success of corporate sustainability initiatives.
In the new study, Khan and Andreas Hinterhuber recruited 465 purchasing managers from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden for an online survey. They asked the participants to make hypothetical purchasing decisions about laptop computers, safety gloves, and copy paper, dividing them into two groups – one that saw greenwashed products and one that saw eco-certified products.
The study participants had to decide how much of a premium they would be willing to pay for the “eco-friendly” product compared to a standard product of the same type. But in each of the three scenarios, the premium that purchasing managers who saw the greenwashed products were willing to pay was not significantly different from the premium the purchasing managers who saw the certified products were willing to pay.
In other words, the purchasing managers thought the greenwashed products were worth just as much as the eco-certified products. The results appear in the journal Scientific Reports.
“Going into the study, I had hypothesized that purchasing managers would show a clear preference for certified sustainable products over greenwashed ones,” Khan says. But that wasn’t the case. In fact, the purchasing managers’ willingness to pay for greenwashed laptops and copy paper was even slightly higher than their willingness to pay for certified ones.
“It was surprising (and frankly concerning) to see that years of professional experience did not necessarily help these managers distinguish credible sustainability claims from marketing spin,” Khan adds. “It really underlines how complex and overwhelming the sustainability certification landscape has become.”
Environmental certifications are supposed fight greenwashing, but their proliferation – more than 400 such schemes exist worldwide – makes them less effective, the results suggest. People trying to figure out what to buy are more confused than ever, and may find vague greenwashing claims just as persuasive as unfamiliar eco-labels.
The researchers argue that standardized and simplified certification systems are needed to guide purchasing managers – and others – to genuinely sustainable products. Purchasing managers should also be specifically trained to evaluate sustainability claims. And regulatory authorities should apply stricter standards to such claims.
“If organizations want their ESG [environmental, social, and governance] strategies to be truly effective, they must invest in better tools, clearer certifications, and stronger evaluation frameworks for procurement teams,” Khan says.
In the future, Khan aims to investigate whether corporate culture, individual personality traits, or training programs help purchasing managers evade greenwashing.
Source: Khan O. and A. Hinterhuber. “An experimental study on the susceptibility of purchasing managers to greenwashing.” Scientific Reports 2025.
Image: © Anthropocene Magazine. Based illustration by GeorgePeters
