Getting consumers to adopt a more sustainable behavior is not an easy task. Even with the right mindset, overcoming psychological barriers and changing one’s habits can be hard.

Prior research finds that Psycholigical Ownership can be an effective tool in pursuit of this challenge. For example, PO is shown to be effective in increasing recycling intention through eliciting the sense of stewardship over our planet (Felix & Almaguer, 2019).

When it comes to sustainable consumption, one particularly stubborn area is diet. Food production is responsible for roughly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Crippa et al., 2021; van Dijk et al., 2023). Yet many consumers, even those environmentally conscious, frequently fail to connect their dietary choices with environmental consequences.

In their recent paper published in Appetite (2025) Frem and Nguyen explore how Psychological Ownership can help tackle this challenge. The authors address a famously tough dietary topic – meat eating and hybrid meat alternatives. Hybrid meat is a meat product that contains both meat and alternative plant-based protein sources (van Dijk et al., 2023). Recent consumer research shows that hybrid meat is more appealing than fully plant-based meat alternatives both for its sensory properties and for the minimal degree of behavioural change required. Yet, many meat eaters are still sceptical.

In two studies, Frem and Nguyen show that making a call encouraging customers to help take care of  “Your Earth” (vs. “The Earth”)  increases the sense of Psychological Ownership resulting in a significant increase of Purchase Intention. Interestingly, anthropomorphising Earth also has a positive effect on purchase intention of hybrid meat products. Importantly, in case of  anthropomorphism, the stewardship manipulation (“Your Earth” vs. “The Earth”)  does not carry any added value for the purchase intention.

These findings underscore the power of messaging in shifting consumer behavior even in such challenging domains as diet. The results show that there is a variety of tools marketers can use to encourage sustainable consumption and not all of these tools need be employed at once. While some branding contexts may be better fitting for anthropomorphism, in others Psychological Ownership may be the right tool for the job.

You can read the full article here.