Populism and Sustainable Marketing Practices: Insights from Manufacturers' New Product Launches
The Institute of International Management and Entrepreneurship hosts monthly speaker series, featuring experts from leading institutions across the UK and around the world. Each session explores a diverse range of timely and critical topics exploring how global economic, social, and institutional forces shape entrepreneurial practices and organizational dynamics across different cultural and structural contexts
Description:
In this talk, Prof. Yoon will present insights from his research on how anti–climate change populism shapes firms’ sustainable marketing strategies in the consumer-packaged goods sector. While sustainable practices have traditionally been anchored in stakeholder capitalism, the rise of populist sentiment introduces new political uncertainties that lead firms to scale back environmentally friendly packaging in new product launches. Drawing on resource dependency theory, the study further shows that sub-national institutional contexts—specifically economic freedom and cultural tightness—moderate these effects.
Using a quasi-natural experimental design centered on the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and a global dataset of product launches, Prof. Yoon employs a difference-in-differences approach to assess the impact of populism on sustainable marketing practices. The
analysis provides empirical support for these dynamics and highlights the multilevel institutional forces shaping firms’ responses to politicized sustainability issues.
Speaker:
Prof. Yoon holds the Chair in Global Business and Development, with a specialisation in international business and entrepreneurship. His research explores how institutions and national culture influence the behaviour and strategy of multinational corporations, venture capitalists, start-ups, and entrepreneurs, with a particular focus on technological innovation and sustainable development. Prof. Yoon’s research has been published in leading FT50 journals, including the Journal of International Business Studies, and has been supported by the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, and the Inter-American Development Bank.