Katherine "Kate" White

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Summary

Katherine (Kate) White is a researcher in marketing and behavioral science at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She is also the senior associate dean of equity, diversity, inclusion, and sustainability at the UBC Sauder School of Business. White is an eminent researcher on the positive social and environmental consequences of marketing, examining the ways in which marketing communications can encourage outcomes like charitable giving and pro-environmental behaviors. Her work has shifted the traditional focus of the field from how marketing can be a profit-maximization tool to how marketing can be used to catalyze positive, prosocial, and sustainable consumer actions.

Description of Research Impact

In her research on the positive social and environmental consequences of marketing, White conducts field experiments to measure real behaviors, such as residential recycling, charitable donations, and eco-friendly purchases. Such use of real-world data has been relatively rare in a field that has historically relied on laboratory and online studies. Her research is not only notable for its societal impact but also for its theoretical richness and academic contributions.

White’s paper on encouraging recycling—“It’s the Mind-Set that Matters”—exemplifies the impact of her research in that it disentangles previously mixed findings on message framing and pro-environmental actions. While some earlier work had found loss frames to be particularly effective, other work had found the effectiveness of gain frames to be greater. White’s work showed that the impact of messages framed as loss versus those framed as gain depends on the type of mindset that is activated in a message’s recipient. Loss frames are more potent when paired with low-level, concrete mindsets (i.e., providing the details about how to recycle), whereas gain frames are more effective when paired with high-level, abstract mindsets (i.e., offering broader information about why one should recycle). This information was determined through a field experiment with the city of Calgary, Canada, that measured recycling behaviors both one week and six months after an intervention to promote recycling had taken place.

As another example of White’s academic impact, her paper on encouraging sustainable behaviors has been cited, to date, close to 1,200 times. The SHIFT framework detailed in the paper identifies five routes to encouraging sustainable consumer behaviors: social influence, habits, individual self, feelings and cognitions, and tangibility. The work also forwards 25 novel theoretical propositions for extending future research on sustainable consumption. This article has placed both at the top of the Most Read list for the Journal of Marketing and on Shugan’s Top20 Marketing Meta-Journal list, which ranks the highest-impact articles across all marketing journals.

White has also worked on sustainability with various organizations, including the government of Canada, the city of Calgary, MakeWay, the SB Brands for Good collaboratory, Sitra, BC Hydro, the British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BC SPCA), Celgene, My Sustainable Canada, Vancity, Starbucks, Lululemon, and Unilever.

Examples of Research Impact

White’s findings have been directly acted upon by the city of Calgary to foster recycling and composting behaviors, by Starbucks to promote reusable mug practices, and by the BC SPCA to encourage charitable giving. In addition, her research on the SHIFT framework specifically has impacted a variety of stakeholders, including small and large companies, nonprofits, cooperatives, educational programs, and government organizations.

White has given interviews to advise on the use of SHIFT to over 50 organizations, including Starbucks, Amazon, Zillow, Visa, Tide (Procter & Gamble), Unilever, Recurate, CoGo, and Wren. White has also worked as a consultant for Starbucks on the SHIFT framework. In addition, she has used this framework while working with the Share Reuse Repair Initiative (part of MakeWay) to help eco-focused startup organizations shift consumer behavior toward sustainable products. These startups have included Fulfill Shoppe (a zero-waste grocery shop), Tradle (a reusable baby clothing library), Susgrainable (which converts beer waste products to grains and cookies), The Ethical Chair (which reuses and reupholsters furniture), as well as government organizations such as Zero Waste Washington and the cities of Portland, Oregon, USA, and Vancouver, Canada.

A version of the SHIFT framework and a related workbook have been shared in collaboration with Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. The framework has also been used in executive and continuing education courses (UBC’s Influencing Behavior Change for the Public Good and its Advanced Professional Certificate in Behavioral Insights), undergraduate courses (Consumer Behavior, as well as Sustainability Marketing), and doctoral courses. In White’s Consumer Behavior class for upper-year undergraduates, students have worked in collaboration with such brands as Arc’teryx, Modo, Vancity, STIL, and Puracy, using the SHIFT framework to design and test various behavior-change strategies.

White has endeavored to share her work broadly and in diverse ways, including through presentations, news articles, webinars, book chapters, and podcasts. She has presented her work at academic conferences and universities and, more specifically, detailed the SHIFT framework at the following practitioner conferences: Unreasonable conference, Brand Battle for Good, GreenBiz conference, Sustainable Brands conference, Harvard Business Review Sustainability Summit, Marketing Science Institute’s brand accountability session, GlobeScan, Sustainability in Packaging conference, Coast Waste Management Association’s conference, Behavioral Insights into Business for Social Good conference, and Shell Powering Progress Together conference, among others. She has written managerially relevant and accessible articles in Harvard Business Review and The Conversation.

Select Publications

• Katherine White, Rhiannon Macdonnell, and Darren W. Dahl, “It’s the Mind-Set that Matters: The Role of Construal Level and Message Framing in Influencing Consumer Efficacy and Conservation Behaviors,” Journal of Marketing Research 48, no. 3 (June 1, 2011): 472–85, https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.48.3.472.
• Katherine White, Rishad Habib, and David J. Hardisty, “How to SHIFT Consumer Behaviors to Be More Sustainable: A Literature Review and Guiding Framework,” Journal of Marketing 83, no. 3 (February 14, 2019): 22–49, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242919825649.

Supporting Links

• SHIFT Program, Share Reuse Repair Initiative
• SHIFT: A Review and Framework for Encouraging Ecologically Sustainable Consumer Behavior, Sitra