When leadership messaging fails to encourage producers’ climate action: Field experiments reveal what works in the real world

• Whether the leading-by-example encourages climate action of producers is tested. • The message was randomly sent to half of the wineries in Japan. • The message did not encourage wineries to participate in carbon footprint webinars. • An intention–behavior gap was found between wineries’ interest and attendance. If a government highlighted the first producer to adopt green technology, how would the remaining producers react? This study is the first attempt to evaluate the impact of a message about a climate leader sent by the government to an industry. From among 374 wineries in Japan, half were randomly selected and received a message stating that a certain winery was an early adopter of renewable energy. We then observed whether other wineries participated in webinars on carbon footprint measurement to collect information. We find that this message about climate leadership did not encourage the wineries to participate in the webinar. We interpret this result as reflecting both the strategic decisions of competing wineries and the adverse psychological effects of the message. Further analysis reveals a substantial gap between the stated interest and actual participation, suggesting that self-reported intentions may not reliably predict behavior. Overall, this preregistered field experiment highlights the importance of carefully designing supply-side messaging policies and emphasizes the value of collecting behavioral data in real-world settings to better understand actual responses.