The channel did not know the product existed

The question was willingness to pay. The method was not a pricing method.

The brief was whether higher value could be captured from customers by selling sustainable options alongside air freight. Four end customer industries were scoped, and interviews were run with named contacts introduced by the client.

Two things about the method have to be said before any finding. First, no pricing technique was used. No conjoint, no price ladder, no sensitivity testing, and no monetary price point appears anywhere in the work. Everything about willingness to pay is what people said in an interview, which is a different thing from what they do at a quote.

Second, the scope was four industries and three were delivered. The automotive segment was scoped, given its own section, and never populated with an interview or a finding. That is in the source material and it belongs on this page rather than in a footnote.

Three industries, three different answers

Pharmaceutical customers said no. The industry is price sensitive on freight and its attention is on quality and safety, and sustainability was rated as not a decision making factor. The structural reason sits in their own reporting: the overwhelming majority of their emissions are in the supply chain, and air freight is a small slice of that. Selling a carbon story to someone for whom the carbon is somewhere else is a hard sell.

Electronics said yes, and it is the segment where the arithmetic supports the answer. Air logistics carries a large share of their logistics emissions, in one case a majority of operational emissions and in another around 60 per cent of the total. Where the emissions are visible in the number the customer reports, the appetite to spend follows.

Fisheries said not yet. Time sensitivity keeps them on air freight for long distance, air freight is a real share of their footprint, and they were clear that they are not willing to pay more now and expect to be later. All three of these are stated positions from interviews, not observed purchasing.

The finding that was not about price at all

The freight forwarders were the most positive group in the study. All three said they were ready to buy sustainable options and resell them, and described strong demand from their own customers for carbon calculations and emissions reporting. Because there is no industry standard, getting that data is expensive and they were falling back on public estimating websites.

And the same group rated their perception of the client on sustainability as not important. Some of them were simply not aware that the client had sustainable offerings at all.

That is a distribution problem wearing the costume of a pricing problem. The most willing buyers in the chain, the ones who actually place the freight, did not know there was anything to buy. No price change fixes that.

What to sell, and to whom

Sustainable aviation fuel came out as the single most important offering for the next two decades and the one blocked today on price and on network coverage. The recommendation was correspondingly narrow: test it on specific routes rather than launch it, look at the three jurisdictions running subsidy schemes, and let forwarders buy customisable amounts rather than all or nothing.

Emissions data was the offering every group wanted and nobody rated as expensive. Forwarders were using rough public estimates because accurate carrier data was not available to them. Providing real numbers, in a form their tools can consume, is a cheaper way to be chosen than a fuel programme.

Carbon offsetting was rated neutral, and positioned as the thing to sell to the price sensitive segments precisely because it costs less than the alternative. Reusable packaging was rated not important and was the one recommendation written as a conditional, because customers already handle their own packaging and it breaks when a shipper uses more than one carrier.

What this study can carry

Eleven named interviews. Contacts introduced by the client, which means selection toward people already engaged with the topic cannot be ruled out. Three industries delivered against four scoped. No pricing method, so nothing here supports a price premium, a willingness to pay level or a revenue number, and none is offered.

There is no measured client result in this work. No volume, no price, no margin and no conversion. What it produced was a segment by segment read on who will pay for what, and one finding worth more than the answer to the original question: the channel could not sell what it did not know existed.