Consumers as the Demand-Side Buffer of Sustainable Supply Chains: The Formation and Boundary Conditions of Resilient Consumption Through Perceived ESG Legitimacy

Sustainable supply chains carry a cost premium that can make their demand base fragile when economic shocks tighten household budgets, because the more expensive environmental, social, and governance (ESG)-aligned product is often among the first that consumers forgo. We propose extending resilience thinking to the downstream, demand-side node of the supply chain: we frame premium-tolerant ESG consumption as a conceptual indicator of demand-side resilience—an absorptive buffer that may help keep sustainable supply chains viable through disturbance—and draw on signaling theory to model how it is formed. Using a nationally structured, quota-controlled survey of 3000 Korean consumers collected by the Korea Consumer Agency, we estimate a moderated-mediation structural equation model in which ESG signal trust is associated with resilient sustainable consumption through perceived ESG legitimacy, conditioned by income and perceived greenwashing. Because the data are cross-sectional, we report associations rather than causal effects. Trust was positively associated with perceived legitimacy, which in turn was associated with resilient sustainable consumption, so that legitimacy is the proximal correlate linking trust to resilience. Income moderated this conversion only modestly—the sustainability–resilience trade-off is statistically present but small in magnitude—while perceived greenwashing did not attenuate it, and its unexpected positive coefficient proved unstable across specifications and is not interpreted. A multi-group comparison indicated that the pattern of associations differs with the perceived credibility of the ESG signal environment: when third-party signals were perceived as credible, the trust–legitimacy–consumption route was more pronounced, whereas when they were not, trust was associated with consumption more directly. Consumers also expected ESG far more of large firms than of micro-enterprises. No supply-chain-level outcome was measured; the cross-level link is advanced as a proposition for future work. The study reframes supply chain resilience as partly demand-side, potentially sustained by credible, independently verified ESG signals rather than by firms’ own disclosure.