The clues offered by behaviours
Go beyond waste
Waste reduction is the gateway sustainability behaviour for many people and businesses. In fact, it’s so well established across categories and countries that it tells you very little about what makes people different when it comes to values and actions.
It’s still important and, in Kantar’s Sustainability Sector Index, the issues of waste, packaging and plastic pollution are among the top issues consumers rate as relevant to many different business sectors.
Action on waste is also frequently communicated by brands contributing to the fact that waste reduction has become almost normalised, at least to the extent that most people in all markets say they are reducing their waste.
In short, waste has been scaled to such a degree that even people not engaged in environmental issues will participate to an extent.
When it comes to segmentation, while it may have been a powerful tool in the past, waste is no longer an effective action that can help brands determine who is most engaged.
Advertisers need to look at other sustainable behaviours for real differentiators.
Raise the bar
The behaviour that’s hardest to adopt can be the most effective way of breaking down the population into powerful segments.
Consumption-related behaviours, such as waste reduction or buying more sustainable products and services, are amongst the easiest behaviours to adopt. However, the reality is that other actions would have a much bigger impact on reducing carbon emissions.
Changing how we travel and what we eat are widely accepted as two of the more impactful behaviours. They also help split people apart when it comes to levels of engagement and behaviours.
On travel, for example, asking people if they are flying less, or using cars less often because far fewer people say they do this. Asking about changes in diet is also instructive. In our survey we asked about a more realistic behaviour of eating less meat and dairy / eating more of a plant-based diet. This relatively small behaviour change elicited few people doing this in some countries. In the UK, US and Singapore there are only a third of people doing this currently, and between a fifth and third of people say they have no interest in doing this.
This finding aligns with purchase data from Europanel’s Who Cares Who Does which shows flattening sales of meat or dairy alternatives in European markets (2022 vs 2023).
Including a mixture of ‘harder’ behaviours is a good way to make sure we are splitting people apart correctly, as different behaviours will require different effort depending on where someone lives.
Difficulty depends on location
Understanding the deep-rooted frictions to adopting more sustainable behaviours is vital if we are to truly understand what is getting in the way of action. These vary by market and are different for each behaviour.
In the US, for example, the most stated transport friction stems from lack of interest. In the UK it is about not thinking it would make a difference, and in Singapore it is simply not thinking about it at all. When it comes to food, the barrier is broadly the same across markets: the struggle to change day-to-day eating habits.
Online search data is a great way to unpick the local nuances to the frictions and get a sense of the opportunity in a given market as well as the changing trends.
Veganism, for example, averages 300k monthly searches on Google in the UK, but search is slowing. Instead, consumers are looking at
sustainable nutrition in a broader sense, with search interest in Organic, Seasonal and Local trends showing significant growth. This suggests that sustainable eating habits go beyond eating less meat and dairy / eating more of a plant-based diet.
Including detailed, relevant frictions that are slowing or stopping sustainable behaviour change are an excellent way of segmenting people and focusing on driving action.
Indirect questioning, honesty priming and activists
Ask a direct question and you may not always get an honest answer. Indirect questioning in context of frictions gives a lower claimed action. Our research covered several clusters of sustainable behaviours and explored different approaches when asking about people doing these behaviours. The approach of asking about behaviours, indirectly, in the context of barriers to action, revealed what we interpret as more accurate answers, or at least lower claimed action results.
And we also got lower claimed action numbers when we primed our respondents for honest answers. We asked consumers to give an honest assessment of how often they do our eight key actions, giving one group an honesty priming statement to give permission to say they don’t do this.
Across all markets and behaviours the honesty-primed approach generated a six percentage points lower average claim to doing the behaviours most of the time.
Given the social pressure to respond positively, we suggest the lower scores are a better reflection of reality and that honesty priming is a useful technique to use when asking about specific behaviours.
Willingness to take collective action was asked about in very broad terms, from contacting their government to campaigning, protesting or volunteering. Despite the range of activities within this group, comparatively few people are doing these actions on average across markets.
Whilst not relevant for every brand, more activist brands might want to consider the nuances of the frictions to collective action to trigger growing the movement, and all brands might want to consider these more activist consumers in their categories as a way of understanding some of those most engaged on sustainability issues.
