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Consumer Behavior Change

The latest ways brands are supporting a shift toward sustainable consumption, and best practices for brands aiming to encourage more conscious consumer behavior and lifestyles

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Follow-Up to SB'13: Lucid's Michael Murray on Using IT to Drive Behavior Change

Michael Murray is the president and co-founder of Lucid, a software company providing real-time information feedback designed to “teach, inspire behavior change, and save energy and water resources in buildings.” Since the company’s founding in... View More

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Want to Nudge Consumers to Waste Less? Make It Easy, Fun and Popular

As my Green Marketing students are learning, companies large and small are reducing their carbon footprints by adopting strategies to make their operations, goods and services more environmentally sustainable. But with the world population headed tow... View More

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M&S Uses the Power of Co-Design to Drive Behaviour Change

Marks and Spencer (M&S) recently piloted training toolkits for its supplier factories in the UK and Sri Lanka, as part of its Plan A commitment to being a Fair Partner. These toolkits were a result of a collaborative design process between M&... View More

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How a Towel Rail Changed a Village

I was asked recently about my favourite behaviour change stories in the energy space. I didn’t have to think long: my favourite is the one about the £200-a-year towel rail. Yep, you heard that right: a towel rail. ... View More

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Big, Bold, Creative ... and Normal: How Brands Can Shift Sustainability Into the Mainstream

Bob Dylan understood the sustainability challenge long ago when he sang, “People seldom do what they believe in / They do what is convenient, then repent” in “Brownsville Girl.”For sustainability to become mainstream, we need to reframe the d... View More

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Behaviour Change: Collaboration and Strong, Independent Leadership Required

Consumer behaviour change is the challenge of our time. An effective response will require increased capacity and capability across the sector: more skills, different skills and more people with those skills. If we are to achieve this, we need cross-... View More

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New Generation of Companies Emerging to Sate Demand of Conscious Consumerism

In the past two months, the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, the second-floor failure of the shoe factory in Cambodia, and most recently, the fire in the Chinese poultry plant have resulted in the deaths of some 1,500 workers in the developing... View More

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The Power of Peer Influence on Consumer Habits

When it comes to motivating behavior change, there’s nothing more powerful than the recommendations of your peers. This applies to everything from musical tastes of teenagers to brand selections among consumers to farmers in India.This power of pee... View More

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Will Millennials Drive the Shift from a Consumption-Based to a Values-Based Economy?

One of the most frequently discussed topics in the sustainability industry is sustainable consumption. How can we shift people away from frequently buying new “things” and toward re-use and alternatives to ownership such as borrowing or swapping?... View More

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Sustainable Shipping Initiative Working to Take the Environmental Sting Out of 'Sea Miles'

Ninety percent of international trade travels by ship. And that comes with the type of carbon impact you would expect: The shipping industry’s carbon emissions currently account for 3-4% of global emissions and are expected to triple by 2050 if cur... View More

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Round-Up #1: What Can My Brand Take Away From This Issue in Focus?

Our Issue in Focus on Driving Behaviour Change kicked off in style this month with articles exploring why, how and what brands can do to create behaviour change for a better world. Here is the first of two round-ups of the content from Forum for the ... View More

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The DoNation: Less Talk, More Action

“Less talk and more action” has been a guiding motto of my life, so I suppose it should have come as no surprise when, after a year of researching the ins and outs of environmental behaviour change for my Masters, I decided to put the theory into... View More

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Mooncup: How to Market the Unmentionable

In his book The Green Marketing Manifesto, environmental advertising guru John Grant admits that there is one product that he had no idea how to sell. The problem is not product performance. The little disruptive innovation in question is not just gr... View More

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Barriers and Benefits: Changing Behavior Through Social Marketing

Promoting behavior change is something that Lifebuoy knows well. Launched in 1894 by William Level in the UK as the Royal Disinfectant Soap to stop cholera in Victorian England, it went on to be known as the “red soap” throughout the twentieth ce... View More

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Crafting Sustainable Consumption Patterns: Nokia's Ecosystem Approach

The consumption of goods and services is growing rapidly with the rise in household incomes and population growth. This growth in consumption is significantly offsetting and underplaying the environmental gains being made on the production side.At No... View More

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Case Study: How We Changed the Behavior of Littering

Over the last few years, Shelton Group’s Pulse studies have tracked a decline in concern for several environmental issues — hypothesizing that some issues (such as climate change) have become highly politicized and that the country’s declining ... View More

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Marcal Rebrand Lets the World Know That It's Always Been Green

In my speeches on "making green sexy," which I've given in a number of locations in the US and Europe, I talk about different types of message points for three different audiences: deep green, light green/lazy green, and non-green. I discus... View More

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The Easiest Choice in the World: Using Innovation to Help Every Customer Be More Sustainable

Since its launch in 2010, the Eco Rating scheme that Forum for the Future created with Telefónica UK/O2 has been helping consumers make more sustainable handset choices, whether they like it or not. ... View More

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How to Jump-Start Behavior Change Around Energy Conservation

For many years of Pulse studies, when asked who they most blame for rising energy costs, respondents have said they most blame either 1) oil companies or 2) the U.S. government — with utilities much farther down the list. ... View More

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Is It Best to Approach Behavior Change from Inside or Outside of Your Company?

Work on behavior change cannot be considered a new area; various institutions, especially governments, have long sought to influence individuals’ behavior in areas such as health, transport, family planning, etc. It is also not new for companies an... View More

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