Consumer Behavior Change

Dispelling the Dissonance:
How Conscious Brands Can Turn Customer Beliefs Into Actions

In the 2010 UN Global Compact-Accenture Global CEO Study, 49% of CEOs said that the sustainability agenda can only move forward if driven by greater consumer demand; government and corporate initiatives will not be enough. While sustainability advocates fret that companies are interested in sustainability initiatives only to sell more stuff, CEOs are frustrated by the dissonance between what consumers say they want and the values that their spending reflects. To quote a CEO from the survey:

By Eliza Preston | Published 10 years ago | About a 4 minute read

In the 2010 UN Global Compact-Accenture Global CEO Study, 49% of CEOs said that the sustainability agenda can only move forward if driven by greater consumer demand; government and corporate initiatives will not be enough. While sustainability advocates fret that companies are interested in sustainability initiatives only to sell more stuff, CEOs are frustrated by the dissonance between what consumers say they want and the values that their spending reflects. To quote a CEO from the survey:

"The holy grail is to be able to say that the impact on purchasing behaviour of consumers for sustainable brands is clear. It is not."

This disparity is often put down to greed or laziness, the triumph of convenience or financial savings over ethical principles and intentions. This is too harsh. As behavioural science demonstrates, we are not rational beings. The fact that our behaviour does not always reflect our beliefs does not mean that we never had the belief in the first place. We set out with the best intention to act on our values and make decisions that support and reinforce them. But in the clamour of life, the voice of principle is drowned out by the din of marketing messages, time pressures and limited product choice and information.

In a recent talk at the British Academy, Jessi Baker, co-founder of Project Provenance, highlighted how online retail can enable people to foreground their values while making a purchase decision, allowing us to choose our values and explicitly pursue them, ordering our options accordingly.

At present, many of brands' sustainability efforts focus on the point of purchase. Certification symbols and labels and carefully crafted messaging help us to choose products that have been responsibly sourced, manufactured and delivered. But what about the thousands of other decisions we make in daily life? Can brands think beyond the point of purchase, making it easier for people to keep their values in focus in the daily use of products?

Simple Bank offers one example of a brand bridging the gap. While traditional ‘current balances’ offer little more than a figure of how much money is in your account, Simple Bank gives customers information on how much they have to spend, deducting predictable expenditures, upcoming bills and pending transactions.

Simple Bank interface

Simple Bank’s approach demonstrates thoughtful consideration and empathy for the reality in which they are used. While many brands use their understanding of consumer values to provide relevant products, Simple provides a context in which those values can be reaffirmed.

Thinking of brands as contexts rather than products is not antagonistic to the need for businesses to sell stuff. Small changes in the context of our lives can have a dramatic influence on the purchase decisions we make. If brands can offer products and services that build and reinforce our values as we use them, we are more likely to reaffirm those values in our next purchase decision.

For example, in 2011 Unilever, in partnership with IDEO, initiated a project to explore sanitation solutions in urban Ghana. Careful consideration of the practical realities of these very poor neighbourhoods resulted in an innovative, portable sanitation system that brought basic toilet facilities and collection services to thousands of homes. But Unilever did not have to wait for the incomes of these people to rise before they saw the sales of their personal care products rise. For many who were previously limited to ‘plastic bag’ toilets, Unilever’s service fostered a new sense of dignity and self-respect. Personal care was no longer such a distant luxury, shower gels and deodorants no longer so irrelevant to their daily activities. In this way, Unilever created a context in which previously irrelevant values could take prominence.

CEOs need to stop blaming consumers for the fact that sustainability is not selling more stuff. Sustainable lifestyles are not built on the decisions we make in the shopping aisle. They are made of hundreds of decisions that we make as we navigate the demands of daily life. Brands that support our values beyond the shopping aisle are more likely to win our loyalty within it.