Encouraging Signs

Why do people do what they do? This is the question at the heart of marketing, and in relation to sustainability, businesses, governments and academics have put huge amounts of effort into trying to understand exactly why consumers either will or won't engage in more sustainable forms of consumption.
What makes the question difficult to answer is that consumer behaviour is multi-faceted, complex and frequently inconsistent, and much of the research into sustainable consumer behaviour has produced sets of results that are equally inconsistent and in some cases contradictory. Much of this research involves taking existing theories and models of consumer behaviour and adding some form of ethical, environmental or sustainable component. The logic behind this is that if we improve peoples' knowledge about sustainability issues, or if we instill sustainability values into people and influence their attitudes, then they will reflect this knowledge and these values/attitudes in their consumption intentions and behaviours. Models based on the Theory of Reasoned Action and the Theory of Planned Behaviour are particularly popular for applying or adapting to explain sustainable consumption behaviour (and sometimes the lack of it). Although if you are one of those people who feel that life mostly happens to you, the explanatory power of a model based around planned behaviour might seem rather shaky.
Much of the research into sustainable consumption behaviour is looking for a single simple explanation for when, why and how consumers consider and respond to sustainability issues in their behaviour. What emerges instead is a jigsaw puzzle picture of different influences which come into play for different consumers, in relation to different types of product or service at different times.
One interesting piece of this puzzle is highlighted in a recent Journal of Consumer Research article by Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini and Vladas Griskevicius, based on a simple experiment they performed. This concerned finding ways to persuade hotel guests to reuse towels and the types of message that they would respond to (Although this is slightly ironic given that 'green' hotel towel laundering policies are the origins of the phrase 'greenwashing', as we noted in our text book). The experiment tested the responses to different in-room signs. They found that customers responded more strongly to a sign that said 'the majority of guests reuse their towels' than to the normal messages which just highlight the environmental benefits of reusing towels and ask guests to do so.
This, they argue, demonstrates the power of social norms on consumer behaviour. What was really interesting was that guests responded even more positively when the wording was tweaked to say 'the majority of guests in this room reuse their towels'. The researchers felt their data didn’t provide an explanation for this effect, but they speculate that it may also be a social norm effect because guests identify more strongly with an imagined social group of users of that room.
A subtly different explanation is that this second message seemed more personal and relevant to people because it allowed them to more easily picture themselves engaging in the behaviour. This links into ideas about personal identity (how we see ourselves) as an influence on consumer behaviour, which is under-researched compared to social identity (how we think others will see us). There has been relatively little research about the role of self-identity on sustainable consumer behaviour, but what there is suggests strongly that whether or not we can readily imagine ourselves doing something strongly influences whether or not we ultimately will. This is an effect that Ken came across in doing some research in the glamorous field of home composting. It was curious that many householders who were enthusiastic recyclers were entirely unwilling to get involved in composting (despite the superficial similarities in the behaviours). Some faced practical barriers from a lack of garden space and some had concerns about hygiene, flies or rats. What focus group research probing their reasons revealed, was that many householders didn’t get involved in composting because they felt ‘it wasn’t the sort of thing that people like me do’. When asked what sort of people they thought did compost, the typical response was to envisage a middle-aged man (often wearing a cap) who gardened as a hobby.
These insights into how we relate sustainable consumption behaviours to our sense of personal identity are very revealing. They highlight the importance of positioning sustainable consumption as normal, part of the mainstream and something that all sorts of people can get involved with. This makes it important to leave the ‘alternative’ label far behind, and moving both sustainability marketing and more sustainable consumption further into the mainstream is very much what we hope to achieve with the book "Sustainability Marketing: A Global Perspective".