December 2007: The challenge of changing consumer behaviour for sustainable consumption

In response to forecasts of a catastrophic fate for the planet, the telecom industry has taken a step forward with declared ambitions to make a significant, positive impact on climate change and the environment. Australian research published earlier this year estimates that telecom could contribute an overall 5% cut in the country’s green house emissions . Last year a joint report from the European Telecommunications Network Operators association (ETNO) and WWF predicted the sector could contribute a 50-million tonne cut in annual EU-25 CO2 emissions by 2010 (equivalent to just over 1.1% of total EU-15 emissions in 2004 ). In this article, Sheridan Nye considers what can be achieved - always assuming that you, me and everyone else is willing to make a few changes to our behaviour. 

What is to be done?

Proposals for increasing sustainability by deploying ICT products and services are wide-ranging and include: the radical displacement of transport through video and audio conferencing; dematerialisation of government and commercial services through online delivery; intelligent buildings with automated heating and lighting; improved transport logistics; advanced urban planning for energy efficiency; improved rates of recycling and reuse; longer product lifecycles; and the reduction of telecom’s own energy footprint through technical, operational and planning innovation.

These propositions, however, presume some similarly radical shifts in the behavioural patterns of consumers, businesses, governments and citizens. Requirements can be classified at three different levels of impact on the individual – direct impact (such as learning to communicate effectively via audio conferencing, or becoming more committed to recycling), indirect (such as being provided with access to e-government services) and systemic, whereby wholesale change is needed in patterns of living and working, with implications for a wide range of actors, economies and institutions (see Table 1).

 

Changing behaviour: the biggest ask

The challenge of trying to stimulate behavior in desired directions can hardly be overestimated. Decades of academic research has sought to explain how policy makers and firms can engage with individuals’ motivations in the interests of environmental, social or economic goals. Conventional approaches tend to rely on the provision of digestible, compelling information and appeals to rational decision-making. Such techniques have been fundamental in the design of public policy campaigns for years. Yet research from diverse disciplines within psychology, sociology, biology and medical science highlights the limited scope of these approaches to promote real change.

The belief that consumers will change their behaviour on the basis of rational deliberation alone – for instance, by absorbing more and more information about the causes and impacts of climate change – seems unrealistic. Incentives and penalties often fail to achieve expected outcomes and research suggests such appeals to consumer rationales are limited by lack of attention to several factors: 

- Information overload – too much data and persuasion can provoke feelings of powerlessness and futility.

- Bounded rationality – people often make decisions based on their best guess assessment of a situation, their previous decisions and favoured ‘rules of thumb’. 

- Moral values – decisions are not always explicitly taken in self-interest. Concern for others and a sense of duty are just two examples of motivations that may complicate an individual’s choices. 

- Group interests – the interests of the social group may override those of the individual. Alternatively, the individual may locate their self-interest in the progress of the group. 

- Stated intentions often have little relation to behaviour, which need not anyway follow from the adoption of beliefs and values. Causality is sometimes reversed where a psychological desire exists to justify behaviour retrospectively (Jackson, 2005, pp.46).

- Irrationality – Even allowing for the above, people do not always behave according to a logical calculation of costs and benefits.

In addition, choices that on the surface appear straightforwardly motivated are, on closer inspection, constrained and directed by higher-level institutions such as societal norms and national culture - the family, immediate acquaintances, peer groups and communities may all have a role. Awareness is therefore needed of the individual’s capacity to make decisions based on values other than self-interest and in the context of their home and work environments.

Socially embedded behaviour

An extensive meta-review of the academic literature, published in 2005 and commissioned by the Sustainable Development Research Network , concluded that public policy should be designed with more emphasis on the socially-embedded character of behaviour (Jackson 2005, pp.xi). Although this more holistic approach presents challenges to policy makers, the sum of the research suggests that the processes that produce socially-embedded practices have identifiable dynamics that should be amenable to influence (Jackson, 2005, pp.107). The difficulty is in identifying these processes.

Telecom service providers, being among the most successful retail marketers and with subscribers totalling almost entire populations, have good understanding of social groups and behaviour compared with many other sectors. The industry is highly skilled in the design of advertising messages that reflect marketers’ appreciation of consumption as a social activity. Through consumption, consumers endeavour to satisfy not only their basic needs and individual self-interest, but also more diffuse and socially-mediated desires. Concepts underlying the activity of consumption thus include: identity, aspiration, taste, competition (eg for status, sexual attention), communication, association, the need for social cohesion and so on. Initial research from the energy sector confirms that people like to feel empowered and prefer that their norms and values are reinforced rather than challenged. Rewards and targets are popular, especially if offered with easily understood benchmarking data.

Habit

Many of the behavioural changes outlined in table 1 imply the need for individuals to accept new ways of doing something they have already been doing for some time. However, one of the greatest barriers to behavioural change is the entrenched nature of habit. We develop habits for many reasons, one of the most obvious being efficiency of effort. The automatic, low-level cognition required to perform a habitual act saves time and attention that can be used elsewhere (Jackson, 2005, pp.91). For example, deciding not to recycle domestic waste saves effort over having to think about its material composition and appropriate allocation among different recycling bins.

Habit is difficult to change without the explicit awareness and cooperation of the consumer. An important initial consideration is therefore to identify and directly target the barriers to change – a lack of cycle-paths tending to reinforce driving habits, for example. Social norms also reinforce habits by defining society’s moral expectations and values through resource to ‘templates’ of common responses to given situations. Such norms may function at the level of a society, the workplace, a peer group or local community, or in terms of the individual’s own beliefs and values. As a consequence, people can make quite different value-based decisions at home than in the workplace or among their communities of interest.

‘Framing’ of the issue is another important way to influence behaviour. A ‘top down’ or prescriptive message may be less effective than a strategy to address local communities; for example, a policy message about sustainable consumption may be better received if framed as an improvement strategy for a local area.

Additional techniques that can be deployed in the bid to change habits include profiling of the target audience, extensive piloting to address segmentation differences, reminders and reinforcement, and setting consumer commitments (anecdotal evidence from early trials of electricity ‘smart’ meters suggests many consumers respond positively to targets that require reasonable effort, more so than if the target is relatively easy to achieve).

Community-based social marketing

The dynamics that produce socially embedded behaviour are multi-dimensional. However, research suggests that techniques such as social marketing, social learning and participatory problem-solving can successfully influence these dynamics (Jackson, 2005, 98-102).

Community-based social marketing can be especially effective where it supports existing grassroots activities. ‘Communities’ can be found in many contexts, but broad criteria from a telecom perspective might include shared calling groups, locality, age, interests, language and subcultures. It should be noted that communities also have weaknesses. They can be inward-looking, or repressive and exclusive. Recent innovations in community building, such as Facebook, therefore, may prove to be inherently less stable than groups rooted in immediate family and locality.

Telecom operators would seem to have particular advantages in regard to community-based marketing. They have unprecedented, aggregate detail about customers’ communications habits and movements as well as a feedback channel that could be used for tailored messages on sustainable consumption in response to measures of behaviour (such as personal carbon footprint). However, beyond the ability to optimise the relevance of the message to the individual, telecom service providers may lack credibility as a messenger. Recent research from Telefónica O2 suggests that customers do not look to their mobile services provider for leadership on the environment . Additionally, consumers may be discouraged by a perceived lack of environmental commitment on the part of the service provider. For example, broadband suppliers are often unsupportive of unofficial sharing of WiFi distribution in a locality, which might otherwise reduce energy consumption.

Central government has traditionally not been the most successful in stimulating community-oriented behavioural change. In contrast, local authorities that have successfully ‘branded’ their cities and towns (see Brighton & Hove Visitor and Convention Bureau ) can be well placed to capitalise on a strong sense of community identity. As with many prominent philanthropic initiatives, telecom partnerships with civil society organisations could help with the credibility issue.

Roles of telecom service providers, industry bodies and government

As discussed above, the telecom industry and the state both have roles in framing sustainable consumption for consumer. Telecom companies have unique marketing channels to large proportions of national populations. Marketing is especially strong in mobile where companies own proprietary aggregate and granular data on how people communicate and move around cities and transport links. They also control ubiquitous wireless and fixed-line connections to the home that could be used to monitor personal and household carbon footprints.

Additionally, and crucially for community-based marketing, mobile service providers are bringing social networking platforms such as Facebook to mobile devices. However, behemoth Google and device manufacturers such as Nokia are competing for ownership of the consumer. Energy suppliers are also circling the market for home energy management services and are looking to mobile service providers as a model for segmentation of customer base. Customer usage and demographic profiling would allow energy suppliers to bundle a new raft of sophisticated incentives and monitoring services.

Industry organisations are highly credible lobbyists for regulatory and tax changes and setting of standards. An important new role is to present the case to policy makers for ICT’s contribution to climate change mitigation .

Government crucially sets the appropriate institutional conditions via product and environmental standards, regulations, laws, taxes, incentives and penalties etc; recycling facilities; equality of access, distribution of benefits. As discussed above, local authorities also have an important role in supporting community identity and activities.

ICTandclimatechange.com now offers a social marketing capability to help organisations and companies wishing to use ICT to help change behaviours and reduce their own, and other's, carbon footprints. Send us an email to find out more.

References:

[1] Climate Risk (2007), Towards a High-Bandwidth, Low-Carbon Future

[2] ETNO/WWF (2006), Saving the Climate at the Speed of Light

[3] European Environment Agency (2007), Annual European Community greenhouse gas inventory 1990–2005 and inventory report 2007

[4] Jackson, T (2005) Motivating Sustainable Consumption, an overview of academic thinking and research

[5] Fischer, C (2007), ‘Influencing electricity consumption via consumer feedback: a review of experience’, in Conference Proceedings, ‘Saving energy – Just do it!’, Vol.4, pp.1873

[6] Wolff, C (2007), ‘Mobilising the Public’, Telefonica O2 Europe, presentation to Informa conference Telecom & Environment, October 23, 2007

[7] See http://www.visitbrighton.com/members/1137.asp

[8] Such as ETNO’s 2006 report with WWF. See also the report from the Confederation of British Industry Task Force on Climate Change: http://www.avtclient.co.uk/climatereport/