Halo by Design founder, Tam Hussey, talks about how digital experiences can enable behaviour change at scale and unlock business benefits beyond meeting sustainability goals.
What is the Green Gap?
Anyone who has tried to do anything hard knows about the say–do gap. Just think about how hard it is to commit to learning a new language or even drinking less coffee. The gap is statistically proven and often sizeable - it is also extremely common in the sustainability space. So common that behavioural psychologists have given it a name; the ‘Green Gap’. Current evidence suggests that when it comes to sustainability, intentions get translated into action roughly 50% of the time.
According to a Futerra survey reported by Forbes, 88% of UK and US consumers want brands to help them close the ‘Green Gap’ and behave more sustainably. Providing this support offers a great opportunity for brands to build deep connections with their consumers, which improves customer loyalty and unlocks financial benefits.
Brands such as Ikea, BP, British Cycling and Manchester Council are already supporting customers in this space through their respective initiatives and are seeing the benefits. Their campaigns are very high touch – leveraging above the line, below the line and also individual coaching. The significant investment cost of such initiatives leads to a high ‘cost per behaviour change’ metric, which provides a challenge to accessing budget when the time comes to launching these initiatives. Which raises the question; how can brands drive sustainable behaviour change at scale?
Digital - the silver bullet?
Enter: digital. Digital is already being used to shift complex behaviour around our relationship with food (meal planning apps), with exercise (step trackers) and even our finances (financial wellbeing tools). But most importantly, digital allows initiatives to scale exponentially. It’s cheap, convenient and easy to reach people regularly (according to a Deloitte study up to 47 times a day). And it can be leveraged to develop individually tailored programmes which learn over time and utilise gamification to increase effectiveness.
Digital meets sustainability
Many companies in the sustainability space – Olio, Too Good to Go, CoGo, PlugShare – are already using digital to make behaving sustainably easier. And, when it comes to specifically supporting behaviour change there are solid success stories:
- Joulebug has gamified sustainable actions to create over 7 million sustainable behaviour actions
- Each user of Scone, a personal AI climate assistant app to help you shift your behaviours to get to carbon neutral, saves almost a tonne of carbon per year
- Do Nation, a digital platform which supports people to change everyday behaviour around sustainability, has driven 17m kg of annual CO2 savings.
What about brands?
Digitally-driven sustainable behaviour change isn’t just limited to the world of start-ups. Brands like Fairy, Lifebuoy, Ariel and P&G have also turned to digital to drive awareness around the need for customers to change. Whilst campaigns like REI’s #optoutside, which helped over 1.4m people boycott Black Friday and get outside instead, have been able to leverage digital to change behaviour at scale.
Getting started
The beauty is that investing in digital as a tool to drive sustainable behaviour change doesn’t require huge investment.
Businesses can start within existing consumer journeys and weave appropriate nudges in copy or design to start to shift behaviour. Take Skyscanner, who through simply highlighting which flight options have a lower carbon footprint, nudged over 159m customers to opt for lower-emission flights. Or Scone, who achieved a 37% reduction in mobility related carbon footprint for its users through simple design interventions in their app.
As the saying goes, you don’t need to “eat the elephant”. You can start small. First, review existing digital journeys - CRM loyalty programmes, on-site purchasing journeys, in-app product discovery journeys. Businesses can start by simply asking themselves, what is the most sustainable choice my customers can make at each stage? How can I get as many of them as possible to pick it? For example, if you ship physical products to customers, how do you nudge as many of them to choose click-and-collect delivery over straight-to-your-door delivery as often as possible?
Once you’ve done that, your customers are going to be more susceptible to bigger, bolder strategies. The business can then lean in and support as they will see the results. You can then start to tackle some of the bigger sustainability challenges which require larger behaviour changes, including product use and transport.
Find out more about how Halo by Design can help in your behaviour change journey.
