Business challenge
Here at Impact, we have a focus on sustainability so we wanted to gain a greater understanding of what barriers are preventing individuals from acting sustainably and how these can best be overcome.
What we did
We conducted a self-funded, online completion survey with 2,006 UK respondents and identified four distinct segments comes to being environmentally-friendly, with some doing a lot and others doing very little.
- Focused achievers: Consumers who are very interested in the environment and are actively doing their bit to help
- Educated non-doers: Consumer who have the knowledge but do not have the time to implement environmentally-friendly behaviours
- Light contributors: Consumers who complete the simpler actions to help the environment
- Inactive sceptics: Consumers who are not very interested in doing their bit to help the environment.
Outcome
Through applying the COM-B behaviour change model (looking at an individual’s Capability, Opportunity and Motivation) and recognising different heuristics at play (Social Norms: day-to-day behaviour influenced by social customs; Loss Aversion: losses are twice as powerful mentally compared with gains; Future Discounting: putting more value on the now; and Planning Fallacy: underestimating the time need to complete a task), we were able to identify what barriers each group were facing and then provide actionable recommendations on how they would be able to overcome them.