Prioritise Sustainability Alongside Deals & Discounts

When it comes to shopping and sustainability, behavioural science offers provide powerful levers that can be both effective and appreciated.

In this article, we explore well known cognitive biases, that are proven to strongly influence shopping behaviour. We illustrate how they can be applied to persuade shoppers to make more sustainable choices. The aim being to demonstrate that encouraging more sustainable shopping may be easier than we think.

Psychology and behavioural science are able to provide powerful shopper and consumer focussed initiatives that require minimal effort on the part of the shopper, and can lead to dramatic improvements in sustainability. Why wouldn’t you embrace all that psychology and behavioural science can do in your drive for improved sustainability?

But, shoppers are increasingly being recognised as having limited desire for engaging in conscious rational deliberations with respect to most routine purchase decisions. After all there are a lot of more pressing things we need to think about in our busy lives.

Instead, shoppers act more as creatures of habit, creatures for which automatic repeat purchases are triggered by situational cues and coloured by implicit emotional responses: Think promotional displays and added value special offers.

Shoppers take mental shortcuts (heuristics) that bias the choices they make. Fortunately, these heuristics are very predictable. For example, shoppers tend to be risk averse in the short term, yet they severely discount the value of rewards in the longer term:?Hyperbolic discounting

Importantly, shoppers are also quick to conform to prevailing social norms.?And they often seek information not to illuminate and improve their understanding of a situation but rather to confirm their existing beliefs:?Confirmation Bias

These embedded shopper and shopping related traits and habits need to be acknowledged, understood, and designed for in advance. For example, in product packaging, marketing communications and many sustainability related initiatives.

Unfortunately, human nature stands as a potential challenge to the sustainability agenda, as any attempts to shift shoppers to more sustainable ways of thinking and behaving will need to overcome significant mental barriers.

In the Behavioural Science world, the term?friction?is often used to describe any heightened mental effort, shoppers have to expend when their mental model of the world has been upended, and they have to learn and adopt a new behaviour. It is the opposite of something being intuitive and effortless. Simply put, friction is experienced when existing beliefs are violated, existing habits are made ineffectual, and expected rewards are denied.

As a result, and rather than expend the extra effort needed to learn how to shop more sustainably, shoppers often just walk away and cling to familiar and more comfortable, if fundamentally flawed, unsustainable alternatives.

Shoppers & Sustainability – How Behavioural Science Can Help

Firstly, let’s return to?Hyperbolic Discounting, mentioned earlier. Hyperbolic discounting is a cognitive bias where people choose smaller, immediate rewards rather than larger, later rewards. To put it plainly, it is a cognitive bias that stems from impatience!

How does hyperbolic discounting affect purchase behaviour? Shoppers prefer immediate rewards over delayed gratification. If you run any sort of free gift or instant reward scheme for a more sustainable brand, shout it from the rooftops - the hyperbolic discounting theory will have shoppers flocking to your brand.

Secondly, let’s define heuristics as mentioned earlier:?Heuristics?are mental shortcuts that allow shoppers to make judgments purchase decisions quickly and efficiently. They are mental strategies shorten decision-making time, reduce mental effort, and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think in detail about every item in their shopping trolley, basket, or cart.

In summary, to cope with the tremendous amount of information we, as shoppers encounter in-store and online, our brains rely on these mental strategies to simplify things so we don't have to spend endless amounts of time and energy analysing every detail.

While heuristics are helpful in many situations, they can also lead to cognitive biases. And it is these biases that we can use to encourage more sustainable shopping.

Availability Heuristic?-?The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a shopper’s mind when evaluating a purchase decision. Shoppers make decisions based on what they remember - they mistakenly assume their memories are a representative sample of reality.

Endeavour to make any sustainable brand the most front of mind in category. Link it to consumption and link it emotionally too. When shoppers think of your category, they need to immediately think of your brand and draw upon Availability Heuristics, without having to get all ‘System 2’ about sustainability issues.

Confirmation bias?– Here’s another well-known human imperfection. Confirmation bias is the tendency for the brain to value new information more if it supports existing ideas and beliefs. Once shoppers have formed a view, they embrace information that confirms that view while ignoring, or rejecting, information that casts doubt on it.

When it comes to working with confirmation bias in-store, there are a number of considerations and opportunities. For example:

What’s the story? Identify what it is that shoppers want to hear about your category and make your sustainable brand the key owner of the most important attributes. Confirmation bias will set in and shoppers will be more likely to become consumers because they feel that the sustainable product meets their desires.

Tell, tell and tell again! Repeated advertisements and product placements convince shoppers that a particular sustainable product is really good. When they go into a store and see it on a well-designed display, they are more likely to really want the item, even if it's something they don't really need.

Remind shoppers. Play on confirmation bias as a means of reminding shoppers who buy your brand of the good choices they’ve made (positive affirmation).

Friction?-?In an increasingly competitive market, reducing friction is critical for retaining customers and outperforming your competition. So, what is friction? Friction is any activity that makes the purchasing process more mentally difficult than it needs to be. Every bit of friction gives shoppers and consumers one more reason to step away from your brand.

By removing mental friction at every stage of the customer journey towards sustainable brand choices, you will achieve better brand performance. And yet only a minority of businesses are currently doing this, which leaves a huge opportunity for companies to improve their sustainable brand performance and gain a competitive advantage.

So, how do we remove friction? Firstly, you need to understand the customer's psychological needs and desires, to identify what potential mental barriers exist between them and fulfilling those needs/desires through a more sustainable brand.

Companies need to make the more sustainable choices more customer-centric by providing convenience, consistency, and trust, all optimised from using behavioural science. As a result, they will be rewarded with loyal customers who continue to purchase their products or services because they deliver what is expected at every touchpoint in the customer journey.

In this article, we’ve taken a tiny handful of well known cognitive biases, that are proven to strongly influence shopping behaviour. And what we’ve done is simply apply them to persuading shoppers to make more sustainable choices. The aim being to demonstrate that encouraging more sustainable shopping may be easier than we think if we simply align the more sustainable purchase choices with the minds, forged by evolution, of more shoppers.

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