Why Brands’ Moment to Make Sustainability More Human Is Now
Accenture Song's recent global anthropological research ‘Our Human Moment’ identified a striking disconnect between how organisations approach encouraging sustainable behaviour and how individuals themselves perceive sustainability. Intriguingly, the study found that the notion of living sustainably does not strongly resonate with 60% of people.
It's evident that there's a disparity in how sustainability is perceived by individuals and organisations. Rather surprisingly, people seldom think about organisations when it comes to sustainability. This means that businesses must take a new approach instead of simply attempting to shape people's understanding and choices regarding sustainability.
To explore the report, LBB’s Alex Reeves caught up with Mark Curtis, head of innovation and sustainability lead at Accenture Song.
LBB> I was first reading ‘Our Human Moment’ soon after the Purpose Disruptors Day Summit. One key perspective there was that advertising needs to completely rethink its purpose away from promoting consumption, if there's going to be a planet to do advertising on. Do you think that thinking is compatible with the art human moment?
Mark> Yes it is. We need to reinvent consumption because it was consumption that got us into this mess in the first place. Advertising has been around for centuries. And it became a lot more sophisticated in the post war era, in particular, with the rise of mass media and then digital. Advertising encouraged consumption, and has encouraged unsustainable behaviours, without any shadow of a doubt. But trying to pretend that consumption needs to disappear is ridiculous, because humans (as long as we don't wipe ourselves out) are here. And we literally need to consume, at the very least, food, heat, clothing etc. in order to stay safe. So let's not try and pretend that consumption somehow magically goes away because it's not going to happen.
But then you're faced with the logical question of 'what then?' And that's why we think as an overarching framework, that reinventing consumption is really the key start point here. How do we reinvent consumption to be sustainable?
Let me just be completely candid. If we go out into the market with our clients with a message which is degrowth - people consume less and you're going to sell less, you're going to make less profit - they're not going to listen to us. Because they don't want that to happen. That's fine. Morally, you might feel like you've been terribly pure and feel noble about it. But the reality is, you're not actually creating any change.
Our clients include most of the world's largest corporations and a lot of the mid-sized ones as well. If our clients don't actually change, then we're not achieving anything. So we're talking about shifts in the future of consumption to be palatable to our clients. But we're doing that because that's the way in which we create the change we need in order to make sure that we have a habitable planet. That's got to be pretty important. And I think advertising and marketing have a huge role to play in that.
LBB> The research centres around this concept of ‘The Relevancy Gap’. What is that?
Mark> The Relevancy Gap is that three out of five consumers simply don't get sustainability. They don't relate to it. It's not something that they talk about, think about that much, or that they're going to act on. And study after study shows that, roughly speaking, about 25% of people are super motivated to actually do something, but about 75% either talk about it or don't, but actually aren't that motivated to do enough. So there are these big barriers to getting the changes we need to get.
If we zoom out to the macro level, a lot of where sustainability as a business imperative has been about what I would call largely technocratic approaches: Let's measure what we're doing; let's try and reduce our emissions; let's look for how we can emit less carbon. All of this has to happen. None of that is immaterial or wrongheaded. But humans have been left out of the debate altogether. It's like we don't exist, and we're just going to make these changes and somehow magically, it's all going to work.
Actually, that's not the case. Because at the end of every sustainable value chain, at the end of everything we want to change, whether that's the food we eat, the ways that we get around, the way we heat our houses, or how we clothe ourselves - all pretty fundamental human things - there is a human who's going to have to change what they do. They're going to have to get an electric vehicle or they're going to have to install a heat pump, or they're going to have to recycle their clothing, or they're going to have to abandon red meat, which they may be particularly unwilling to do. All of that means huge behaviour change. And yet the need for that behaviour has been almost minimally debated.
We wanted to understand where people are. And when we looked at it with the research, what we discovered was that there is this relevancy gap between how organisations are increasingly approaching sustainability and people's realities - actually how people see things. The assumption is organisations will decide what sustainability is for people, partly as a marketing exercise, and yet people's realities is that the way they think about sustainability, and the way they think about their lives generally are very diverse. And sustainability is not top of mind for most of them.
Then you've got a gap between organisations that want to make people care about sustainability but what we see with absolute clarity is the drivers of people's actions are human values and sustainability is not a value which is eternal, that people hold - there are other bigger, deeper ones.
Lastly, organisations assume that they can help sway people towards sustainable choices. And in truth, it probably can. But the gap here is that people aren't necessarily looking to organisations for direction. This gap is so big that we found three out of five people don't relate strongly to living sustainably at a global level. And those people are therefore much less likely to be acting sustainably and pretty unwilling to do a whole lot more.
LBB> Why do we need to close the relevancy gap?
Mark> The relevancy gap is this missing link and if we can close the gap, we can really lift the ceiling on sustainability efforts. From a planetary perspective, which means a human perspective, accepting a ceiling on sustainability efforts means accepting that we're going to continue to trash the environment which we depend on for life. So we've got to do something. We've got to move from trying to make humans more sustainable - do this, do that - to how we can make sustainability more human. That's a core question we're asking and we believe advertisers, marketers and chief sustainability officers need to be asking themselves.
LBB> What human values really do drive human behaviour and can be used to promote more human approaches to sustainability?
Mark> What we discovered when we talked to people in depth was there are six entryways to sustainability, each one of which is a well-known human value. And those six are all things we understand.
They are:
1. Resourcefulness: I want to make the most of what I've got.
2. Empowerment: Make me feel like I can do something - often a lot of the barriers to sustainability are it being too big a problem. Recycling a bit of plastic isn't going to make any difference therefore why should I bother?
3. Openness: That's about intellectual curiosity and a sense of personal growth.
4. Belonging: That one's extremely powerful. We're beginning to see in our next wave of research that quantified, that's one of the most powerful - I want to feel this sense of belonging.
5. Self-fulfilment: These are all very positive terminologies but status is part of self-fulfilment as well. So what if we began to shift the way in which we thought about status? Marketers have a huge role to play. They've told us over the last 50 years that we get status by carrying a particular kind of handbag with a logo on it, or buying a particularly posh car with leather seats. What if status came because you're doing the right thing?
6. Caring: Hugely important. People want to care for their family, for those around them. How can we build sustainability into caring?
These are all really important human values, which, for the majority of people, way outweigh sustainability when they're making purchase decisions. They're more likely to be thinking and driven by these things than they are by “You can go green”.
LBB> It seems like there's an assumption in the report that organisations should run ahead of consumers on climate action because so much of human behaviour is not moving fast enough.
Mark> Yeah, they should. In fact, they're going to be forced to. So let's get real about this. There are five forces pushing organisations, which are stronger in combination than the pull force of 25% or less of consumers saying, "Give me sustainability."
Those five forces are:
1. Government. He didn't do a lot right, but Boris [Johnson, former UK prime minister] did mandate that internal combustion engines will be phased out in new cars come 2030. And the government are legally enshrined to try and make that happen. Look at what happened with the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, what that's done is pumping heaps of money into the system. The government is priming the system in order to engage with sustainability.
2. Courts: Increasingly, organisations are being pulled over the coals by courts, particularly in Europe, for not delivering on mandated statutory controls.
3. Employees: Every CHRO [chief human relations officer] will tell you that they are already not able to hire the best graduates they want to hire if they are not able to evidence what they're doing for social and sustainable impact that matters.
4. Shareholders: We've seen the effects of shareholder action on a range of different companies. Shareholders are driven by profit as much as they are by sustainability. But increasingly, they are winning the ESG debate.
5. CEO's children: Silent, invisible, no one ever talks about it, but again and again C-level people, including CEOs have said in research that children are asking them about this. You remember that First World War poster, "Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?" And there's two children sitting on an armchair with their dad. The whole point was to make people who hadn't signed up for the army feel guilty. CEOs’ children are now saying, "What are you doing about the environment, Mummy?" I hear this anecdotally all the time. So don't underestimate that force.
Those five forces are what I call push forces. They are pushing large organisations to develop an SDG agenda, a sustainable agenda and a social impact agenda harder than they're being pulled by consumers. Which means our research is even more relevant, because in order to achieve their goals, they're going to have to generate behaviour change with their customers. They've been doing that for 60 or more years using advertising and marketing. Now they're going to have to build into that agenda behaviour change around sustainability, because the push forces are telling them they have to do this. And it is inevitable. So we'd better grapple with this now.
