Selling to the Unconscious Consumer

Climate Reality Hits Home

Even before the global pandemic had started, everyone in my city was already wearing face masks. The air quality had become so bad that we couldn’t even step outside without putting on a surgical grade N95. Suddenly daily decisions about whether to drive the car to work, or if we should order food for home delivery, felt like toxic choices. The connection between the way we lived and the impact this had on our environment became all too real.

And we weren’t alone. In the same month, 30 other cities across Asia recorded even worse air pollution than us.

Today, our climate and environmental challenges are growing exponentially. Now every corner of the globe is experiencing worsening weather conditions, wildfires, rising water and toxic pollution levels that are clearly linked to the consumer choices that we, as individuals and as a society, are making. No one is immune from climate change. East or west, rich or poor, suburban or rural - there’s no hiding from the worrying conditions we’re all experiencing now.

And the challenges aren’t just environmental. There are broader social issues inter-connected with our ecological concerns. And it’s become clear that the way we deal with the racial, gender and economic inequalities in society will need to go hand in hand with solving the problem of climate change.

After all, how sustainable is underpaying your staff or mistreating your supply chain? Or what if your recycling just means shipping off waste to poorer countries and communities. And shouldn’t protecting the planet also mean protecting a customer’s privacy rights, individual freedoms or their physical and mental wellbeing?

Consumers no longer make any distinction between how sustainably a company treats the environment and how well they treat their customers, staff and the wider community. Confronted as we are with what’s going on in the world right now, there’s an increasing realization that we’re facing a global crises where both people and the planet - our approach to ethics and sustainability - are intimately connected.

And both equally under threat.

The Convenience Gap - What We Say vs How We Shop

As consumers, our response to this has been to talk about how we will change our ways, and commit to purchasing the right products and services to help address these problems. And most of the data reflects this increased desire to shop better for ourselves and others - with one recent survey showing that a remarkable 65% of people saying that we will make better ‘conscious’ shopping decisions.

But while the consumer sentiment towards wanting to change is there - the reality is that actual shopping behavior has not shifted significantly. For every optimistic piece of research talking about the steady rise of the conscious consumer - there is data reflecting a far more pragmatic reality. The most recent research shows there’s a substantial reality gap between consumers wanting to change, and the way people actually shop.

Bottom line - unless the ‘good’ products we buy are available, affordable and perform as well as those ‘bad’ products we seek to replace - most people won’t follow through with their good intentions.

This attitude is one result of the hyper-convenience economy we’ve created in the last 10 or so years. An economy that has fundamentally changed consumer expectations around the quality, availability, simplicity and affordability of goods and services across almost every market on the planet. Creating expectations that often come at the expense of the very things we say we hold so dear.

We’ll explore in later articles the rise of hyper-convenience and the consumer expectations (and costs) that have come with this type of economy. But what’s important to point out here is how this hyper-convenience bias is impacting our demand for ethical & sustainable products.

Understanding this bias starts with the acceptance that - as Daniel Kahneman noted in his seminal book Thinking Fast and Slow - the majority of our decisions are as a result of unconscious, fast thinking. In short, while we may think we are rational beings that carefully consider most decisions we make - the reality is that in our busy lives most of our decisions are driven by our emotional/reflex mind that prioritizes convenience and quick decision making.

What this means for purchase decisions is that if there is a simple and affordable choice that meets our immediate requirements, even if there is another more sustainable and eco-friendly option, this won’t be considered unless it meets our basic convenience criteria.

Only hard-core conscious consumers - a small percentage of any given customer segment - will accept an inferior but sustainable product. The majority of consumers will unconsciously and automatically buy the best and most convenient product available - despite their rational preference for ethical & sustainable products that would make the world a better place.

We can rail against this as an example of consumer ignorance or laziness - but this is the reality of how most people behave. We’re too busy just getting by to be constantly thinking about how to buy the right thing. And so we choose the right thing for now.

This is the dilemma facing any brand looking to create a more ethical and sustainable future. We aren’t perfect human beings who always act rationally and make the best choices for ourselves or others. Instead we live messy, imperfect lives - often using limited information to make quick decisions based on intuition and instinct.

So, given this reality, what’s the future for ethical & sustainable brands? Are good products forever destined to be bad at selling to a broader, mass market?

Absolutely not.

But brands need to fundamentally re-think their approach if they want to make ethical & sustainable products accessible to the broader mass market of unconscious consumers.

Tesla - Selling to Me Before We

For years electric vehicles (EVs) were sold like the Prius. Expensive, impractical, unsexy… but undoubtedly good for the environment. Great for the small market of conscious consumers who would - despite all obstacles - pay the price and put up with an ugly box to do the right thing. For the mass market, the unconscious mass consumer, the Prius was far too high a price to pay.

Tesla took the opposite approach. In planning the development for the car Elon Musk famously tweeted his priorities. Building a sports car, then making it increasingly affordable. Making it electric was almost a footnote.

So why was it that Tesla was able to get more people to consider EVs while others like the Prius had not ? A more efficient electric engine? No. Better advertising? No. Was it all on the new batteries? The batteries were better, but that’s not the key reason why.

The secret is that Tesla embraced something that the Prius never quite understood. That you’d never appeal to most car buyers by ignoring personal aspirations and only focusing on their desire for a better world. Musk instead talked about building a cooler, faster sports car. He wasn’t appealing to just the eco-driver niche - he was speaking to all of us. And while Tesla’s initial customer market was premium, ultimately the mass market was the prize.

Tesla understood a very simple customer maxim for the new, convenience economy. If you take care of me first, I’ll be happy to buy something that’s also better for the collective we. Tesla's plan was aimed at the mass, unconscious shopper rather than just the niche conscious consumer.

And as a result, the automotive industry has quickly followed suit. Mass car bands like Ford and GM - as well as luxury brands like Mercedes and BMW - have all committed in the last 12 months to completely revamping their whole automotive range to become electric. Some by as soon as 2025. And it’s not just the automotive market embracing the ethical & sustainable movement. Now hundreds of brands, across almost every industry, are adopting a very different approach to broaden their appeal and sell to the mass market.

 The Demand for Connected Convenience

In the hyper-convenience marketplace of the last decade or more, many larger consumer brands and e-commerce platforms successfully narrowed the focus of consumers to demand a fantastic direct product experience. These customer-centric brands have been highly effective in meeting a narrowly defined, but important set of needs extraordinarily well.

And in doing so they have successfully limited the demand for ethical & sustainable products to a small group of conscious consumers. A dedicated niche of eco-shoppers willing to go out of their way to buy green products that are often more expensive, less efficacious and harder to find than their more convenient competitors.

But the costs of hyper-convenience to us as individuals, to our communities and the environment are becoming clear. And as these negative outcomes only become more apparent and more threatening - the more conflicted we’re becoming as consumers.

What many consumers are looking for now is a balance between both these needs - brands that can deliver a new kind of connected convenience. Where a great product & service experience is deeply connected with better outcomes for the broader community and the planet as a whole.

Delivering on these expectations however, and shifting from hyper-convenience is no easy task.

To become an ethical & sustainable brand - especially for large existing legacy brands - requires a massive transformation to their entire business operations in order to deliver a far more holistic brand experience. On the other hand, meeting the convenience standards of today’s mass consumer is equally demanding. And requires no less a change in business and customer operations to meet the extremely high expectations from any direct product experience today. Especially in the Post-Covid era.

But overwhelmingly, we believe the tide has started to turn.

The rising levels of ESG market investment and the explosion of new product development in this space, are just a few indicators that the mass market demand for ethical and sustainable products remains largely untapped. Brands who can embrace the demands of the unconscious consumer, and deliver a more balanced connected convenience, will enjoy a lucrative new opportunity for mass-market success.

But this won’t happen at the flick of a switch. There’s no flashy advertising campaign or magical purpose statement that will sustain, or fix, a brand’s ethical & sustainable development. We need a new type of brand framework that maps out the key areas for ongoing focus, and delivers outcomes beyond the limited hyper-convenience focus of traditional Customer-Centric Brands.

We call this roadmap creating Human-Centric Brands. And in the next article I’ll explore how these type of brands are re-thinking their business model to achieve broader market success.

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