The Synovate ‘values’ research and its application at EECA
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Penny Turner (standing in for Debra Hall) from Synovate and Pat Murray from EECA, present the findings of their ‘values’ research. This research was about understanding how we can encourage people to make space in their minds to think about using energy wisely. This is especially when their mind is already filled up with other important decisions (for example food and shelter, work, and friends, family and relationships). They found four key groups of motivations to encourage energy-related behaviour change: sustainable future, warm comfortable home, family wellness, and $$$$$’s. It is then illustrated how the findings from this research have been used to develop a behaviour change television campaign for EECA, ‘the Energy Spot’.
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The Synovate ‘values’ research and its application at EECA
- 1. Understanding human behaviour to motivate smarter energy use Motivating Change Workshop The Synovate ‘values’ research and its application to EECA Patrick Murray & Debra Hall 1
- 2. It’s all about understanding why people do what they do 2
- 3. For EECA, it’s about understanding how to embed better energy decisions into people’s core values that determine how they live their lives So what do human beings care about? Food & shelter Meaningful work Relationships with friends & family A partner for life To which we add... Their community, their country, the world Ref: Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works 3
- 4. No matter how much we care about ALL these things – our values in life – we have only one brain to share around! 4
- 5. Changing what they DOwithout changing what they THINK Working with current mindsets to encourage change in the short term 5
- 6. Depending on our current mindset, we respond to different levers... 6
- 7. Different promised outcomes resonate differently depending on your mindset 7
- 8. Be careful about the words that you use!Different words connect with different people in different ways.... Conservation : Connects with people willing to use less by changing their habits Efficiency :Connects with people who plan in advance to use as much as they need, through purchase / installation of more efficient “equipment”
- 9. Overall, people’s attitudes to using energy wisely are driven primarily by day-to-day activities Driving wise energy use by starting with insulationsets up a stream of causality relating to housing infrastructure Overall insulation Overall water heating Overall home heating Overall lighting Overall day-to-day actions Using energy wisely Overall work activities Overall appliances Overall transport solutions Graphical model based on partial correlations Persuading people to act at point of purchase, at work, and on the roadare interlinked (out-of-home activities), but still need to pushtowards day-to-day activities to cause actual change 9
- 10. The Energy Spot 10 Information about bigand small things you can do For the good of yourself, your family AND the wider world
- 11. Early results are positive... When asked what they had done after seeing the advertising... 41% had done something about reducing heat loss 10% had paid greater attention to their hot water use 13%were trying to be more careful with vehicle fuel 20%were turning offappliances and lights more. 16% said they had installed energy-efficient light bulbs BUT we know that people over-claimeffects 11
- 12. Better measures are inferred People who claim to have done something recently are more likely to have seen the ads 12 +6% +31% +5% +10% +6%
- 13. Change happens fastest when it requires NO effort The more we can do to enable effort-free, investment-free change, the faster we’ll see the benefits 13
Editor's Notes
- To motivate change we need to understand human behaviour – as we will no doubt have already heard by now – and in particular, to understand why people do the things they do. Years of researching consumer behaviour – the study of who people do what they do when they’re buying stuff – has led us to understand that every action is NOT the result of a well-reasoned considered decision. In fact, our lives would be a nightmare if it was...No, human beings decide what to buy, what to do and how they live their lives by taking a SHORT-CUT in the decision process – a shortcut which enables their brains to almost automatically hone in on a ‘good enough’ decision, acting on a ‘generalised sense of what’s about right for me, right here, right now’. That generalised feeling comes about firstly from what we’ve always done – our habits. Habits change when the pain or cost of continuing to behave in a particular way outweighs the effort or cost of making the change... And what we’re doing here today is talking about trying to effect exactly that type of change.
- In reality – people have a lot of things going on in their lives. The challenge for EECA – and one which they presented to Synovate – was about how to encourage people to use energy more wisely... and to do that, we know that we have to first understand how energy use fits into their wider set of life priorities.According to Stephen Pinker in his book “How the Mind Works”, every decision we make in life is motivated by the things that we care about, be they the more basic need for food and shelter, or the higher level needs of having meaningful work – a purpose in life – and people to share our lives with... extending that concept, we added community, country and the world, and we have a pretty comprehensive set of potential motivations... In fact, every really great advertising campaign in the world can arguably be linked to one of Pinker’s four core human needs.So we set out to try to understand how to encourage people to literally make space in their minds to think about using energy wisely, accepting that most of their attention would be already taken up with financial, emotional and social priorities, like making a living to provide food & shelter, building a career, finding a life partner, and building family and friend relationships....
- Because the reality is that no matter how important we think it is to use energy wisely, we still need to find space in our heads to think about doing it... Like some of the people we found who are truly committed to using energy wisely – some 14% of adults who have already make this a part of the way they live their lives.The good news for EECA was that there are even more who actually want to give more attention to their energy use – they’re simply too bogged down in other priorities to actually do so.... And that only a very small number completely reject the value of including energy wise behaviours in the way they live their lives...
- Pat, this one’s for you... Something along the lines of Well, of course in the ideal world we’d want everyone to be fully committed to using energy wisely, but we don’t live in the ideal world, and changing people’s minds takes time, a long time...However, by understanding where people are at in their current mindset – and that the things are that are preventing them from DOING more, we can encourage some short term behaviour change, things they can accommodate in their current lifestage, things that they can do without too much perceived change to the way they’re doing things now...Examples?
- The importance of understanding where people are at in their thinking is that this is what directs their ‘hot buttons’ in terms of persuading them to change their behaviour.Many energy-related change behaviour campaigns we’ve seen focus specifically on the cost benefits – a highly rational argument, which often involves a substantial pay back period for little immediate gain. Arguably even more long term is the promise that the world will be a better place!In the values study, we looked at 14 different potential outcomes for a person who does make the effort to change their behaviour – everything from “you’ll make short term cost savings”, “your house will increase in value” through to “you’ll be doing your bit to make the world a better place”... What we found, and quantified, is that there are in fact four groups of motivations – promises that we all can make to persuade people to do better... And that different promises resonate to a greater or lesser extent with different people, depending on where they are at in their current thinking on energy use…
- The promise of family wellness is the only one which doesn’t vary by mindset – we believe this is a specific niche case, based on circumstances such as asthmatic children, damp housing and foggy Waikato climate!But the other three vary dramatically, with those already committed to using energy wisely most strongly motivated by the promise of sustainable future energy supplies – do it for the next generation – and the associated ‘green’ or environmental benefits, while those at the other end of the spectrum are much more motivated by cost savings, and the promise of a warm comfortable home.In essence, the more people commit to these ‘good’ behaviours, the more they view the benefits as being outward rather than inward... So we need to start with the personal and family benefits, and then move outward to the community, the country and the world.
- In doing this, we need to be very careful about the words that we use...
- One of the most important findings in the values research is the importance of the small, day to day activities in building that ongoing commitment to using energy wisely. It sounds obviously now, but the simple fact is that if we want to change the way people live their lives so that they use energy better – without conscious, considered effort, without the need for rational assessment – we need to build habits, and habits are built on frequent rather than infrequent behaviours.In this analysis, we show the ‘gate-keeper’ role of day to day actions – not what light bulbs we choose, or which appliance we buy, not the decision to insulate or install solar hot water, but rather the day to day decisions to turn off appliances not in use, drive more efficiently, hang out the washing and so on....And it was this understanding that supported the base premise of EECA’s Energywise advertising campaign – effectively using a spokesperson not only to talk about the big decisions, but to encourage the small ones, and in each episode, to highly the personal, family and wider benefits of changing the way we live our lives.So now I’m going to hand over the Pat to talk about the campaign, and how its working to genuinely change not just attitudes, but behaviours as well...PAT – first discuss (while this slide is still up) the challenges around funding of programmes instead of funding on the basis of integrated linked up thinking aimed at ongoing outcomes...
- Pat to discuss the construction of an Energy Spot ad – the strategy behind the campaign...The research told us that after the cost of doing the big stuff, it was information that was the biggest barrier... Not necessarily LACK of information, though this was part of it, but also things like too much information, conflicting streams of information and so on...And that’s where the Energy Spot campaign comes in... Delivering trustworthy, reliable information, in simple easy to understand ways.
- EECA monitors consumer attitudes and claimed behaviours in an ongoing weekly survey, where, amongst many other questions, those who have seen the latest Energy Spot ads have at times been asked to say what they did as a result of seeing the ads.Clearly, there are people claiming to have responded directly to the messages in the advertising...... But we know there is an element of socially acceptable overclaim in this result. So, we look instead to other measures within the survey...
- This data is from a question asked earlier on the survey, where people are asked to say which of a list of energy-related behaviours they have done in the past month... It’s a simple yes / no question, asked of everyone in the survey.If we examine the results of this question we find that those who go on to tell us later in the survey that they have seen the Energy Spot ads are indeed significantly more likely to be undertaking a range of different energy-wise behaviours, with examples shown here.In the ideal world, we’d be tracking real energy use, and linking that back to survey results, but resources are limited, and give the early results we’ve seen, the current decision is to use the limited marketing resource to pay for more marketing rather than more research.
- PAT:Most people know they should be using energy more wiselyMany, perhaps most are doing what they canWithin their budgetsBut more importantly, within the level of time / effort they have This means that anything we can do to make change happen ‘invisibly’ could have major impacts on energy usageWe need to tread carefully though...Perceptions of deprivation (low pressure showers, poor quality light) could cause a ‘backlash’ reaction from consumers making them less willing to engage in actions that do require effortAnd we need to remember that invisible change does not in any way build commitment to making the changes that require some effort – it’s only by actually DOING the small day to day things that we get people to embed wise energy use in the values by which they live their lives.