How to beat the say-do gap with sustainable products and unlock growth

Key Takeaways

1. Sustainable product innovation has emerged as a strong driver of sales growth for both retailers and brands, but understanding true opportunity can be difficult given the say-do gap, since consumer intentions tend to be overstated
2. Closing the gap is possible but not a given. You can’t expect minimalist activation to address the situation
3. To reach full growth potential, lean into behavioral science principles to disrupt automatic tendencies

In recent years, sustainable product innovation has emerged as a strong driver of sales growth in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) sector.

The 10^th edition of Ipsos Global Trends confirms that climate change is indeed a primary concern for consumers: 80% of global citizens agree “we are heading for environmental disaster unless we change our habits quickly,” a measure that has consistently increased over the last decade as people come to consensus. Yet there is lack of agreement on who is responsible and what should be done: 72% of citizens say they’re already doing all they can to save the environment. 

The 2023 Sustainable Market Share Index finds that products marketed as sustainable are responsible for nearly a third of the growth in consumer packaged goods (CPGs) from 2013 to 2023, and market share growth continues year over year, despite high inflation.

Many retailers and brands are trying to tap into this growth with their own sustainable products, innovation efforts, and in-store activations.

But when trying to understand true upside potential of products and efforts, the say-do gap represents a challenge.

What is the say-do gap? It points to the fact that intentions to act sustainably are often overstated. Because of that, traditional survey research may not be the best predictor of success, which affects our innovation efforts as we try to understand what truly will work and what won’t.

There are often circumstances that prevent consumers from following through on their intentions or values – for instance price, convenience, concerns about product performance. But there are often other motivators in play, some of which the consumer is not even conscious of as they lean into their default choice, which makes our job even harder to understand true potential.

How do we better predict actual behavior? How do we get more consumers to act on their intentions?

We set up an experiment to see if we could close the say-do gap in-store. Since traditional research can be misleading in understanding true behaviors given the say-do gap, we set up a “true to life” experiment to see if we could motivate consumers to buy more sustainably through shelf signage.

We used cutting-edge 3D software to simulate a grocery store environment in a virtual experiment, developed by our technology partner, 345. We asked respondents to undertake a shopping mission online in this simulated environment shopping either for paper plates or household cleaning products. They were divided into test and control groups. The control group saw a regular shelf. The test group saw a shelf with signage calling attention to the sustainable product options.

Respondents entered the survey on their device, either a laptop or mobile device. They were taken to the platform to complete their shopping mission in one of the two categories. They had the chance to navigate the aisle, pick up and examine the products, and eventually select one for purchase. Pricing was included.

We also asked them some questions about their sustainability attitudes, demographics, etc.

We looked especially at respondents who SAID they try to purchase sustainable products (in general, not necessarily in these categories). Would signage compel more of them to purchase sustainable options?

The experiment worked, although some results surprised us.

We did prove that the say-do gap is real. That wasn’t surprising. Virtual shopping consistently demonstrates the difference between intentions and behavior. Among the 31% percent who said they “usually try to buy sustainable products”, only 40% of them did without special sustainability signage. That was very consistent across both categories.

We did find that those that SAID they try to buy sustainable products were much more likely to in our experiment, by double, which makes sense.

And we confirmed that the majority of purchase decisions are made at shelf for these categories. So it’s clear the job of convincing needs to be done in-store – through packaging, merchandising, messaging, digital tools, or other methods. This finding is consistent with other research we’ve done. The store is the best place to drive demand for these categories. That means if you only talk about ESG outside the store, you’re not going to close the gap.

But here’s where the surprise for us occurred: Signage didn’t help. We saw some directional changes when signage was in place, but they were not significant for either category, showing us that the say-do gap is pretty well entrenched and difficult to close. Even prompting with basic signage doesn’t guarantee success in closing the gap.

Maybe we were naïve thinking we could move the needle simply with signage, so what would drive success? How do we close the say-do gap?

To compel follow-through in store, we need even smarter activation. Tapping into behavioral science principles makes the difference. The challenge is that the gap in many cases is not driven by conscious, rational factors, but instead by shoppers who are in “autopilot.” We need to understand and align in-store activations to nonconscious drivers of behavior like context, motivations, and emotions.

To overcome those non-conscious barriers and drive behavior change at shelf, our Ipsos behavioral scientists advise following the ABCs.

First, grab Attention: Make sustainability top of mind; create visual disruptions. Second, intuitively convey category and sustainability Beliefs: Reinforce the impact people can make. Lastly, drive Compliance: Create incentives, leverage social norms, think about how to become the default choice.

So how does that play out in our scenario?

First, we did a good job using color on the sign to contrast from the rest of the shelf to drive noticeability, but we could have gone further by using a disruptive shelf layout (e.g., offsetting one shelf) to create a slight disconfirmation of expectations and cause shoppers to pause.

Second, leveraging the color green throughout leans into existing mental associations around sustainability driving beliefs about the product intuitively, but we could have considered messaging to goals, for instance communicating how the product is better for the environment and/or functionally similar to non-sustainable options.

Lastly, our signage could have done more to convey the “appropriate” behaviors. We could signal social norms by providing messaging around others buying these products as proof points and we could have considered how to drive the default, automatic selection process, possibly by labeling other products as “non-sustainable” to push automatic behaviors toward sustainable products.

In closing, before retailers and brands can make informed decisions about opportunities to grow sustainable products:

• Understand how committed your consumer base is
• Test in a realistic way since claimed behavior isn’t always the best predictor of actual behavior in this area
• Leverage the behavioral science ABCs, Attention Beliefs Compliance, to interrupt automatic decision making
• And be ready to experiment. Just like our attempt at signage, what you think should work sometimes won’t

If you’re interested in learning more about virtual shopping experiments or behavioral science activation, connect with our experts. Or, you can click here to read more about how the ABC’s of ESG can help grow your business and meet consumers sustainability demands.