Brands & Behavior Change

Forum for the Future and the Guardian Sustainable Business co-hosted a very interesting evening last week, which convened a wide variety of stakeholders from the business, nonprofit, and media worlds. Around the table were global brand heavyweights (our friend Jonathan Atwood from Unilever and Amanda Devore from Miller Coors were at our breakout session) and the likes of L’Oreal, Whole Foods, and B Labs sat on the panel.

The focus of the evening was collaboration and partnerships, as a means to advancing collective goals. There are about 7 different directions I could go in terms of recap or interesting-highlights. But I’ll stick with a thought that hit me a few times over the course of the night, even though it wasn’t every explicitly on the docket.

The concept of behavior change is a hot topic, no doubt. Perhaps even a buzz word. Recyclebank talks about this being the business we’re in all the time (like many, many others these days: OPower, Stickk). To further this observation was the consistent call to action (a plea, really) that brands need to start changing consumer behavior. To which, in my mind, the response was “they’ve already done that”. Brands have been changing the way consumers consume for a long, long time now. McDonald’s didn’t start out with a quadruple decker (or whatever the hell offensively massive burger they sell is). The started with regular, run-of-the-mill, single-patty hamburgers. Over time (and you could argue it was a result of demand) the size of the burger (and everything else on the menu) went up and up. Super-sized meant more variety, more profit, more opportunity to get people hooked. So there, McDonald’s influenced the way a whole group of people think about fast-food burgers.

Now, I don’t mean to over simplify (nor villain-ize McDonalds – they’re recent addition of apples and milk isn’t terrible). But merely make a point: Brands have been, at the very least, significantly influencing consumer behavior since as long as they’ve been around. So as opposed to taking this charge to “change consumer behavior” as some huge, audacious, insurmountable hurdle, how about say “hmmm, ok, this is what we know how to do, let’s just do it towards a different end”. Granted there is a reversal required here – the change that many were advancing for years has clearly gotten us all into a bit of a bind. But I can’t believe that it’s irreparable.

I understand, quite clearly, the need for consumer desire (or at least willingness) to exist in order for any sort of brand-catalyzed change to be meaningful. But I also believe that people (myself included) don’t always know what they want or need. And sometimes, it’s the responsibility of a company – which has a lot of money to do research and analyze trends and conduct focus groups – to help guide us all in that direction. So instead of creating new products that ask us as consumers to act differently with them, just innovate on the products so they are, by definition, put to use differently. As a society, I don’t think we’re so far gone in the direction of expecting 3-decker-everythings, so let’s go ahead and course-correct. There are lots of nimble startups who are in the business of behavior change (whether they’re flying that flag or not) and I think that their bigger, corporate counterparts are just as welcome to the party. Arguably, they’re more welcome, since they have the scale that holds the promise of far-reaching impact. Unilever products are used 2 billion times a day, by someone in the world. That’s a LOT of opportunity to be getting better products into people’s hands. And they are. It’s a two-way relationship, for sure, but I think that companies of the likes of P&G and MillerCoors and L’Oreal are positioned to make some bold changes and just create the kinds of products that yield [positive] behavior change as a byproduct.

So get bold. Get innovative. And have a little faith that us consumers are malleable enough – and open-minded enough – to change with you in the right direction.