Post by Flash on Apr 1, 2008 6:37:22 GMT -5
WE are all both simultaneously consumers and members of the community.
In our role as community members, we tend to see the big picture, think and act considering what we perceive to be some collective good; as consumers we are more individualistic and self-serving.
Decisive and ruthless. Decoding these perspectives has been a perennial problem in trying to determine what people think about different environmental issues, and what they do or would do about them.
If you so much as mention the environment or key issues such as climate change during the survey process, respondents have a propensity to switch into community spokesman mode and say the right thing.
So strong are the moral expectations when it comes to many green issues that people are happy to lie outrageously in order to say the right thing rather than the real thing. This natural survey bias is commonly harnessed by activists and others campaigning for any given environmental reform, who blatantly lead their sample group to deliver the desired opinion.
Technically, the answers are valid but, invariably, the results would be different if the key environmental identifiers were left out of the questions.
All this poses a headache for companies and businesses trying to reposition their brands to retain or attract customers in the new "green is the new black" message coming from the marketing industry.
Fosters Group is sufficiently confident about the trend that it has dispatched its boutique Tasmanian brand, Cascade, to knock out a new eco-beer for the cut-throat premium beer market.
Like most new products, it will be a live experiment to see if such a product can justify the investment by pinching enough beer drinkers from Coopers.
Impressed by the commitment to offset the beer's greenhouse emissions, plenty are likely to take a community-minded approach and give the beer a go.
Once, maybe twice. But in six months' time it will be the hard-headed consumer inside who will be calling the shots based on more primitive motives such as taste, price and its availability on tap.
Last week, PricewaterhouseCoopers released the results of a survey of 500 German motorists to determine what they do and would be willing to change in response to the threat of climate change.
Like few others before it, the PwC survey went to great lengths not to mention climate change at the start of the survey. The results were therefore surprisingly unsurprising. They said they mainly worry about traffic, petrol prices and road rage when they're driving around, not climate change. They had weak understanding of any of the technologies proposed as solutions, thought hybrid cars were too expensive for what you got and while 70 per cent accepted that greenhouse emissions came from cars, they didn't associate it with their own car or driving behaviour.
What the report suggested was that developmental technologies such as hybrid-drive trains would become more mainstream as they evolved in the same way as safety technologies did a decade ago: to become one of a number of drivers in the consumer's final choice, rather than the only one.
Similar results emerged from research into consumer attitudes to environmental packaging commissioned by the National Packaging Covenant in 2003. About 1200 shoppers were surveyed when leaving supermarkets across NSW to find out what motivated a number of the purchases they had just made. The main drivers reported were price, taste and convenience. Packaging was mentioned by only 4 per cent, while recyclability and environmental considerations were barely detectable.
But when they completed a take-home survey that revealed the environmental nature of the research, 55 per cent said they always bought environmentally friendly products, even if they were more expensive.
Presumably, they just forgot when asked the first time. Green power schemes, which guarantee sourcing some of their electricity from low emissions energy providers, have been rising in popularity over recent years, with nearly 7 per cent of households signed up to some green power scheme by the end of last year.
A 100 per cent switch to green power can cost a few hundred dollars extra a year, but most of the residential take-up is in the low levels of green power - normally 10 per cent - offered free of charge by some retailers to encourage customers to switch.
In the competitive electricity retail market there are only two ways to distinguish your brand - price and green. A 2007 survey by the energy retailers found that about 89 per cent of Australians were concerned about climate change. Even so, it found 72 per cent of households said they were aware of green power but hadn't signed on. The penetration rate for green power is much higher in Victoria than NSW, perhaps reflecting the more dynamic and competitive market conditions that come with full electricity privatisation.
Even with free green power on offer, consumers revealed high price sensitivity to their power and appliance purchasing decisions. They accept the threat of climate change, but don't want to pay more to fix it.
What links all this research is that individuals, thinking as communities, are worried about problems and expect governments to fix them. This permits the same individuals, as consumers, to make purchases driven mainly by self-interests such as saving money, safety and personal tastes. These split-personality individuals aren't some minor clique in society.
They're you and me.