Towards sustainable lifestyles: Modelling how consumers buy carbon-intensive products

This proposed PhD project involves investigating how consumers take their purchasing decisions for carbon-intensive products, from washing machines and televisions to cars, on a product comparison website. The findings will be used to nudge consumers towards more environmentally friendly choices, in collaboration with a fast-growing start-up founded to achieve precisely that. The project will suit a candidate with expertise in statistics and the analysis of large datasets, and with interest in applying these skills to sustainable consumer behaviour.

The world has some stretching targets to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to keep climate change manageable. The EU, for example, is committed to a reduction of 80% by 2050. Households produce almost as much as businesses, with 15% of total emissions versus 17% for businesses outside energy generation & transport in the UK in 2014 (Department for Energy & Climate Change 2015). Yet while most larger organisations now have carbon reduction programmes (including Cranfield, in a programme started by one of the supervisors of this proposed PhD), most households do not. Exhortations for consumers to change their behaviour based on moral appeals (Stern et al. 1999) might succeed in changing intentions, but make very little difference to consumer behaviour, except in a small deep green segment (White and Simpson 2013). Similar problems apply to the information-based paradigm of providing consumers with better labelling (Banerjee and Solomon 2003).

There are three fundamental problems with prior research on green consumption that have contributed to this situation. First, most academic research on ecological behaviour ironically lacks ecological validity: it is carried out in laboratories or in surveys of students, and fails to translate to the shopping centre or the home. Second, the dependent variable in the great majority of studies is not behaviour (such as whether you buy a low-carbon fridge or a high-carbon one) but behavioural intention. Yet in sustainable consumer behaviour, the intention-behaviour gap (Vermeir and Verbeke 2006) is better described as a chasm. Third, the levers researchers pull are old and tired. Dominated by the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen 1991), the common assumption of most research is that sustainable behaviour needs to start with altruistic values, which the sustainable marketer should appeal to through a mixture of ethical appeal and rational evidence.

This Cranfield research programme aims to address all of these issues. Access to real-world behavioural data of regular consumers is provided through our collaboration with Enervee, a fast-growing start-up which specialises in nudging consumers towards greener product choices when buying online. Enervee provides major utilities with white-labelled websites so that they can promote products such as freezers, cookers, heaters and televisions. This provides data on 20,000 consumers’ journeys on these websites every day. Cranfield’s collaboration with Enervee allows us to observe consumer behaviour in the real world and model what leads to low-carbon choices. Furthermore, it allows us to conduct field experiments to isolate what variables impact on consumer behaviour: its founders include four PhDs, including a prize-winning Cranfield PhD graduate, and they are committed to underpinning everything they do with the best available evidence.

We call for applicants who would like to help us make use of this opportunity to test and refine existing approaches to green marketing. This requires some expertise in handling large datasets and in statistics. An interest in the topic of sustainable consumer behaviour is also clearly helpful, though prior knowledge of this area is optional. With the help of consumer psychologists at Enervee and Cranfield, we hope to address the third problem we have identified in the existing research base: an over-reliance on a small number of only partially effective mechanisms such as appeals to consumer conscience and better labelling.

The student will be based at the Cranfield School of Management’s Sustainability Network, a cross-functional group of academics addressing the world’s sustainability challenges. The project will involve close collaboration with the Enervee team in Europe and the US. The results will instantly impact on Enervee’s efforts to reduce household carbon footprint. They will also be communicated through academic and practitioner publications to help adoption of new practices by other utilities, retailers and policy-makers.