More sustainable behavior change through more targeted campaigns

Advertising campaigns with sustainable content are not tailored enough to their target groups. "They take too little account of the fact that people respond to different signals depending on how much they know about a topic," says transport scientist and sociologist Timo Ohnmacht, head of the "Sustainable lifestyles and energy consumption" project as part of the National Research Program "Managing energy consumption" and researcher at the Competence Center for Mobility at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

The research team from the Institute of Tourism Economics ITW at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts worked closely with the city of Lucerne and the city of Biel for this project. 2,000 people in Lucerne and Biel were asked about their consumption behavior, and workshops were also held at environmental offices with representatives from the civil engineering departments responsible for cycle paths, city communications, real estate departments and transport companies.

The results were translated into concrete recommendations for action and summarized in six guidelines. They are aimed at municipalities, authorities, communication and consulting agencies, interest groups and NGOs and are intended to encourage citizens to cycle more, reduce their meat consumption, buy more second-hand goods instead of new ones, use public transport, only change their cell phone when it is broken and generally live more energy-efficiently.

Ohnmacht explains that sustainable behavioral change is a lengthy process. In order to better understand human behaviour, the researchers used findings from social psychology, which are visualized in a four-phase model in the graphic above. This is also an opportunity to make campaigns more effective and thus exert a greater influence on human behavior.

People go through four phases before a new behavior becomes a habit: Pre-consideration, intention, action and habit. "Everyone goes through each phase, but not all for the same length of time. Some think longer, others shorter," says Ohnmacht. "Some have relapses into an earlier phase, others don't."

Therefore, in addition to basic arguments for a certain behavior, motives that confirm an action or reinforce a habit should also be pointed out. People should be addressed in a phase-specific manner, which reduces wastage and saves time, money and nerves. "People in phases two and three are often over-served, while those in phases one and four are under-served," argues Ohnmacht. "Especially those who already exhibit the desired behavior are often forgotten. They also need encouragement not to relapse into earlier phases." There are influencing factors such as emotions, social norms or problem-solving skills, which have different effects depending on the phase of behavioral change. The six guidelines list measures that can be taken for each phase and each suitable influencing factor and illustrate this with examples that have already been implemented.

Peter Schmidli from the city of Lucerne's environmental protection department says that the phase model has helped them a lot in their work: "As the city has adopted a motion to significantly reduce energy consumption by 2050, we had already planned and implemented measures. But now we know that it is successful to address those who are already thinking about living more energy-efficiently and want to cycle more, for example. But we can hardly reach those who don't find it important. The fact that the team from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts also specifically assessed the benefits of past campaigns and highlighted campaigns from other cities was also very helpful. "It is important that people are not patronized, but educated. They have to change their behavior themselves, no one can force them to do so," concludes Timo Ohnmacht.