The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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In two earlier posts, I had written about the consumption dichotomy in the National Geographic/ GlobeScan Greendex Survey –

The consumers in developed countries are not concerned about the environment, and the consumers in developing countries won’t back up their concern with proactive consumer behavior.

So, I propose, somewhat sadly, that the “can consume, will consume” maxim will continue to hold for most people in most countries, and the solution to our environmental woes will lie in consuming intelligently, and not in consuming less. Which makes me wonder why I ever thought that the trends towards less consumption will ever move from the fringes to the mainstream.

A recent AdWeek article titled ‘Deflating a Myth: Consumers Aren’t as Devoted to the Planet as You Wish They Were’ confirms my fears –

Surveys do consistently show people voicing strong support for environmental protection… But this is the sort of subject about which it’s awfully easy for people to pay lip service when a pollster asks whether they’d like to save the planet from despoliation… There is a lot of ‘aspirational’ commitment, as opposed to real commitment, by consumers… When it asks about specifics of green behavior, polling tends to confirm that mainstream consumers have learned to talk the talk but are still in the baby-steps phase of walking the walk.

In my earlier post about the National Geographic/ GlobeScan Greendex Survey, I had talked about the dichotomy between developed and developing countries in their attitudes towards the environment –

If the consumers in developed countries are not concerned about the environment, and the consumers in developing countries won’t back up their concern with proactive consumer behavior (recycling is very rare in developing countries), there isn’t much hope for the environment, is there?

On a second reading of the Greendex report, I discovered another (more interesting) dichotomy between developed and developing countries, in their attitudes towards consumption itself.

In the chart below I have plotted the top box “strongly agree” answers for respondents from each country on two questions related to the intent to consume. The first question is an indicator of the intent to consume less and the second question is an indicator of the intent to consume more.

- Question 1: As a society, we will need to consume a lot less to improve the environment for future generations.

India (along with Brazil) has emerged as the most green country and USA as the least green country in the National Geographic/ GlobeScan Greendex Survey of 14,000 consumers in a total of 14 countries.

The survey included questions on sustainable consumption behavior like energy use and conservation, transportation choices, food sources, the relative use of green products versus traditional products, attitudes towards the environment and sustainability, and knowledge of environmental issues.

The Greendex study is especially interesting to me because it is focused on the environmental sustainability of our actual behavior and material lifestyles as consumers, instead of our attitudes and concerns about the environment as citizens. Not only that, it explicitly factors in the consumption choices we pro-actively make (such as repairing or recycling products) as well as the choices that are controlled more by our circumstances (such as the availability of green products or public transport), with sixty percent of the weight to the former.

The Greendex rankings look intuitive at a superficial level, but present a paradox on closer inspection.