How can play drive us to consume plastic more responsibly?

At Kirk, Hatch and Bloom we developed a concept for a mobile-driven retail experience, allowing kids to have fun scanning plastic packaging across retail stores in the pursuit of hidden ‘Polly Pets. Resulting in new consumer habits that lead to responsible usage of plastic.

Challenge

A major retailer came to us as wanting to translate their ‘2023 plastic reduction strategy’ into consumer action in support of their ambitious reduction targets.

“We carry many competing products with different packaging types and need our consumers to prioritize those that can be recycled. How do we educate & develop behavior resulting in responsible usage of plastics among our consumers — while still driving the overall growth of our brand?”

Approach

We began by defining the key goals from the client’s perspective. From increasing the number of recyclable plastics in their stores — to increase brand awareness and customer loyalty.

To understand the space we carried out desk research and interviews with the consumer segment to understand engagement triggers and drivers for changing their shopping behavior. We learned that their key customer segment were moms in their thirties — and that their children were highly passionate about climate impact. We decided to focus on the target group 6–12–year–olds as a gateway to their parents and heavy influencers of their purchase choices.

Hereafter, we ran a mini design sprint mapping out user needs, pains & triggers. From this, we developed a series of hypotheses for creating the desired behavior change and hitting the key business goals.

Hypothesis statement

We believe, we can engage more kids and moms to shop
and recycle plastics in a responsible manner…

​…by making it fun to engage with and learn about plastic-packaging
through a playful mobil-driven experience, targeted 6–12 year old kids…

​As a result we will see increased visits and purchases of
‘responsible plastic’ products in stores by Q4 2020.

But is this true?

Our next step was to figure out “what was the smallest possible thing we could build to test our hypothesis?” As a result, we developed a simple mobile prototype that we tested on kids in the specific age group.

Some things we learned:

”It’s cool — just like Pokemon Go!”

”I seldomly shop with my parents, but I’d use it at home — we have loads of plastic in our bin!!”

Testing with the target audience gave us valuable input on the nature of tasks in the app, and also new inspiration for adapting mechanics from the likes of Pokemon Go! to increase retention of our user segment. As a final component of the project, we developed an engagement and roll-out strategy for the key retail touchpoints — showing how the system could be scaled up over time through activities and events.

Output

• Field study and desk research to identify customer engagement triggers
• Mini design sprint, hypothesis statement & prototype for user validation
• Implementation and roll-out strategy across key retail touchpoints