Going Rogue… Nicole Tiedtke

Driven to understand the sustainable human.

I’m a believer

We met with Nicole Tiedtke, UX Director at SinnerSchrader in Hamburg, Germany, to talk about the attitudes and behaviors of the sustainable consumer, leading conscious consumption, and her daughter’s dream for the future.

Some of us recycle plastic at home. Others grow their own veggies and fruits. Others go as far as speaking about the damaging effects of consumption to other parents at their kids’ school. All these different behaviors tell us something profound about our individual beliefs about the world, and Nicole Tiedtke is convinced that understanding them holds the key to the sustainable future of humanity.

Nicole is the UX Director at SinnerSchrader in Hamburg, Germany, and she has spent a year researching and studying sustainable consumers.

“The most exciting thing about the state of sustainability today is that it’s no longer only considering resources and energy, but also significant human-centric attributes. I’m a Psychologist and a UX designer and my passion is to be able to identify these human inner drivers that make people the way they are, their inner truth. What is their driver that makes them behave in a certain way?”

“Our personality affects every decision we make, and when it comes to sustainability I am very curious about understanding the different points of view, the mindsets, behaviors, and the beliefs each person has about this topic.”

Nicole got interested in sustainability when she became a mother: “After my daughter was born I started to think about how the world will be when she grows up. When she got older she started to ask a million questions about what we were doing regarding the environment, pollution, and plastic waste… there was no way around it, I had to answer her.”

According to a recent study, being authentic about sustainability claims matters more than ever to younger generations. “I solve problems for a living”, reflects Nicole, “and when I talk to my kid I realize quickly that I need to put my knowledge and resources to good use. So I started to work on a sustainable consumer segmentation”

“Understanding what drives people to adopt or reject sustainable behaviors takes a lot of research, and research is really hard work. But I believe that is worth doing it because we can change things for the better.”

Nicole is working with her team on researching consumer profiles, to create mindset clusters so they can better understand what type of behaviors lead to better everyday sustainable behaviors.

“We have been reading studies about consumer mindsets and sustainable behaviors and we have identified 7 clusters, 7 profiles.”

The first one is the Evangelist. People who are trying to do the right thing. Think of Greenpeace, people who are showing the world how to lead a sustainable life. Even some parents at school who you might know, who are always passionately telling other parents about how to behave better.

“I see myself more in the second group, the Believer. They believe in doing good but they don’t shout it to the world. They feel good by doing good.”

The third group is the ones who follow sustainable practices because they want to be socially accepted, known as the Good, they want to behave as the others do. They check all the boxes: I follow sustainable principles, I’m buying sustainable products, of course, I want to change the world and I want to protect the planet, but if they could decide in private, they might not do it. Being accepted is crucial, not just for them, for most of us.

The largest group is the Follower. People who pretend to lead a sustainable life but actually don’t care about fair trade labels, sustainably produced products, or recycling. They do as the majority does, and that’s the opportunity but also the danger.

Most of these people expect brands to be purpose-driven and sustainable but only 1 in 4 of the people who expect others to lead a sustainable life actually do it themselves. We call this the intention-action gap.

Everybody wants to be good, but just a few behave that way.

“We’ve also found an interesting cluster: The rejector and they reject any need for sustainable practices, because they might be too expensive, or because they believe that it’s all a conspiracy. As difficult as it might seem to convert them, the key question for us is how can we help these people do better?”

In Calgary, Canada the government launched a campaign to help people deal with grass clippings after mowing the lawn. Basically, the campaign said: do nothing and the grass will help return nutrients to the soil.

But people didn’t change their habits and continued to trash the grass clippings. So they relaunched the campaign putting pressure on users by telling them: You can do what you want but your neighbor is already doing better than you. And then people started to leave the grass clippings alone.

“Being part of the reimagined event by Accenture Interactive was eye-opening for me because there was a lot of focus on purpose-driven design, and I realized that we can do a lot of good by addressing the right consumer with the right message at the right time.”

Nevertheless, one of the biggest obstacles we face is the lack of actionable information. “During our research, we often hear “I wish I could… but I don’t know how to.” Nicole believes that by giving examples of concrete sustainable actions, people would start to behave like The Believer segment we saw before.

“Look at what we have done in just the last 5 years: The automobile industry is obsessed with electric cars. The truth is we all want to do some good.”

Conscious consumption is basically about awareness of a hundred micro-decisions we make every day about why and what to buy, where to buy it from, and how and where we dispose of it. This is not a natural mental process for most of us. Especially in an environment where the average person is exposed daily to more than 5,000 messages from global brands urging us to consume.

Ultimately, who is supposed to lead the way to sustainable consumer behavior? Brands? People? The Government?

“But it’s not about brands or consumers. it’s going to take all of us working together to figure this out.”

A growing pressured to implement sustainable practices is pushing some brands to engage in what’s known as green-washing, which is a form of marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization’s products, aims, and policies are environmentally friendly.

“My daughter told me the other day: “I want to change the world, do something good, come up with a sustainable idea.” We really need to support this new generation to get going and do something with their ideas.”

I’m a believer.

Follow Nicole on Linkedin