A Lesson in Buyer Intent
Remember Body Smart chocolate bars and fruit chews? I bet you don’t.
During the Atkins diet fad in early 2000, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc., bet that consumers were ready for candy fortified with vitamins and minerals. Reams of consumer research and focus groups indicated that we were. Indeed, part of the promotion literature sent to snack retailers and distributors boasted about a high “intent to buy” score among consumers who sampled the sweets. That meant when consum- ers were asked if they would buy this product, many said, “sure.”
So Pfizer backed the so-called healthy candy with a hefty marketing budget and a big new product launch during the summer of 2001. By early 2002, the entire line was pulled from stores due to slow sales. The Body Smart casualty is another example in a long line of many failures explaining why marketers abandoned the intent-to-buy metric. What consumers say we will do often is not what we actually do.
Today, there is no shortage of surveys in which consumers are say- ing “sure,” we’re all for sustainability, reducing energy consumption, and saving the earth. We want to be good. But watch our behavior at home, and we ‘re not consistently doing the simple green tasks like turning off the lights or disconnecting plugged-in phone chargers.
We’ll even tell pollsters we like the idea of living in a net-zero house, yet even there, 20 percent of potential energy savings is lost when inhabitants fail to do the simple green things, according to BASF, the chemicals manufacturer that promotes the construction of sustainable housing through its “Beyond. High Performance” program. That’s why a net-zero house has a miscellaneous electric load switch—basically a wall switch that we can flip to turn off an outlet because doing that is easier than reaching to un- plug a phone charger and all of our other vampire appliances. Behavioral studies suggest that if monitors show us something is consuming more energy than it should, we’ll modify our behavior.
But a better predictor of whether we do what we say we’ll do is the pres- ence of affordability and convenience. When we hear, myth or not, that net-zero houses cost more upfront to build and recovering that expense through energy-cost savings could take decades, being green takes a back seat. Perhaps innovations with materials and building methods will change that dynamic. Maybe more education among buyers and builders will move both parties to reconsider their reservations to change.
That path is a longer road to take, but perhaps it’s the right one. As noted by Rick Davenport, director of sustainable construction for BASF’s Center for Building Excellence, unless a proposition like net-zero homes has something for every stakeholder in the process, it will fall apart.
