From Zero to Hero?Why Consumer-based innovation is key to revolutionising sustainable energy in the UK.

I had the pleasure of visiting the first day of the Innovation Zero World Congress recently held at Olympia; I was part of a panel of keynote speakers discussing how to overcome perceived fatigue around Net Zero.  My role on the panel was to represent the consumer perspective and to bring three decades of exploring human psychology to the session. If I’m being honest, I thought I may be a lone voice; a kind of maverick outsider spoiling the consensus by offering a large does of real-world human truths.

It was a pleasant surprise to experience a panel who recognised that truly understanding consumers – i.e. real human beings – was crucial in order to move the Net Zero agenda forward. 

I made three core points to the audience:

1. We need to step out of our worlds and into the worlds of the people we want to engage with.  That is, we need to be better at identifying true consumer needs, triggers and barriers.  Essentially, any ‘fatigue’ around Net Zero (and sustainability more broadly) could also be seen as a failure of understanding and communication.  People aren’t fatigued, the industry is just poor at engaging them.

   
   

2. The UK, like many other nations, is highly differentiated; there are people from many different backgrounds and cultures, with numerous perspectives and ways of seeing. The ‘consumer’, as a singular entity, simply doesn’t exist.  There is no single point of unity. We need to be better at understanding the different cultures and psychologies at play and how to engage effectively within different frameworks.

   
   

3. It is futile to expect people to act solely for long-term benefit.  Deferred gratification is luxury that many people can no longer afford.  There has been a shift in our horizons; we now look for immediate (or at least imminent) gratification.  Those involved in Net Zero will have to work harder and smarter to engage people with much more evident benefits and immediate ‘rewards’ for their engagement.

My hope is that we are at the start of a journey towards thinking about ‘the consumer audience’ in a more intelligent (and rewarding) way. In addition, there is a need to re-position ‘energy’ into something that is more emotionally rooted and more immediately related to.  What is it that we should really be selling?  Only when energy, and its associated products and services, become humanised will we start to see the dial shift significantly.

Written by Dr Mark Thorpe, Truth Head of Thought Leadership