This is the second part of a five part series where John Marshall Roberts, in partnership with strategic marketing firm EcoAlign, provides communicators with a new approach in connecting with consumers to advance the adoption of green products and services.

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First Things First:What Causes Consumer Behavior?

Observable behavior is always just a symptom of something larger and unseen. Trying to understand someone’s behavior by looking at their surrounding environment is like trying to understand the ocean by looking at a boat. One may find a few chaotic patterns amongst bobs and ripples perhaps, but that’s about it. To get a deeper understanding of the causes of consumer choice making, we must be willing to dive to very bottom of the vast ocean of the human mind and become familiar with the hidden anchors that underlie human perception itself.

Fortunately, you can leave your scuba gear on the shore. Psychologists and political strategists have spent decades doing this for us. And what they’ve found is both simple and startling. Although inherently dynamic and non-linear in nature, a person’s daily behavioral choices are patterned by their core values—those fundamental beliefs, assumptions, and aspirations that they use to make sense of the world around them. A person’s core values act as a gravitational force of consciousness, literally shaping the way the world looks to them, and in turn how they look to the world vis-a-vis their day-to-day behaviors.

To illustrate by way of analogy, imagine spinning a marble around a bathroom sink. At any given point it would be difficult to predict the marble’s exact location, because its movements are somewhat chaotic and random, fluctuating wildly based upon even the most minute textural gradients in the sink surface. In fact, even the most learned physicist would have a terrible time devising an equation that would predict this marble’s exact path. Yet, anyone with an ounce of common sense can easily predict where the marble will end up eventually—right down the drain.

This metaphorical drain shapes our marble’s path in the same way that a person’s core values shape their thoughts and behaviors. Understand a person’s value systems and you will grasp the size, shape and contours of the mental sink around which the myriad “marbles” of their everyday thoughts are endlessly pulled as they strive make sense of the data their five senses send them. With such insight comes great power for creating communications that can transform feel-good notions into measurable behaviors. On the other hand, without this insight, we are left without an effective map with which to help our audiences escape the sun-drenched doldrums of ineffectual good intentions.

For example, let’s assume that we want to create a campaign that motivates people to install compact fluorescent bulbs in their homes. At the behavioral level our goal is measurable and clear. The challenging question is this—How will we frame our communications so that they effectively play to the mental landscape of our various audiences? What messaging tactics and strategies will be most effective? Should we appeal to the “better angels” of our audience’s nature, calling upon them to be of service to the planet and their fellow man? Should we apply the tried and true guilt-headlock, calling upon them to consider their children living in an overheated world with soot-blackened skies? Should we pound them in the pocketbook, showing them the money they waste every day by sticking to their old incandescent light bulb ways?

The correct answer to all of these questions is, of course, “it depends.” Audiences are comprised of groups of complex, multidimensional people operating from wildly different core values that drive both their daily decisions and their larger life aspirations. Communicators ignore this existential diversity at their own certain peril. Faced with such complexity—and lacking a well-tested scientific model of human values—most marketers pushing green, energy efficiency, conservation and sustainability at large have thus far done their best to appeal to everyone, creating generic, washed-out messages that lack any real punch. Or, even worse, they’ve create messages that have unwittingly offend the very audiences they are seeking to inspire.

Great solutions come from great questions. Therefore, the first action item for creating large scale communi-cation programs that solve real-world problems is to finally start asking the right questions, such as: What do our target audiences care about most? What are their core beliefs in life? What is their generic conception of a mature, responsible adult? What offends their basic sense of propriety? In the context of these existing assumptions, what meaningful purpose might energy efficiency reasonably serve? How might they have already grown cynical about environmental-ism? How might we strategic-ally engage this cynicism to create an immediate sense of trust? How might we con-textualize our behavioral call to action so that it occurs to target audiences as an exciting opportunity to further their own preexisting life goals and aspirations?

From inquiries of this type, we will finally begin to glimpse beneath the veneer of human perception, gaining fresh insight into the hidden causes of human behavior: the core values that people unconsciously use to simplify decision-making processes and organize endlessly complex perceptual data.

Let’s face it: No one cares about a light bulb, really. What people care about is feeling good about themselves, enjoying life, and expressing themselves in ways that align with their core values and beliefs. Get them to see a light bulb as an opportunity to experience these exalted feelings and your job is complete.

THE “GREEN GAP” IS A MATTER OF CONTEXT

The green gap is actually created in the minds of frustrated idealists who naively expect that a person’s stated intentions should match up with their day-to-day behaviors. How many times have marketers experienced the frustration of discovering that what people said in focus groups wasn’t exactly accurate, or that polls were misleading? How many times must marketers continue to experience this frustration before they modify the madness behind their methods?

The simple fact of the matter is that the observable behavior of “stating one's concern for the environment” is merely one specific behavioral expression that occurs within a specific mental/situational context. The observable behavior of “purchasing environmentally sound products and services” is a separate behavioral expression that exists within a completely different set of mental/situational contexts. The only reasonable way to link these two contextually different types of behavioral expression (beyond mandated legal requirements!) is through uncovering and tapping into the one underlying source that unites them—those core values that shape one’s everyday sense-making.

Sincerity is not enough. Good intentions are not enough. Seasoned marketing expertise is not enough. Insight is the key. To consistently and reliably inspire willingness for behavioral change in others, we first have insight into the hidden drivers that underlie their current behavioral norms. Once we have this sort of knowledge we will finally be in a position to call them to action in a way that works within the context of their existing motivational flows, without the need for overt forcing, cajoling or persuasion.

What’s more, through such a lens it becomes possible to finally see that all human behavior—even that which inadvertently contributes to global warming and the melting of ice caps—is fundamentally aspirational and well-intended. Our real challenge as leaders and communicators is not to change people, but rather to create programs that embrace this underlying truth, and successfully call upon those universals of human experience to inspire consumers to express their positive intentions through behaviors that match the feel-good environmental rhetoric they so earnestly voice. At the end of the day, the “green gap” is a mirage. It will disappear as soon we start asking the right questions, and start designing programs that call upon our audiences to access their core aspirations, within a behavioral context that they find personally relevant.

This lofty task becomes much simpler when we apply the wisdom gleaned from decades of developmental psychology research. It turns out that, despite the sometimes overwhelming complexity of thoughts and opinions that reside in the minds of our audiences, there are but a few basic core value profiles or “thinking types” operating in the world today. These value types have been thoroughly discovered, tested and refined through years of disciplined data collection and research. As communicators who aspire to transform environmental rhetoric into reality, this groundbreaking research provides a framework that offers unprecedented—and highly practical—insight into the minds of our various audiences.

To download the paper, “Cracking the Green Code: Using a Values-Based Model to Improve Customer Communications and Marketing,” in its entirety, click here.

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John Marshall Roberts is an author, speaker, and communications strategist for a variety of sustainable and socially conscious clients. His new book, "Igniting Inspiration: A Persuasion Manual for Visionaries," is available here. Find more information on his blog.