While completing my Masters in Design Anthropology I had the opportunity to work with Marks & Spencer’s sustainability platform Plan A. Our task: to help their marketing team increase M&S’ appeal to modern consumers - by using green credentials to their competitive advantage.
After conducting interviews with customers, staff and trawling existing insight a key question emerged: why weren’t socially conscious younger shoppers responding to M&S’ progress in sustainable manufacturing?
On the face of it, it looked like M&S simply weren’t using the right channels to link their green message with the relevant audience. Insight says young people live on social; it also says they prefer (more than previous generations) to spend their money ethically.
Was this the missing link? It turned out to not be so simple. This got me thinking - for all the headlines characterising young people as eco-warriors, I felt that through my own lived experience, there wasn’t much evidence to support this. Sure, if you look through the right corner of Instagram you’ll see plenty of content suggestive of thoughtful consumption, but to what extent do these portrayals reflect actual, everyday behaviour? And what does this mean for brands when trying to use their environmental status to their advantage?
Writing for Habitus Insight, I wanted to reexamine some of these now engrained narratives around young consumers, and explore the relationship between individual behaviour, social media and sustainability.
‘The Myth of the Ethical Consumer’
I began with ‘The Myth of the Ethical Consumer’, which probes for the truth behind the wave of social consciousness that is becoming a commercial phenomenon. Its goal was to understand the extent to which consumers that expressed a preference or set of values around sustainable shopping actually achieved their objective.
Their conclusions present people as well-intentioned but behaving in ways which are not always reflective of their motives. Despite being published a decade ago, its characterisation of the tension between values and action feels relevant today.
In 2020, the archetype for a social activist is a member of Generation Z (born 1995-2005). This generation is the first to have grown up with mainstreamed themes of climate change and social inequality, all whilst under relentless social exposure. The logical response? Use social media to filter out their problems and anxieties to create an image that presents the ideal Gen Z’er- the most ethical consumer. Or, are they simply the protagonists of the latest myth?
I decided to investigate. I interviewed friends, friends of friends (all Gen Z’ers) and asked them a few questions about their own shopping habits. Questions included things like whether or not they researched their products before buying them, where they hear about brands, how often they switch brands, what causes them to make changes, and how they use social media. I wanted to know who they are rather than how they want to be seen.
I found scenes of a myth full of contradictions and complexity being played out. Friends who never use single-use plastics eating at fast-food joints with appalling track records for carbon emissions and driving deforestation. Those that covet Patagonia clothing, a brand made famous by its angle on sustainability, but pair one token item with yet more sweatshop-produced fast fashion. They spoke about their ambition to live sustainably, but recognised the pitfalls of convenience, affordability and complexity making it hard for them to live as they want. They also recognised the same constraints were relevant to the brands that produce the things they buy.
But it was usually only the ‘good stuff’ that made it onto their social media accounts, drawing attention away from the ‘business as usual’.
A duplicitous game
Countless studies examine this notion of digital lives as the ‘ideal self’, but individuals are not the only ones complicit. Companies and market researchers banking on Gen Z’s social consciousness are playing a duplicitous game.
With both individuals and brands portraying their best ‘sustainable’ self online, it seems the conversation gets pushed further and further away from the reality of the situation - which is that all involved could be being more honest, thinking and acting more carefully around the products they produce and consume.
And people notice this facade; some of my research participants pointed out a dissonance they feel when a brand pushes a sustainability message on social, but this doesn’t remain constant across other channels and touch points, or if they are suspicious about its validity. They wondered if the brand was trying to appeal to their demographic to sell stuff, and not actually as committed as they have them believe.
As imperfect as Gen Z (and everyone else’s) behaviours are, they can also be perceptive and untrusting of false promises - something brands should think about before jumping on the latest craze. Single use plastics, veganism; it’s a small part of the picture, and Gen Z’ers will continue to learn and, as greater levels of transparency are enforced, their loyalties should shift further towards brands that truly reflect their ideal intent.
That’s why I felt that M&S’ detailed information about supply chain ethics, whilst not trendy now (relative to veganism, for example), sets them up well in the long term as a business with an authentic ambition. Sustainability messages and practices aren’t a quick win - they’re a long term bid for survival, both in the marketplace and more broadly.
Accessible. Simple. Universal.
The ambiguity and hypocrisy of appearances - that is the challenge both consumers and corporations face today. Going forward, researchers should find new ways of asking what people care about when walking store aisles, or what changes their mind in a split second rather than drawing conclusions from aspirational content on social platforms, particularly Instagram.
I think that a lot of the mainstream portrayals of Gen Z are over-hyped, and a more nuanced understanding of the convergence of values and behaviour is necessary; something I quickly began to uncover when spending time with people.
Parallel to that, brands should work to make their ethics so transparent and accessible that they not only provide information for customers on the shop floor in real time, enabling informed decision making. The real motto for making Gen Z the most sustainable generation yet should be simplicity, transparency, and universality, getting out of the subversive world of social media and allowing myths to jump off of the page and become reality.
Thank you for reading!
You can find out more about Gen Z in Google's report, 'It's Lit', a guide to what 'teens think is cool'.
In addition, if you're interested in the work myself and a few others did with Marks & Spencer, you can find that on our project's Tumblr page.