The commercial challenge: Waste reduction is an issue that’s only getting more important. So, when ASDA planned the launch of their first sustainable trial store, they asked us to help develop its strategy, concept and design. Following the trial, these ideas would be rolled out across the country. We looked at opportunities to help customers make more sustainable choices, from reducing waste and plastic to recycling facilities and self-service refill stations. Of course, we had to find ways to encourage a change in behaviour too.

The human problem: Habits are hard to break. Whilst most of us want to be more sustainable, it’s usually not seen as easy enough to change our ingrained habits. So, our real challenge here was human nature and our resistance to change.

Our insight: There’s no point fighting human nature, so we decided to work with it. We focused on the three key pillars to behavioural change recognised by psychologists: 1. Motivation: people rarely change unless they want to. 2. Popularity: people are more likely to take action if others are.  3. Ease: the less effort it seems, the more likely we are to do it. Knowing that people were already motivated, we set out to make sustainable choices seem popular and simple.

Our answer: A problem as huge as environmental destruction can make us feel helpless as individuals. Yet small actions all add up, especially when made collectively. Research showed that reducing waste was an issue people felt was an achievable change, so this became our focus.
We created a campaign platform: ‘Let’s Cut Out Waste ’. This was an invitation for everyone to take easy individual actions that would make a big difference against a common enemy.

To communicate our messages effectively, we then created a look and feel that stood apart from conventional sustainability approaches, and rolled it out across every customer touchpoint. Punch Above Your Weight: Our campaign immediately won the hearts and minds of all the project stakeholders.

“We couldn’t be more excited about how our first, more sustainable store has come to life. Working closely with the team at CreativeRace, who surprised and delighted us every step of the way, we now have a fantastic identity and design toolkit that can flex and stretch to be rolled out to more stores in the future.” – Robert Sindermann, Senior Director Design, ASDA.

The range of impactful, easy to implement assets we created wasn’t only used in the trial store, but some were rolled out nationally before the trial began. While we’re still waiting for the results to come in, early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Change is on its way.