The-science-of-talking-about-sustainability

The_science_of_talking_about_sustainability_2_9_2021 


[Image appears of a photo of a participant on the main screen and then the image changes to show Anthony Wright talking to the camera and the other participants can be seen in the Participant pane at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Welcome everyone to the seventh in our webinar series, or the Eta variant as I’m calling it now. Today we’re going to be having a chat about the science behind talking about sustainable housing and I’m really looking forward to hearing from our three speakers, Danie Nilsson, a Post-doctoral Fellow in Social Sciences here at CSIRO, Ben Peacock from Republic of Everyone, and James McGregor from BlueTribe. I will let all of them do their own introductions on their presentations shortly. 

Before we start I would just like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri People who are the traditional custodians of the land from which I’m speaking and pay my respects to their Elders, past and present, and extend that respect to any Indigenous Australians who are present in the audience today. We’ve got a few, couple of housekeeping things to go through before we get started. The first, for those who already know, this will be very familiar. For those that don’t, there are two sections where you can have a chat. There’s a Q&A section and a Chat section. The Chat section is strictly for you in the audience to speak amongst yourselves and the Q&A section is for questions for our speakers. That Q&A section will be passed through to me and I will moderate those questions and direct them to our speakers at the conclusion of all three presentations. 

So, get your questions in there, while you’re listening to the speakers and I will ensure that they get to the right people, when the time comes. I’d also just like to confirm that this webinar is being recorded and will be available on our website, the ahd.csiro.au website. It takes us about two weeks to get it uploaded after the presentation, mainly because we need to get transcripts done. So, there will be a little bit of a wait, but this will definitely be uploaded and available in about two weeks’ time. So, without further ado, because I know these guys have a lot to talk about and I don’t want to take up their time, I’m going to hand over to Danie Nilsson from CSIRO to share her slides.

[Image shows Danie Nilsson talking in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen and Anthony can be seen listening on the main screen] 

Danie Nilsson: Anthony. 

[Image shows Anthony talking on the main screen]

Anthony Wright: Thanks Danie. Looking good. You just need to pop it in presenter mode. 

[Image changes to show a slide on the screen showing the CSIRO logo and text: The science of behaviour change, Dr Danie Nilsson, September 2021]

That’s it. Go for it.

Danie Nilsson: OK. I’m just going to minimise this box if possible, I think. OK. Should be good. Alright, hi everyone. So today, I am going to be talking about the science of behaviour change. Sorry. 

[Image changes to show a new slide on the main screen showing a photo of a hand holding a glass ball reflecting a sunset, and text appears: What brings us all here today?, A desire to create a more sustainable world, Want to create impact and generate change, Cornerstone of sustainability is human behaviour – underpins every sustainability problem, But it’s also the solution!]

OK, so I asked myself, what is it that’s brought us all here today? What is it that we have in common? And I believe that is, that we all have a common desire to create a more sustainable world. We want to create impacts and we want to generate change and at the cornerstone of sustainability is human behaviour. Human behaviour actually underpins just about every sustainability problem that we have. So, the good news though, is that whilst it’s a problem, it’s also the solution.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text on a white screen: How do we influence human behaviour?]

So, what I hope to teach you a bit about today is how we go about influencing human behaviour and I’m going to speak about this first in a bit more broad terms and then I’m going to contextualise this within the sustainability field and specifically speak to some of the research that we’ve been doing to drive Australia’s sustainable housing market, using the behavioural science.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a diagram on the right explaining how human behaviour is explained, and text heading and text appears: Understanding human behaviour, Applied science – Draw from theory, evidence and practice, Many theories exist to understand behaviour and to be used as frameworks for behavioural interventions]

So first off, I’m going to briefly explain how we go about understanding human behaviour. And the first thing to know is that this is an applied science, which is great, because it means we can draw from theory, evidence, and practice. There are a whole other range of fields that have used this in the past which we can learn from as well. And the second thing to note that there are many, many theories that do exist to both understand and predict human behaviour. And no one of them is perfect, but they can help us to understand it better and then there are also frameworks that we can use to design behavioural interventions, which I’ll be speaking about a bit later in this presentation. And finally if I can just draw your attention to the diagram on the right here, this actually helps us to understand the interaction of behavioural and social science in understanding human behaviour. So behavioural science actually focuses on understanding an active psychological state, whereas the social sciences here, focuses on understanding that broader social cultural context for that actor. Now both of those are actually necessary for understanding an actor’s behaviour within a given environmental context and any changes that are made to that social cultural context, the environmental context, or that actor’s behaviour actually create feedback loops with one another.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing four boxes next to each other labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, and text heading appears above and text appears in the boxes: What not to do, 1. Attitudes – not the end goal, don’t often translate to behaviour, 2. Awareness/Education – information intensive campaigns, very popular but low success rate alone, 3. Economic incentives – Can provide motivation but alone can often fail, Crowd out intrinsic motivation, Not as sustainable as intrinsically motivated behaviour, 4. Rules and regulations – difficult to enforce, low compliance] 

Alright, now I’m jumping straight to what not to do and I wanted to do that because it can be really easy to assume that behaviour change is simple and to fall into any of the following traps that I’ve listed here. And so the first one is attitudes, so it’s really easy to assume that, well if someone has a positive attitude, they’re going to act positively, but unfortunately it’s not that simple, and the research actually shows that attitudes don’t often translate to behaviour. 

So, it’s important to remember that attitudes aren’t actually our end-goal. Behaviour is our end-goal and attitudes might be one step amongst many to achieve that goal of behaviour change. The second point here is awareness or education and this is actually in the form of information intensive campaigns. These are very, very popular, but they often have a very low success rate when it’s the only strategy that’s used. And a great example of this is, we might, you know, pretty much all of us here know that we should be eating five vegetables a day, but I can almost guarantee that that is, that not all of us are complying with that. 

So, the third point here is economic incentives. Now we like to assume that we are purely economic, rational beings and that we act in our best rational interest. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and a great example is, how often do we sign up for gym memberships? It’s in our best interest to go as often as possible, but it might be the case that we end up going three or four times a year. So economic incentives, they can provide good motivation, but when it’s just, again, simply, when it’s just provided in and of itself, they can often fail. The other important thing to note is that economic incentives can actually crowd out intrinsic motivation and we don’t want that, so for instance, if someone’s performing a behaviour because it aligns with their own self-held values and then you if go and introduce an economic incentive or some other sort of incentive, extrinsic incentive, that can diminish or crowd out that behaviour. 

So, they may no longer do that behaviour unless they’re paid to do so for instance, and we don’t want that because we know that behaviours that are intrinsically motivated, so if it aligns with someone’s values, they’re more self-sustaining. They’re more sustainable and, whereas, if you’re providing an extrinsic incentive, often once you remove that extrinsic incentive, unless it’s translated to something like social norms, that behaviour will often stop. And finally, is rules and regulations. So, we like to think this is an easy solution, but if this works as well, we’d have no, there’d be no-one in our gaols and none of use would have ever gotten a speeding fine. So, these can actually be quite difficult to enforce and have low compliance. So just to finish off here, I just want to point out that these are tools. They’re tools in a tool kit but when we think of these just simplistically and in and of themselves, is when they don’t tend to work that well.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing the CSIRO logo and text on the screen: Behaviour Change in Practice, What does work?]

Which takes me to, well what actually does work? And I’m going to speak about some of the strategies of actually what does work, but also behaviour change in practice and the processes that we tend to go through. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a flow chart of Community Based Social Marketing Steps, and text heading and text appears: Community Based Social Marketing – Doug McKenzie Mohr, Alternative to information intensive campaigns, Programmatic approach based in social psychology, Very effective at bringing about behaviour change, 1. Select behaviours to promote, 2. Identify barriers and benefits, 3. Develop strategies, 4. Pilot test strategies, 5. Implement and evaluate strategies broadly]

So, one of the first processes that, or approaches that I’ll talk about is what’s called community-based social marketing, and this has been designed by a guy called Doug McKenzie Mohr. He’s a fantastic practitioner and researcher. Wonderful book, great website and training that he offers, so I’d really encourage that as a resource if you’re interested. So, this is an alternative to those information intensive campaigns and it’s a very pragmatic approach and it’s based in social psychology and it has been shown to be very effective about bringing behaviour change and it follows a five-step process. So, the first step is to, you get really clear on selecting those behaviours that you’re trying to promote. You then identify the barriers and the benefits to those behaviours and then you develop this strategy. So, you’re looking at strategies that are going to remove as many of those barriers as possible and promote as many of those benefits or those drivers as possible. You then pilot those strategies and then you scale it up. You implement it and you evaluate those strategies more broadly.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a “Behavioural Science Circle” overlapping a “Design-thinking circle” creating an area in the middle “BCD” and text appears on the left: Behaviour Centred Design, Complete process for behaviour change aimed at both individuals and societies, Blends insights from behavioural science and approaches from design thinking to generate solutions] 

The second approach that I want to talk to you, it’s very similar and it’s, and it’s called behaviour centred design. And this, again, it’s a complete process for behaviour change and it’s aimed at both individuals and at societies. So, it blends insights from behavioural science and approaches from design thinking to generate solutions.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a line with labelled symbols along it at eight different points and text appears at the points: 1. Frame, 2. Empathize, 3. Map, 4. Ideate, 5. Prototype, 6. Test, 7. Launch, 8. Assess] 

And similar to community-based social marketing, this has an eight-step process. The first step is you frame the problem. You get really specific. You then empathise. You understand who’s involved in this problem.  You then mark it, mark this out. You draw some hypotheses there. You then ideate, so this is a strategy creation phase. You then prototype that, which is similar to the piloting phase. You test that. You launch it and then you assess it and monitor it as it goes forward.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a diagram on the right of a circle divided into six segments labelled Information, Emotional Appeals, Rules & Regulations, Choice Architecture, Material Incentives and Social Influences and text appears on the left: Rare’s Levers of Behaviour Change Framework (Rare 2020), Leveraging Social Influences, Designing Choice Architecture, Appealing to Emotions]

Right, I’m now going to jump to the strategies that we might actually use when it goes to changing people’s behaviour. So, there’s a fantastic organisation, it’s a US based organisation called Rare and they have this centre for behaviour and environment. I really also recommend that as a strong resource and I’ve taken some snippets from their website here. So, they have this Levers of Behaviour Change Framework. So, there’s six levers here and what you might realise already is that three of these levers is what I touched on earlier which is Information, Rules and Regulations, and Material Incentives. So again, they are tools in a toolkit, but the important thing to understand here is what strategies are going to work best together for the specific context and the problem that you’re trying to solve. So, there’s three other levers that are often overlooked but the evidence shows can be really powerful at creating change, so these are what’s called Social Influences, Choice Architecture and Emotional Appeals and I’m going to talk a bit more about those now.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Choice Architecture, Changing the context in which choices are made, Direct attention, Make the target behaviour the default option, Draw attention to the target behaviour by making it salient, Simplify messages and decisions, Streamline complex decisions to focus on key information or actions, Provide shortcuts for a target behaviour with many steps or options, Use timely moments and prompts, Target moments of transition and habit formation, Provide prompts and reminders about the target behaviour, Facilitate planning and goal setting, Provide support in making a plan to achieve the target behaviour, Use commitments to bind or limit future decisions] 

So, Choice Architecture, this is where we change the context in which choices are made and there are a whole range of principles here, so in bold are the different principles that you can draw upon and then these dot points are different strategies that we might like to use. So, if we look at the first one here, directing people’s attention, you might want to make the target behaviour the default option and a really great example of this is if we think about organ donation. So, there are some, I believe, European countries, in particular, Austria, where organ donation is actually the default option. So, if you were to pass away, your organs are automatically going to be donated. On the contrary, if we look at Australia, our default option is that your organs aren’t donated. You actually have to opt in, in order to be an organ donor and this basic change in choice architecture has meant that there’s a significant difference between the peoples, between the European countries compared to Australia in the rate of organ donation, obviously being much higher when the default option is to donate your organs. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Emotional Appeals, Using emotional messages to drive behaviour, Leverage emotions in specific contexts, Pride – Use to motivate people to show others what they have done when they have achieved a goal or done the right thing, Joy – Use to motivate people to talk to others or reinforce their behaviour when they have achieved a goal or gained resources, Hope – use to motivate people to start a behaviour when they can achieve a desired outcome while facing a threat, Fear – use to motivate people to avoid risks when they experience uncertainty or an immediate threat, Anger – use to motivate people to confront others when they witness injustice or experience threats to personal autonomy, Interest – use to motivate people to seek information when something is novel and complex, Prospect of shame – use to motivate people to avoid an action when other might find out about socially undesirable actions, Personalise the message – Put a human face on campaigns and focus on a single story over abstract statistics, Tailor messages to make them personally relevant, relatable, and appealing]

The second one here is Emotional Appeals. So, you might use emotional appeals, emotional messages to drive behaviour. As I mentioned, we are not purely rational beings. We are also emotional creatures and we can be driven by our emotions. So, we can actually leverage emotions in specific contexts or we might like to do something like personalise the message. So, we might want to put a human face on campaigns and focus on a single story over abstract statistics or we might like to tailor messages to make them more personally relevant, relatable or appealing.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Social Influences, Leveraging the behaviour, beliefs, and expectations of others, Make engaging or not engaging in the target behaviour observable, Publicly broadcast who has and has not engaged in the target behaviour, Provide a way for people to show they are doing the target behaviour, Make the target behaviour the perceived norm, Highlight possibility of social sanctions for doing the problem behaviour, Share that people are currently doing the target behaviour, Create conversation around shared beliefs and expectations, Promote cases of success with the target behaviour, Leverage credible and trusted messengers doing the target behaviour, Facilitate peer or community exchanges where others can observe and gain support for the target behaviour, Eliminate excuses for not engaging in the target behaviour, Encourage public commitments or pledges to drive the target behaviour, Provide visible indicators that signal support for the target behaviour (eg hats, badges)] 

And finally Social Influences, so this is where we can actually leverage the behaviour beliefs and expectations of others. So, we might make engaging or not engaging in the target behaviour observable. We might make the target behaviour the perceived norm or we might eliminate excuses for not engaging in the target behaviour. And I’m going to talk about these ones in a bit more depth a little bit more later on in terms of the research that we’re doing.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Sustainable Housing, Driving market demand]

So, now I’m going to jump to the work that we’re doing in the sustainable housing space. So, we’ve been looking at how do we use this behavioural science to drive market demand across Australia? 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Background, Research has indicated that mass media is a priority mechanism to promote the sustainable housing market across Australia, Key action of LCL CRC and ASBEC Industry Roadmap Report, “Consumer engagement campaign – Develop and deliver a longitudinal consumer engagement campaign – including programming in mainstream broadcast media, social media and commercial product placement – to accelerate the adoption of sustainable homes and support early adopters to enter the market at scale”.]

OK. So just a really quick background here. So, the research has actually indicated that mass media is a priority mechanism to promote the sustainable housing market across Australia and this is a key action of the Low Carbon Living, CRC and ASBEC Industry Roadmap Report. So that is to develop and deliver a longitudinal consumer engagement campaign, including programming in mainstream broadcast media, social media and commercial product placement, both to accelerate the adoption of sustainable homes and to support early adopters to enter the market at scale. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Why mass media?, Change at behaviour scale, Reality television is established as a highly popular entertainment media source around the world, Been found to significantly influence viewer behaviours and to generate billions of dollars in spending annually, Social media has also been found to have a direct effect on behavioural outcomes, CSIRO collaborated with Blue Tribe and the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment to create lifestyle television to drive Australia’s sustainable housing market, Supported by secondary content on social media channels and website, Innovative research opportunity – creating content based on behavioural science and rigorously monitor and evaluate to demonstrate impact]

So, why mass media? Well, ultimately, this gives us a really great opportunity to change behaviour at scale and reach those masses. Now reality television is actually established as a highly popular entertainment media source around the world. It has been found to significantly influence viewer behaviours and to generate millions of dollars in spending annually. And social media as well, has been found to have a direct effect on behavioural outcomes. But as a result, the CSIRO has actually collaborated with Blue Tribe and the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment to create lifestyle television to drive Australia’s sustainable housing market and this has been supported by secondary content on social media channels and websites. Ultimately as a researcher, this is a really innovative research opportunity and what we’re doing here is we’re creating content based on behavioural science and then we’re rigorously monitoring and evaluating it to demonstrate impact.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: How?, Social norms – normative social influence/messaging – Use tailored language and key messages that promote the target behaviour as something that is normal, common (descriptive norm) and socially desirable (injunctive norm), Eg “When purchasing homes these days many people are prioritising energy efficiency and comfort”, Eg “Everyone I know these days is making sure they insulate their homes to X standard, Social Modelling – Encourage audience learning and action via cast learning or modelling desirable behaviour, Eg Show the contestants seeking quotes for solar panels from Energy Matters, making decision to purchase and the installation process]

OK. So how are we actually doing this? Well, we did come up with a whole range of strategies based on evidence and theoretical guidance, to create influential TV and I only have time to talk about two of these main ones that are, that are operating today. So, the first one is social norms, or we could call it normative social influence or messaging in this case. So that’s where we might use tailored language and key messages that promote the target behaviour as something that is normal or common. That’s called a descriptive norm or socially desirable and that’s called an injunctive norm. 

So, for instance, you might have the host of the show saying something like, “Well, when purchasing homes these days, many people are prioritising energy efficiency and comfort”, or you might have a cast member say something like, “Well, everyone I know these days is making sure they insulate their homes to such-and-such standard” and this is shown to be much more influential. And then we get, jump to social modelling. So social modelling is actually where we encourage audience learning and action via the cast learning or modelling the desirable behaviour. So, for instance, we might show the contestants seeking quotes for solar panels, for solar panels from Energy Matters and taking them through that decision-making process to purchase that and the actual installation process, start to finish.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a “Nobody Smokes Here Any More” sign on the right and text on the left: Social norms, Humans tend to follow others and do not like deviating from the norm, Making a norm prominent and visible leads people to be more likely to conform, Social norms can include both descriptive norm information (what people are doing), as well as injunctive norm information (what others expect you to do)]

Now, just to unpack those a little bit more. So, social norms, humans tend to follow others and they do not like deviating from the norm and when you make a norm more prominent and visible it actually leads people to be more likely to conform to that behaviour.  Now, as I said, social norms can include both what’s called a descriptive norm, that’s what people are actually doing, as well as an injunctive norm, so that’s what we, others expect us to do and a really great example here is the smoking campaign, which is Nobody Smokes Here Any More, really invoking social norms in this instance. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of two children whispering together on the right and text appears on the left: Social Modelling, Social modelling refers to the implicit learning generated by observing other people interacting and performing behaviours, Such learning previously stemmed from personal interactions with peer networks, family, and others, but reality TV has now started to make major contributions to social learning, Lifestyle programs have been found to influence modelling behaviours in their audiences, If programs demonstrate behaviours that result in a better life, there is research to suggest that viewer modelling of these behaviours continues over time, and as a result creates societal-level change]

And just to unpack social modelling a little bit more. So social modelling actually refers to the implicit learning that’s been generated by observing other people interacting and performing behaviours and I’m sure there’s probably a lot of people online here who have children and, which is a great example. Children like to watch adults. They like to watch their parents and they learn by what people do, rather than less or potentially, what they say and that’s where they model and learn their behaviours. So, a lot of this learning has actually previously stemmed from personal interactions with peer networks, family and others but interestingly reality TV has now actually started to make major contributions to social learning and lifestyle programs have been found to influence modelling behaviours in their audiences. So, what’s great is that, if these programmes demonstrate behaviours that result in a better life, there is actually research to suggest that viewer modelling of these behaviours continues over time and as a result creates societal level change, which is what we’re after. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a bar graph on the right comparing household energy usage and text appears on the left: Case study – leveraging social norms to reduce household energy usage, Opower compares people’s energy useage to their neighbours through Home Energy Report – conveys descriptive norm, The smiley faces convey the injunctive norm, demonstrating the socially “approved” behaviour (conserving energy), Smiley faces address the “boomerang effect” – customers who were told they were consuming less than others suddenly started consuming more once they saw that the norm was to consume more energy, But the smiley faces counteract this by providing feedback on whether consumers are doing the socially right thing]

OK. I’m just going to talk you through, a really cool case study here to exemplify that and this is where they leverage social norms to reduce household energy use. So, there’s a company called Opower and they compared people’s energy usage to their neighbours through what’s called a home energy report and you can see that on the right hand side here. So, this is what actually conveys the descriptive norm, so you can see in blue, that’s where you would sit and then it compares you to your neighbours and then it compares you to your efficient neighbours and then if you have a look as well, you can see the smiley faces there and those smiley faces convey the injunctive norm. 

So that’s demonstrating the social approved behaviour which is ultimately to conserve energy. Now, what’s really interesting is that those smiley faces address what we call the boomerang effect. So, consumers who were actually told, initially this is what happened, consumers who were told that they were consuming less than others actually started consuming more, once they saw that the norm was to consume more energy. That’s how powerful social norms can be. But those smiley faces counteract that. So, they were introduced to counteract that by providing feedback on whether consumers are doing socially the right thing and this had really fantastic results. So, these households have saved about 11 billion kilowatts of energy since 2007, on average, saved consumers 1.5% go 2.5% on their energy bills in the first two years and cumulatively, they’ve driven $2 billion in customer savings. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Pilot results, Testing the approach]

OK, I’m going to speak to some of the pilot results that we have here. As I mentioned, we developed some pilot episodes that we wanted to use to test this approach for ourselves.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a graph of comparison of desire for sustainable housing features and text appears: How might the pilot have impacted the interests of audiences?, Pre- vs. post-pilot comparison of desire for sustainable housing features] 

And we got really great results. So, we were interested in how these pilot episodes might have impacted the interests of audiences and their desire for sustainable housing features. So, we asked them to imagine that they’re about to choose a new home to live in and did they consider the following, there’s a whole range of sustainability features, a must have, nice to have, a don’t mind, or a prefer not to have. The key finding here is that between the initial survey and the final survey where they, in between that, they watched the pilot episode, there was quite a significant increase across the board in people wanting to must have these sustainability features. So, in particular, if you just have a look at the first one on the left-hand side here, those who wanted a home energy star rating of at least 6-stars, so that jumped from 20% of people said that they must have that to about 50% of people must having that after watching their pilot. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a graph displaying what consumers look for when they are purchasing an energy efficient appliance and text heading appears: How might the pilot have impacted the knowledge of audiences?, Pre- vs. post-pilot comparison of energy efficiency knowledge]

Another example here is, so we were interested in whether the pilot might have impacted people’s energy efficiency knowledge and whether audience learning occurred here to do this social modelling. So, we asked them, if they were to purchase the most energy efficient appliance, what would they look for? And this might seem really obvious, I assume, to the people who are online here today, but the obvious answer is the highest energy star rating with lowest energy consumption. However only about 55% of people got that right initially, but after they watched the pilot episode where we conveyed that social modelling and we showed how to properly interpret these labels that jumped to about 75%, indicating, this is a pretty good indication that that social audience learning did occur there.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing another bar graph displaying the likelihood of seeking design information and text heading appears: How might the pilot have impacted the behavioural intentions of participants?, Viewer group compared to non-viewer group]

And finally here, we were interested in how the pilot might have impacted the behavioural intentions of participants. So, we asked them, what was their likelihood of seeking design information? And the key findings that we got here, so we, this time we compared people who watched the video to people who didn’t actually watch a pilot episode and the big difference here is that those who did watch the pilot episode were significantly more likely to intend to visit a 7-star home, as well as ask for the star rating of the home. So, as you can see, really great results here. That’s fantastic to see.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of an advertisement showing a group of participants in the Renovate or Rebuild TV show and text appears on the left: What’s next? – Call to actions, Roll this out to a full TV series in October – longitudinal evaluation, Refine measures – actual behaviour, Can’t do this alone – we need your help!, Become part of our impact community and help us recruit participants for this study and share amongst your networks, Opportunity for us to work together towards our shared goal of creating a more sustainable planet by being part of this exciting and innovative research initiative, Join us and be a part of transitioning Australians towards more sustainable homes!]

And that brings me to my final slide. So, what’s next? Well, we actually have a call to action for everyone online here. So, the next step involves, we’re rolling this out. We’re scaling it up. We’re rolling it to a full TV series in October and James McGregor from Blue Tribe will talk about this more shortly in his presentation. And my colleagues and I have been designing a longitudinal evaluation for this one. So, this time, what we’re going to do, is we’re measuring people before, at baseline, before watching the series, halfway through the series, at the end of the series and we’re also doing a three month follow-up to see whether these behaviours and these shifts in desires are sustained over time. And we’re also going to compare that to a panel group, so people who haven’t watched any of the, the, the TV series. 

This time round, we’re refining the measures and we’ve actually got an opportunity to measure actual behaviour so we’ve put that in there. You know, are people purchasing solar panels? Are they insulating their home? And the thing is, we can’t do this alone. We actually need your help. This is a really great opportunity, if you’d like to become part of our impact community and help us recruit participants for this study and share this amongst your networks. So, James will speak a bit more about this impact community. But just to wrap this up with how I introduced this presentation. 

This is a really great opportunity for us all to work together here towards our shared goal of creating a more sustainable planet by being part of this really exciting and ultimately really innovative research initiative. So, I really hope that you will join us and that you’ll become a part of transitioning Australians toward more sustainable homes. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing the CSIRO logo and text: Thank you, Energy Danie Nilsson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Danie.nilsson@csiro.au]

And that finishes my presentation.

Anthony Wright: Thanks so much Danie. If I could just ask you to stop sharing your screen. 

[Image changes to show Anthony on the main screen talking to the camera and the Participant bar can be seen at the bottom of the screen]

Next up we have Ben Peacock from the Republic of Everyone. So, Ben is a marketing and brand guru and comes at this from another angle. Ben are you with us and ready to share your slides? 

[Image changes to show Ben Peacock on the main screen talking and the Participant bar can be seen at the bottom of the screen]

Ben Peacock: I am with us and ready to share but I am not a brand guru although it’s very nice of you to say so. Can you see that? How’s that share looking now?

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a person watching TV while holding a remote control in one hand, a bottle of drink in the other, and a pizza box on their lap and text appears: Making it mainstream]

Anthony Wright: That’s looking quite small at the moment actually. Ah, that’s it, we’ve got it maximised now on the slide.

Ben Peacock: …a problem. Presentation.

Anthony Wright: Thanks so much.

Ben Peacock: Great, so thank you. My name is Ben. I founded a company called Republic of Everyone. Just, what I mean, that means I spent about 12 years of my [25:34] but then I decided that the, the good, smart target in marketing were far too valuable to be spent on what they’ve spent on in advertising and started A Republic, essentially only to [25.45] good things if you like, which has led us into the world of setting up actually far deeper than just the comm, but setting up sustainability strategies for companies, but then setting up the communications around selling good things, things that are good for you, good for the world. 

So, that’s the, the simple version of it and the viewpoint I bring. And really the question being asked here is the question I guess we ask on all forms of sustainability. How do I make it mainstream? How do I stop this being niche? So, I have had the pleasure of working with many, many companies and many, many people across many ways of looking at communication and I can tell you there is one secret that they all share that no-one ever lets you in on and that’s that the process for the average comms strategy looks something like this.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a light bulb attached by a very tangled wire to a power point and text appears: The comms process]

Nobody really knows what they’re doing or where they’re going. It’s a little bit of a, oh my god, we’ve got to get to here and we’re here, and people throw stuff at the wall and eventually sometimes you get lucky and what you throw at the wall sort of works, but the, the truth is, you know people attack it from very different angles. A lot of people go, “Oh, we need to be on YouTube” or “We need to do this thing” or “We need to do that thing” and the challenge I find with this and that’s the temptation, especially when you’ve had no training in this, is that’s what you tend to do. So just putting a bit of structure on that may help and so I’ll show you a simplified version of the structure that we place on things and how to do things.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of multiple people and text appears at the centre: Who]

And the first thing to begin is to say that all good communications start with, starts with who. If we’re going to talk about making something mainstream, understanding that person and what drives them is really where you have to begin. Because if you don’t understand a person, how on earth can you potentially work with them to try to encourage a different choice, a different behaviour, whatever it is?

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a bar graph showing different consumer markets in proportion to the Australian adult population and text heading appears: LOHAS Consumer Segmentation Model – 2018, MOBIUM Group]

So, looking broadly, this is from a fantastic company called Mobium Group, who runs a piece of research about every four years called LOHAS, Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability. And what they’re doing is, they’re looking at people’s relationship to sustainability and how it changes over time. And in, in the broadest of terms, when you look at a cross-section of the Australian population it looks like this. Leaders, ie they’re already convinced, they’re probably already doing it, 16%. Leaning – I’m interested, I’m doing some of it but I don’t really know how, just a bit more help please, 40%, so that’s significant it’s more than half the market. Learners – OK, I know I probably should be, but I probably haven’t begun yet, 36%. Laggards – about 8%. 

Interestingly, when we first began, I started this company about 15 years ago and that Leaders was at 4%. But interestingly, too, the Laggards was also at about 4%. What’s happened over time is that definitely, the curve has moved towards the Leaders, but there has been a bit of a shift towards the Laggards as well. It’s quite interesting, the middle is shifting out which is quite similar to other things you see in the world. So that’s the broad population.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a new bar graph comparing the percentage of people with what they are extremely concerned about and text appears: Looking at what people are extremely concerned about, the big picture looks like this, The six issues Australians are most concerned about are all environmental, The next six issues are all about people]

So, looking at that more closely I guess, that’s who’s interested broadly, this is a piece of research we did earlier this year called Power and the Passion and it’s significant because it’s probably the only piece in market in Australia, number one that’s in Australia versus global, that asks what do people care about when it comes to social and environmental issues? But also, it’s significant because it’s, it went to about 2,000 people which is a lot. Whenever you see like surveys in Australia, they generally have written somewhere, “n equals 1,024” meaning we asked 1,024 people because that’s statistically significant for the size of the Australian population. 

So, we went out to 500 people in four different generations, a total of 2000 people, and we broke it down. What was interesting was that the results didn’t change particularly much among the different, the different, the different generations. But what really struck us was a few things. Number one was how similar the levels of concern are and I’m only showing you the extremely concerned here. If you added very concerned and concerned the numbers go up to like 80s. But if you look at it, the gap between our oceans and loss of forests and habitats, is not that big. People are quite concerned about many things. 

[Image continues to show the same slide on the screen]

Another thing to note is that the top six concerns are all environmental and the next six are all social. So environmental trends, concerns, really have come front of mind for people. Climate change varies significantly across generations. It’s definitely of more concern among younger generations, but as a rule you could pick any of those topics and people would be worried about it. So, that’s what’s on people’s minds broadly. When you start to break that down into when they’re thinking about a house, so, you’re going from the population and their concerns to, to homes and housing,

[Image changes to show a new slide showing various covers of brochures on the slide]

We’re recently doing some work in the Green Building Council at the moment, and one of the things we’ve done is looked at the personas across lots of different developers and these are just a scattering. So we go, “What are the different personas that buy housing? Which are ones who are most interested in this subject matter?”.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a couple, a photo of a family, and a photo of an older couple, with facts below each photo, and text appears: Who’s most interested, First time buyers, Upgraders, Downsizers] 

Now what we came up with is, there are three audiences that have some level of interest. It’s the first homebuyers, it’s the upgraders, and it’s the downsizers. They’re roughly the three, there’s a few under all those personas but when you really look at that,

[Image shows the central photograph of the family remaining on the screen while the other two disappear]

if you want to know who’s most interested, you best, the best market for this stuff is the upgraders. There’s a number of reasons. The number one, price is not probably the number one driving priority for them. They’ve sort of moved from price to value if you like. They have more of a concern, less of a concern about themselves personally and more of a family concern. They’re possibly looking at it as a forever home or at least a long-time home, certainly a home as long as they have a family in that home, this will probably be their home, so they’re thinking of it long term. As I say, they’ve got a little bit more to spend. So, when we’re looking at it, we’re finding it’s that, it’s that, second and third homebuyer really who is the bigger opportunity here. 

[Image changes to show a photo of a couple looking at paperwork and frowning and text appears: What stops them?, Complexity, Buying a home is hard enough as it is, 51% of home buyers surveyed found the process “stressful”, while 42% described it as “overwhelming”, St. George Bank’s Home buying survey]

When you look at what stops them, and this is perfect here, where there’s so many of them, where there are barriers, complexity is actually the biggest one. Buying a home’s hard enough. Anyone who’s ever seen someone go through the home buying process, there is so much to worry about, without me thinking about sustainability, and that’s borne out in that St. George Bank’s home buying, Home Buyer survey. People are stressful and they find it overwhelming, so throwing more information at them is simply never going to work. 

[Image changes to show a photo of a modern kitchen and text appears: What stops them?, Money, “I want sustainability but if it’s a choice between that and the stone bench top, I’ll take the bench top”.]

The other barrier is, of course, money, and it’s not necessarily money in the sense of, I can’t afford it. It’s money in the sense of the opportunity cost. And this is a classic quote, “I want sustainability but if it’s a choice between that and the stone bench top, I’ll take the stone bench top thanks.” So, people want all those creature comforts they’ve seen around in every magazine and every home show and they’re not prepared to swap, I guess, long term sustainability, or any of those things for it. 

[Image changes to show a photo of a family and text appears: What motivates them?, Easy ways to live better at a lower cost]

What motivates them? Well, they do want to live better and they do want a lower cost and it’s a bit of a dance between these two things, because if I can save money, but live a better life, well that’s a double-edged sword, a positive double-edged sword for them. So that’s really what it comes down to, and I guess different audiences will move between those two messages but that’s the core of it. So that’s a look at who. Who are we talking to?

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a black and white photo of Elmer Wheeler in a suit next to a sign showing a cow and a steak on a plate and text appears on the slide and on the sign: What, Don’t sell the steak, Sell the sizzle!]

The next question is, what do you say to them? And this guy is, what they call the godfather of modern marketing. His name’s Elmer Wheeler. If you go look at his videos on YouTube, and they’re fantastic. He’s this real chummy sort of fellow and he’s the guy that came up with this concept and everyone says, “Don’t sell the sausage, sell the sizzle”, and that’s not what he said, he said “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle!”. Then some wise person once added to that, because if you’re selling me just a steak, you’re just selling me a dead lump of meat. So, it’s this idea that, it’s also been put as, “I don’t go into the, the hardware store looking for a drill bit. What I really want is a picture hanging on my wall”. So, figuring out what is the benefit created from the attribute or the item is core to communications, because what is essentially your message? Who is your audience and what is your message?

[Image changes to show two Homer Simpson cartoons, one of a sleeping Homer, and one of an excited Homer, and text appears: 3.6kW of solar, Live well without bill shock, Extra insulation, Cool in summer, warm in winter, Great sealing, Remember the air pollution in fire season? Not in this home, Low tox materials, It’s OK for the kids to chew on everything]

And it’s quite simple. There are messages that bore you and there are messages that excite you. And the messages that bore you are things like 3.6KW of solar. Like you and I probably know what that means and go “OK, that’s not bad, that’s a good amount of solar”. But what they really want to hear about is live well without bill shock. OK, that day that I decided that it’s cold in winter but it’s sunny, well, maybe I can run the air con. Extra insulation is pretty boring, but when you talk about cool in summer and warm in winter, well that’s something that I want.  

Great sealing you know, talking about how say a green star home has really good seals. The average Australian home, I read once, has about a metre square of gaps. If you took all the gaps from all the windows and all the places and put them into one big gap it would be about a metre square hole in your home, you know.  And so, but that’s not very interesting to someone. What becomes a very interesting message if you say things like, “Remember the air pollution in that fire season with the big bush fires? Well, you wouldn’t really smell that in this home, because it’s so well-sealed”. So, bring people and their personal everyday concerns and health, living well benefits, if you like, is what gets them. 

And then, low tox materials. I don’t think most people could name a toxin in a material, so they don’t know what tox is, let alone low tox, but they do know that they want the kids to be able to crawl around the floor and lick the floor and chew on the sofa and that sort of thing. So, when you look at those people you’re messaging, choosing your messaging to actually talk to them about things they care about, is something that generally sustainability has been very poor at, simply because it is a technical space and it’s been driven by technical people, so, who understand the benefits. It’s just translating it when you’re talking to people. So that’s two. We’ve started with who. We’ve moved on to how. Now, let’s, sorry, so we’ve moved on to what we’re going to say to them. Who are we going to talk to? What are we going to say? The next question’s, how are we going to say it? 

[Image changes to show a male holding an “Ultra” box and pointing to it and text appears: How]

And there’s so much resonant in this next piece that came from your presentation Danie, 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a brick background divided into four quadrants intersected by the Internal External horizontal axis and the Individual Collective vertical axis and text appears in the four quadrants: Give me a reason to do it, Show me how to do it, Show me others doing it, Make it easy for everyone to do]

which is, this is our theory I guess, of behaviour change and like all good theories, we stole it, from somebody called Integral by a guy called Ken Wilber. And I’ll just explain it to you simply. It says that, when you’re trying to get it, so first of all it says that you, the, the, [36:00] phrase, “You can’t change my behaviour and it’s rude to try”. This comment about change is awful, because if I came to you and said, “I’m going to change your behaviour”, your natural response, if you didn’t give me the middle finger, would be to say, “Well, I’m now definitely not changing it, just because you’re trying to change it” and that’s a big challenge. 

So, this concept of, all I can do is perhaps show you options and you choose it for yourself, is very important in our mind’s eye. When you think about it, you go, there’s different, we live in different ways within our world. There’s the individual you’ll see on the up/down axis and then there’s the collective. There’s me as a person. There’s me as my role in a collective and then there’s internal as in, what goes in my mind, and then there’s the external, which is the physical world, what actually happens in the world. If you look at the top left quadrant, it’s about me as an individual, having a perceptive reason to create some sort of a change. So, so give me a reason to do it, and that’s classic advertising, if you do this, this will happen. So, it’s the perception of goodness, if I do this. 

If you look at the top right, it’s still about me, but it’s about well, do I actually know how to do this thing? Therefore, because if I don’t know how to do it, well I can’t do it and then when you get to the internal collective, it’s well do I feel like an outsider if I do this personally, within the world of the collectors, collective? Therefore, I need to feel that other people are doing this as well. It’s not just me, it’s OK. I’m safe. I’m in a group. And then the bottom right is, is there the collective infrastructure, essentially? Externally, do the things exist that are needed for me to do this thing? 

[Image shows a cartoon appearing in the top left showing a bike and a car and text appears next to them: This one runs on fat and saves you money, This one runs on money and makes you fat]

That’s all a little bit theoretical, so I’ll put it in terms of bike-riding for you, because I think it’s a beautiful case study. If you were to ask four people to, to get more people to ride bikes, the first person might go to the top left, you’ll get the advertising person. They’ll do “Hey, here’s, I’ve got this cool ad, I just made it up”. Isn’t it funny, this one runs on fat and saves you money, this one runs on money and makes you fat”, you go that’s pretty funny right? Why don’t we stick that on billboards and put it on footpaths everywhere and we've given people a reason to do it, which is save money and be fit. And so, individually you’ve given me a perception of why my world will be better if I do this, yeah, fantastic. An advertising person goes, “Woohoo”. Then you get the person who’s used to doing like, a little, give you a piece of sausage, at, you know, the supermarket, or wherever and you get a little sausage trial, and they go, “No, it’s all about product trial, guys. It’s all about product trial. 

[Image shows a photo appearing next to the top right quadrant showing a photo of people with bikes in a park next to a sign “Sydney Rides Business Challenge”]

Get, get people trying it and they’ll be part of it” and they say, “What we’re going to do, is we’re going to find parks that people walk across like Hyde Park in Sydney, and we’re, and at one side of the park, we’re going to give them this bike, and say, “Look, instead of walking to work today, why don’t you just ride across the park, and my friend who’s over the other side is going to collect the bike from you and, and you can just ride that, like 300m and get the feeling of riding to work, how much more enjoyable it is, and you’ll find, you know, I know you haven’t ridden a bike since you were ten, but it’s just like riding a bike, guys, don’t worry. And so, and when you get off, you’re going to go, gee that was a good feeling, I may consider doing that. And so that is, this kind of bike trial thing, and that will get more people on”. And that person, the product trial person will go, that’s what’s going to happen. Then, what’s going to happen is you’re going to a PR person and they’re going to go, “No, no, no. It’s an influencer campaign, guys, we need. 

[Image shows a photo appearing on the bottom left quadrant of two influencers riding bikes]

We need to show all the influencers riding bikes now, and so we’re going to go get Bono and Jimmy Kimmel and we’re going to get them to ride bikes around Sydney together and when everyone sees that those guys do it, like everyone’s going to think, wow, this is the new cool thing to do, and I’m going to do it and it’s OK if they do it, I’m cool. So, I’m going to be cool. I’m going to do it.” And then the last person who’s the engineer is going to say, “You guys are all dreaming. You’re all full of it. 

[Image shows a photo of a bike lane appearing next to the bottom right quadrant]

Unless you put in bike lanes, it’s not safe so we can’t do it.” And that, and the answer, and the question becomes, who’s right? And of course, the answer is everyone’s right. And, and, in our opinion, if you don’t have that full ecosystem, you’re unlikely to long-term get people to consider and change. And it’s interesting, because I’ve been using this example for a few years, and, and what you’ve seen is that over the past few years, bike-riding has gone from a niche adventure to suddenly everybody is doing it. So, that’s a really good example of how the world changes to sustainability. But it was slow at first and then it’s really sped up. 

[Image shows the pictures and photos surrounding the quadrant disappearing from the screen]

So, let’s apply that to sustainable buildings. How would you say, use the same theory, and I don’t have all the answers, but at least we can start to twig the sorts of things. We understand our audience, we know we’re going to talk in terms of benefits. Now how are we going to use this shape to do it? 

[Image shows two signs appearing next to the top left quadrant: Why a Green Star Home is a better place to live, New Green Star Home Standard set to make new houses more energy efficient and slash energy bills]

Well, the first thing is, we’re going to go out there. You’ll see that Davina Rooney’s been doing some great PR lately from Green Building Council and you end up with stories in media and you start to run ads and things that say “Green Star Homes are great places to live” and it’s setting the standard for houses, new houses that are more energy efficient and slashing energy bills. So, we’re going to give people benefit focussed communications, one way broadcast communications, so they just understand that, hey, it exists, a green star home, but also that it has benefits to having one. What we’re then going to do is, that’s going to twig their interest and they’re going to go, “Well, I’m not buying it just because I went through one” right. 

[Image shows a photo of a sustainable home appearing next to the top right quadrant and text appears: Local Sustainable Homes Open to You]

So, we’re going to open up a whole bunch of homes, when they exist, because there’s a limited amount, but, and encourage people to come through and then we’re going to make it a little bit more interesting by putting on free coffees and like maybe a bit of an e-bike ride and trial around it and so and we’re going to do a little festival around it where people can not just walk through the home but feel like that’s the centrepiece of this interesting, sustainable life and they’re going to get the feel. If you ever talk to a car salesperson, they will tell you that the fundamental, that all car advertising if you notice aims at one thing and that’s getting you to take a test drive. Because they know once they have you in that seat, the chances of you buying it have gone up significantly. So, get them in the home. 

[Image shows a photo of Josh Byrne next to a house smiling at the camera next to the bottom left quadrant]

Then what we’re going to do is we’re going to go find awesome people like the amazing Josh Byrne, who’s a legendary guy, who knows his stuff, he’s credible, he’s an influencer, he’s a media person and we’re going to get him to take you on a tour of his home and then we’re going to do it with every other, all the, all the Instagram influencers and we’re going to show that all the cool kids are doing it, so if you do this, you’re a cool kid. And that’s of course fashion and recommendation, you know. 

[Image shows a photo of a sign next to the bottom right quadrant: House with no bills by Mirvac]

And then what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to work with the developers and the builders, so that they know how to create the stock of this stuff, because if they don’t know how and they don’t create the stock, it’s, no one can do it, because the infrastructure’s not there to do it. So, we’re going to go get people like Mirvac and the like and we’re going to get them to do things like the house with no bills and create their own brands about it and make it same price or just similar price and make it look cool and make it look like a magazine. And if we can do that together maybe we’ve got a chance of getting people to do all this.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a tangled arrow line and a straight arrow line on the left of text: Who, What, How]

So, there’s the simple version. If you want to go from the complication of communications to a simpler version I would suggest, just think, who, what, how. There are other things you can add to that like, when is always a good question, timing plan. But let’s keep it simple, three’s the magic number, Who, What, How. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a selection hand symbol next to a search bar and text appears: Thanks 😊, republicofeveryone]

Thank you very much. You can find me or more about our stock at republicofeveryone.com and I appreciate your time and attention.

[Image changes to show Ben on the main screen listening and the Participant bar can be seen in the bottom of the screen, and then the image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen]

Anthony Wright: Thank you so much Ben, that was fantastic. Really interesting stuff. And apologies for calling you a brand guru. And also…

[Image changes to show Ben talking on the main screen and participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Ben Peacock: I am a guru of nothing, like literally.

[Image changes to show Anthony talking to the camera on the main screen and participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Anyone who uses a Simpsons gif gets invited back, so on that basis alone, thank you very much. Over next to James McGregor, CEO of Blue Tribe. James if I call you a social entrepreneur am I going to be getting it wrong? 

[Image shows Anthony listening on the main screen while James McGregor can be seen talking in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

James McGregor: Oh, yeah. What’s wrong with that? That’ll do. I don’t know what to call myself either.

[Image flashes to James listening on the main screen, and then the image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen]

Anthony Wright: Alright, no problems. Well, you’re our third speaker, so that at least I can’t get wrong. I’ll hand over to you to share your screen now. 

[Image shows Anthony listening on the main screen and James can be seen talking in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

James McGregor: Just bear with me. Alright. Can we see that?

[Image changes to show a new slide showing The BlueTribe Company logo at the bottom and text appears: Making sustainable housing mainstream with Lifestyle TV, Behavioural Science + Entertainment = Impact at Scale] 

Anthony Wright: Yes. And James, if you could put yourself on speaker mode, oh sorry, thank you, you are on presenter mode and, I’d just like to let the audience know we’re going to run a poll now, if my polling maestro out there is able to run that, that would be fantastic. The results of this poll are going to be compiled by the fabulous Lachlan and sent through to James and will feature as part of his later presentation, so please fill them in when they appear on your screen, folks. This is the first time we’ve tried this so bear with us a moment, while we get it right. Eric, are you out there?  

James McGregor: Just let me know when you want me to go, Anthony.

Anthony Wright: I will. Our polls are out there, James. James and I can’t see these polls so please fill them in folks and Lachlan will let me know when you’re more or less done. 

OK, James, our poll numbers are growing rapidly apparently, but it’s good for you to start now if you’d like to crack on with it.

James McGregor: OK, right.  So, thanks for the intro, Anthony. So, Anthony sort of described me as a social entrepreneur. I actually don’t know how to describe myself really, but I did spend 13 years at CSIRO leading a whole lot of really cool research projects, before I started the Blue Tribe Company. The short version is, you know, the Blue Tribe Company exists to develop solutions to sustainability or environmental and social problems at scale, alright. So the word scale’s really important and a lot of what we do is we take amazing research like the stuff that Danie talked about earlier and then we try to convert that into something that people really want to love and use so, and so one of those projects is actually this one that I’m going to talk about which is taking some of that amazing behavioural science research that the team had worked on as well as others, combining that with what the research said, which in this case is lifestyle TV and those things combined, hopefully delivers a very large impact around shifting the dial on sustainable housing in Australia.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a set of balance scales with the word “Supply” on the left side and “Demand” on the right side of the scales] 

So fundamentally the problem that we came across when we started working on this issue of, you now, how do we get sustainable housing happening at scale? And then, Ben talked a bit about understanding the whos. We went out and spoke to a lot of people to find out well what was really going on out there in the market and what we found out there was this Mexican standoff going on. So, we’d speak to builders saying, you know, “How come you’re not building more sustainable homes?” And they’d say, “Well, actually, you know, we can build them fine but consumers aren’t asking for them”. So, we’d go and ask for the consumers, people who are buying homes and they would say, “Yeah there’s not enough product on the market. I can’t find what I want and the builders are controlling everything. I want a sustainable home, but I can’t find a builder who can build one for me”. So we end up with this Mexican standoff where you’ve got builders on one hand saying , “There’s not enough demand” and consumers on the other hand saying, “I can’t find the product I want” and the question is how do we bring those two things together?

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a male with his chin resting on his hand sitting at a table with a notebook in front of him and looking up in contemplation]

And so, sticking with that theme of Ben talking about, you know, making sure you understand your who, I want to introduce you to a character right. So, this is Jonathan. So, Jonathan is just an avatar for every person you’ve tried to convince to do something more sustainable, right, which is probably the reason why you’re here today, right. So, whether it’s, you want a reduced amount of waste, you want the kids to turn off the lights when they leave the bedroom, if you want to convince the CFO to approve a sustainability project at work. Whatever it is, Jonathan represents that particular individual, right, and in this case, in the housing, it’s, you know, people buying and renovating their homes. And the, the traditional approach, we’ve all taken in the past is that we, we’ll just educate them. We’ll just give them the information, right. Let’s tell them why it’s good for the environment. Let’s give them a great business case. Let’s explain how much money they’re going to save, if they upgrade the solar system on their roof, for example, right, and the problem with that particular approach is, actually, this is not the Jonathan that we’re all talking to, right.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a male wearing a caveman outfit, holding an axe type tool and looking at a computer]

The actual Jonathan we’re talking to is this guy. And if you go back thousands of years when we were hunters and gatherers, human beings out on the plain, if something came along with very big teeth to eat you, you had to respond immediately to all these chemicals being produced in your brains telling you to run away, right. So, all these human beings that responded to these chemicals, oxytocin and adrenaline, that were being produced in their brains, ran away, didn’t get eaten by this thing with big teeth. Those that didn’t respond to those chemicals, would go, “Should I run away from this thing, what should I do?”, they got eaten by the thing with the big teeth. The human being that survived, survived because they made decisions based on emotions and those human beings then went on to reproduce, you repeat that cycle thousands and thousands of times and you have us here today, right. So human beings make decisions based on emotion, right. And if you don’t believe me, let me give you a scenario. 

So, say, you’re going down to the food court and you want to get a roast vegetable sandwich, right. You go through the food court and you come across two shops. One shop’s called We Sell Roast Vegetable Sandwiches and the other one’s Roast Vegetable Sandwiches Are Us, right? Exactly the same menu, they both have the same delicious aioli that you really, really love, same price, as far as you know, they make exactly the same quality, but on the left hand side there’s a queue about ten people waiting to place orders, a buzz of activity, a whole lot of people waiting to collect their orders. On the right hand side, that particular shop, so our, you know, Roast Vegetables Sandwiches Are Us is completely deserted. There’s not a single person standing in the line, there’s no one waiting around, and you know, imagine yourself in that scenario and deciding which line would you choose, right. 

So, what would be happening in that scenario, in your brain your [inaudible :49:49], there’s no one, must be something wrong [49:51] don’t [49:55] you go with the majority of people and stand in the queue rather than go to the store with no one. Actually, if you go to the food court today and you stand around, you’ll always see that one shop where there’s no one, no one ordering food and it’s not because the food’s bad, it’s just because there’s no one standing in line and everyone thinks there must be something wrong. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a drawing of a building on the left with text above “Hashtag Sustainability?, Home Renovators Media World”, and text on the right: The Problem, Research undertaken by the Low Carbon Living Cooperative Research Centre (LCLCRC) has shown that current ‘top down’ education approaches aimed at changing consumer behaviours to adopt sustainable housing options (including concepts like net zero energy homes) have been largely ineffective]

So, human beings make decision based on emotion, right and so rational arguments about why it’s good for them, you know, what’s, what’s the business case, doesn’t actually resonate with human beings’ brains, alright, and so this was the fundamental problem where this research started. So, it was like, you know, how do we actually, how do consumers make decisions around consumption choices? And what the research found was that there’s actually no evidence to show that educating people alone has any impact on the choices they make, alright. 

[Image changes to show a photo of a range of booklets on the screen]

So, then the natural question then becomes, well, what does? And so, the researchers flip that on its head and say, well if educating people doesn’t make a difference around sustainable choices, around sustainable housing, what does? Right, and what came back was, well what does influence them, right? And there‘s a whole stack of research that leads into that. 

[Image changes to show photos of adverts for TV shows on the left and text appears on the right: Mainstream Media Approach, One of the key findings of the social research undertaken by the LCLCRC is that sustainability should be communicated in a more mainstream way and in particular there was an opportunity to learn from mainstream broadcast media with an emphasis on entertainment and story-telling that has been shown to resonate with homeowner/renovators’ aspirations and lifestyles – and reflects and shapes the ordinary cultural context for home ownership/renovations]

The answer to that particular research question was mainstream media, right. And Danie’s done a great job of laying out all of that research at the beginning about why mainstream media is so influential, because of using influencers and things, shows like The Block and Grand Designs and ABC’s War on Waste, right. So, these platforms are extremely influential in shaping the things people want, right. And that can be directed at good things and bad things but in part, one of the reasons for that is it draws on storytelling and TV shows respond to people’s emotions right. So, if you’ve ever watched a TV show, and you start screaming at the TV because someone’s done something stupid in a reality TV show and that’s activating your emotions right, so you’re getting emotionally invested in the story. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a male leaping onto a pile of plastic bottles on the left, and a male wearing a hardhat on the right and text appears: War on Waste, 400% increase in sales of Keep Cups, 1.1M Single use plastic straws saved by the Opera Bar alone as part of the #SydneyDoesntSuck campaign, 3.3M Australians watched the War on Waste – Series 2, 68% of the people who watched the War on Waste Series 2 made positive changes to reduce their waste behaviour – Source ABC, The Block - $251M boost to quarterly renovations investment two quarters (or six months) following the airing, 1.5M Average audience size per episode for 2015 series of The Block, 3.3% increase in economic activity associated with home renovations attributable to The Block]

And to show you how influential these platforms are, so we looked at ABC’s War on Waste so the Series 2 that was out, it was probably 18 months ago now, so ABC’s War on Waste had 3.3 million people watched that particular show and of that show 68% of the people who watched that show reported some change in their waste behaviour right, so that’s a, if you’re a marketing person, like 68% conversion rate is phenomenal, right, you see, companies like Keep Cup increased sales by 400% off the back of that particular series and so it, and it used that communications framework very similar to what we’re using in our TV show. 

Shows like The Block, regardless of what you think of it, are hugely influential in driving consumer expenditure in renovation, right. So, a single season of The Block drives half a billion dollars of additional expenditure in the home renovation market because of one single TV show, right. It’s the highest rating show in the country. It’s the most popular show by far and it actually shapes the things that consumers want, right. You can track the trend of say, things like butler’s pantries in project home or volume builder type housing products back to a particular series of The Block where they got this concept, this trend of butler’s pantries was introduced, people then went out to speak to their builders and said, “I saw this on the show, I really want one of those”. The builders heard that enough times and they then started offering butler’s pantries as a standard offering in a lot of homes these days. 

[Image changes to show a diagram on the right showing a circular Consumer Engagement and Knowledge Sharing Ecosystem and text appears on the left: Engagement and Knowledge Ecosystem, The research also identified that the TV show was only one element of the success of popular programs, The most influential shows also had a well designed social media ecosystem surrounding them that was designed to influence consumer behaviour and to convert aspiration into action, The War on Waste was successful in replicating this ecosystem to drive significant consumer behaviour change]

So, so these platforms are hugely influential in shaping consumer sentiments. But it wasn’t just, what the research found, it wasn’t just the TV shows that ultimately made these shows so influential, right. What they found was the ones that were really influential had a couple of different elements to it, right. So, so in the centre we have what we call our flagship content, alright. So, this is a TV show right. So, this, the job of the flagship content is to drive those aspirations and desires from the consumer, right, so these, this is where the emotion comes in, so people make, you know, Caveman Johnny, makes an emotional decision to you know, put in a butler’s pantry or upgrade the kitchen or whatever it is, something they see on the show that they get emotionally invested in. The shows that then had a clear call to action, so they then supported that particular consumer with additional content to, to, once they’d made an emotional decision, you know, I want a butler’s pantry then provide it on, “How do I design a butler’s pantry? What features do I want in a butler’s pantry”, a whole lot of what we call secondary content and most of that occurred through things like websites and social medial and that sort of content, but most importantly what the researchers found was that surrounding all of this, was this social ecosystem. 

So, Danie referred to them as the impact community, so I’ve tweaked that a little bit as, to the agents of change, right. So, these are all the people who, around these particular TV shows will talk about it and share it with their friends and tell their mates about it and comment and interact right, and what that does is, you know, Danie talked about that idea of social modelling so they, they modelled the behaviour of whatever was on the show, others saw that and then eventually it became the social norm.  Alright, so these agents of change and in the case of the ABC’s War on Waste, they were actually able to engineer those agents of change and actually get organisations together to actually get that social modelling activity to happen, right and later on in this presentation we’re actually going to do this live in a what I’m calling the big little experiment, but. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of Josh Byrne with two couples, a couple in a kitchen, and a couple and another male looking at the outside of a house and text appears: The Social Science Research – Mainstream Media Approach, “As clear as indication that we could hope for that the TV show is promoting changing priorities and behavioural intentions”, CSIRO Lead Research on recent survey results from 1016 consumers on the Renovate or Rebuild TV show pilot episode, 30 September 2019]

So, the shows that we assessed all had these three key elements, alright, and so Danie also mentioned before about this idea of, well actually let’s identify who and even Ben touched on this, so we did that. We worked out who actually makes the decisions in the housing space. We improvise with them, come up with ideas and then you Ideate and test it, alright, and so we’re actually a bit over, back in May 2019, oops there’s Siri talking to me, the, back in May 2019, back in May 2019, we created a pilot show which CSIRO did a whole lot of research on and we got these really, really great results,

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a graph of the “Likelihood of Seeking Design Information” and text heading appears: Social Science Research Findings – Pilot]

and so I wanted to sort of focus in on these couple of ones and so that particular pilot episode back in 2019 focused very heavily on the energy star rating of the house, alright, so it was a key piece of knowledge that we wanted to transfer to the audience and increase their level of understanding of the benefits, alright, so the sizzle, of what I, you know, having, getting a NatHERS rating, if you’re a sustainable person, gets you really excited. If you’re the average punter, NatHERS sounds like a strange disease you’ve got to get a special cream from your doctor for, right. So, how do you actually get them to understand what the energy rating means for their lifestyle, what’s the sizzle? Alright. And what we saw was a significant shift of that audience from those prior to watching the episode and then after the episode and their level of knowledge and desire, right, that emotional connection to these particular characteristics of a home.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing photographs of different TV shows on the left and advertising photos for two new TV Series “Renovate or Rebuild” and “The New Jetsons” on the right and text appears: Mass Media Project using Lifestyle TV, The concept has two key objectives – To drive mass market consumer demand for sustainable homes; and, To create a path to market for sustainable designs by showcasing of projects by builder/s with intent of setting key design trends that the broader market aims to mimic]

So, quickly just to our project, right. So, we took all this research, we tested it, we piloted it and now we’re at the, in Danie’s structure, now we’re at the launch and measure stage, so now we have a fair degree of confidence that this was the right approach in terms of how do we shift the dial in sustainable housing? And so, the challenge then was to how do we actually overcome that chicken and egg problem that I talked about right at the beginning, alright, the supply versus demand. 

So, you know, we developed up a concept where, well, actually, let’s stimulate consumer demand, let’s use a TV show that’s really fun and entertaining and provides all that information about sustainable housing and also then work with different brands and partners within the show as well as outside that, to help them sell lots of product, right and that creates both social norming within the construction industry, as well as social norming within the consumer marketplace. So, we actually created two different show concepts. So, Renovate Or Rebuild, I’ll touch on in the moment, is coming on Channel 9 in about four weeks’ time, and then we’ve got another show called The New Jetsons which is in the works as well.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing buildings along the side of a road with various pinpoints along the road and text appears: The Communications Journey, Step 1 Create desire (Emotion), Step 2 Activate Social Ecosystem (Social Norming), We need your help with this step, Step 3 Connect to solutions (Action)]

So, the communications journey is really about these three steps. So, the first step is a TV show, it’s about creating desire. The second step is activating this social ecosystem and creating that social norming effect, alright, and that’s where you guys come in. So Danie mentioned we need your help and I’ll touch on that a little bit later, but this is where even as an individual, you can make a big impact on this research that we’re doing, and then finally we need to connect them to the sustainable housing product, alright, 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a pinpoint on the left and text appears on the right: Step 1 Create Desire, Create desire for sustainable home features (Emotional Choice)]

which is where the builders and the different product providers all come into the story.

[Image changes to show an advertisement for the Renovate or Rebuild TV show showing various couples standing in a line next to a brick wall and text appears: Season 1 Coming Soon]

So, step one is creating that desire alright and that’s where the TV show comes in. So, we created this TV show, we selected our target audience as Ben sort of touched on that’s the who, and yes renovating or rebuilding is typically the upgrader market so I’m glad his research and our research aligned, alright, and we designed a show specifically for that particular market. So this specific show is called Renovate or Rebuild, features a whole lot of, if you’re a fan of The Block, a whole lot of your fan favourite participants from The Block from over the various seasons going back to 2013 and the show’s about basically, designed around a family who live in a home and they’ve got this dilemma right, do I knock it down and start again or do I actually renovate it and make the home into my dream home, my home of the future? A home that’s healthy, efficient and comfortable. We have two teams, Team Renovate and Team Rebuild. They actually go head to head and basically it’s a design show so we’re going through all of those really important design decisions that you need to make so we show you, you know, why you need to do it, how you need to do it and how to make it easy and so on. All within the TV show.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a man in the centre having his arms pulled outwards by a couple on the left and a couple on the right and they are all standing in front of a house]

So, I’m just going to show you now a little pilot. This is our teaser video which just got released today, so you’ll be one of the first to see it and you’ll get a bit of a flavour for the show and what you’ll notice is that it looks very similar to a lot of lifestyle TV shows that we see around and that’s the exact intent.

[Images flash through of a couple entering a house]

Narrators: Oh yeah. 

[Image changes to show a camera panning through a house]

Wow! 

[Image changes to show a couple looking into a room and then the image changes to show the outside of a house]

This is a renovator’s dream. 

[Image changes to show a couple entering a gate]

Rebuild. Get rid of it. 

[Images flash through of a female looking at a house, a table on a verandah, and the outside of an older style house]

This house has potential.

[Images flash through of a couple outside a home, and then the outside of a home]

This ain’t a knock-down. 

[Images flash through of a couple outside a house, photos of the outside of a house, a trampoline in the yard, a cramped study area inside, and a couple talking and smiling]

The first thing I noticed about the house was just how much I wanted to knock it down! 

[Images flash through to show a line of people in front of a house holding levels and a tape measure, people bouncing a ball on a pool deck, two couples clapping hands, and a couple walking into a room]

Have a go at that! 

[Image changes to show a view over house roofs, and then the image changes to show a view of the beach and text appears: Renovate or Rebuild]

Look at that view! Will they renovate or rebuild?

[Image changes to show a new slide showing many coloured balls and text appears: Discover More @renovateorrebuild]

James McGregor: Alright, so you might have noticed that looks like any other lifestyle TV show but throughout the show we actually talk, you know, we focus on things like the orientation of the house, how to bring in natural light. We talk about things like insulation, how to zone the floorplate, how to actually, you know, reduce the amount of energy but we talk about it in terms of the sizzle not the steak. So, we’re not talking about r values of insulation. We’re talking about being comfortable and you know cool in summer, and warm in winter, right. So, we’re talking and we’re speaking to homeowners who are in homes that are like freezing cold in winter and they’re draughty and they, you know, the kids are, the kids are rugged up just to stay warm in winter or they’re, they can’t sleep at night because it’s so hot. 

[Image changes to show a couple of slides flashing through]

So, we use the, all the benefits of living in a sustainable home to address those [01:00:13].

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a pinpoint on the left with a Smartphone inside surrounded by people inside circles and text appears on the right: Step 2 Activate a Social Ecosystem – Reinforce desirability through social norming (getting consumers to talk about features) and continue to journey towards to action]

… step is we need to activate that so now we’ve got people watching the show and they get emotionally interested in, in a topic, we need to now provide them with information to then support what they saw on the show right. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a line of people jumping into the air on the left, and a person working on a laptop connected to a network of people on the right and text appears on the left: Agents of Change, Role is to be agents of change, Drive engagement – Promote the program, Actively engage with the content, Influence consumer choices – Knowledge sharing, Distribution of resources, Get consumers talking about features]
 
And this is where you guys come in right, so this idea of activating a social ecosystem and the key aspect of that social ecosystem is creating this word of mouth network alright so in the housing space in particular the single, the number one source of information when people make choices about renovating and building is through word of mouth. They’ll talk to friends. They’ll talk to families. They’ll ask mum. They’ll ask their neighbour. Now sometimes, some of those people are not the most qualified to give them advice, but that’s where they get their information from. So, the idea of the agents of change is to activate that word-of-mouth thing by starting the talk about the show and the content but modelling the right behaviour, talking about why, yeah, it’s really important to have a home that’s healthy. 

It’s important to have a home that’s well-sealed. It’s important to have a home that’s well-insulated. That’s where you guys come into it. We want you guys to be part of that, our agents of change, right and they, they’ve got a couple of different roles. So, one is to drive engagement, so they get people, if we don’t get people emotionally invested, they don’t watch the show in the first place, then we don’t get that emotional attachment to an idea, get people engaged in talking about the topics and then sharing resources, like connecting people through the like the sites on home, for example, the Federal Government site on housing and all the great resources that are available on there.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing an advertisement for the “Renovate or Rebuild” show on the right and text appears on the left: How do you get people talking about things like insulation, Step 1 – Characters in mass media have the power to be role models (social modelling), inspire audiences to engage in new thinking about “what is possible”, and change the perception of what is “normal” and therefore create new social norms, Step 2 – Get people talking about this new normal in online forums and in person within their own word-of-mouth ecosystem, Step 3 – A new social norm is created]

So, the question is how do you actually get people talking about, let’s take something like insulation, right. So, Ben talked about this alright, insulation is boring right, energy efficiency, I don’t know, I love energy efficiency but honestly if I’ve got to speak to energy, I’d rather read Donald Trump’s latest dyad than talk about energy efficiency sometimes, because it’s so boring. So, the question is, how do we actually get people talking about stuff like that; insulation, like sealing, like insulation, like windows, like zoning etc. 
So, the first thing is we use this social modelling effect through the TV show, to get the characters on the show to actually talk about this stuff and why insulation’s important. We then need to get people talking about it in their social ecosystem and in online forums and then once we’ve done that, then we create this new social norm, because it’s normal to talk about things like insulation so right. So, my dream off the back of this TV show is, I grew up in Western Sydney and Blacktown, is two burly blokes standing around the barbecue, having a bit of a, bit of sledging as to who’s got the biggest energy star rating on their house, right, so that’s my dream. I want to get to this sort of point. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing insulation in a roof and text appears: The Educational Approach]

So, I’m going to show you an example here, so this is an educational approach for insulation, right, so this is the traditional way that we’ve spoken about things like insulation. This is the education approach. I’m just going to play this video for about 30 seconds, and we’ll go from there.

[Image changes to show a male talking on the screen and then images move through of a male installing insulation in the roof space, walls with insulation in them, and an insulated floor]

Narrator: To reduce the heat transfer it’s crucial to have insulation in the roof and walls and also beneficial to insulate timber floors. 

[Image changes to show a view of insulation on the inside of a roof and then the image changes to show a view of the roof from the outside]

Insulation keeps heat inside in winter and stops heat getting inside in summer. 

[Image changes to show a diagram of airflow through a house]

The r-value is a measure of how well the insulation will reduce…

James McGregor: Right, so that’s the traditional approach about how we’ve spoken about things like insulation and there’s nothing wrong with that video. Technically that video’s correct, but there is nobody who’s going out and sharing that with their friends. Like, there’s no, if you’re the average punter, sharing that with your friends, there’s no social capital you get form sharing that video with someone right. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a female walking inside a house]

So, therefore it’s not going to get into that social ecosystem. What I’m going to show you now is an edutainment approach. So, this is an approach we use in our secondary content about how we get across a concept. In this case, I’m, normally I would show you a video, we’ve got one of these videos around insulation, but given everyone’s stuck at home at the moment and if you’ve got kids and you’re homeschooling as you might have heard my son about two minutes ago coming into the room with a homeschooling question, this hopefully will resonate with you. So, this video’s about selling the sizzle around zoning and zoning’s about how you actually close off different parts of the house with doors, so you actually only have to heat and cool a small space, but as you’ll see the sizzle is not the, how we’ve actually framed it, we’ve framed it around a completely different problem for this audience. 

[Image changes to show a female walking down a hallway in a house carrying a soccer ball]

Mum: I love my family. 

[Image changes to show the female standing in the kitchen with a child either side both calling her]

Kids: Mum. Mum. Mum. Mum. Mum.

[Image changes to show the female walking down the hallways and picking up toys as she goes while a male can be seen sitting on a toilet reading a phone on the right]

Mum: I love how they try and include me in all aspects of their life. 

[Image shows the female shooting a young boy with a nerf gun while talking to the camera]

I love their cute little nerf battle games. 

[Music plays and the image changes to show the female telling off a young girl riding a scooter down a hallway]

I love their no quit attitude. I said not in the house. 

[Image shows the female continuing to walk towards the camera]

But sometimes, I love them better when they’re in a different room.

[Image changes to show the female hiding behind a piece of wall between two windows while a boy calls to her in the background and looks for her]

Kids: Mum, where are you. Mum, I need your help. Mum.

[Image changes to show the female walking down the passageway carrying an armful of toys]
 
Mum: And that’s when my favourite design tip comes in. I call it motherhood zoning. 

[Image changes to show the female entering a room and closing the door]

Motherhood zoning is all about strategically placing doors around the house so that you can close off different rooms. 

[Music plays and the image changes to show the female standing behind a door while the children play with nerf guns in the adjoining room and the image shows the female closing the door]

[Image changes to show the female sitting on a couch in a room talking to the camera]

Motherhood zoning will become one of the greatest features of your home. Need time to yourself? Motherhood zone it. Got something you don’t want to look at? Motherhood zone it.

[Image changes to show the young girl knocking on the door and yelling]

Kids: Mum.

[Image changes to show the female seated on the couch talking to the camera]

Mum: But the best thing about motherhood zoning is it saves you energy. When you close the door, you’re only heating and cooling small spaces, rather than the whole house and you get to tell the kids that you have to shut yourself away to save the environment.

[Image changes to show a young boy moving out from underneath the couch and talking to the female on the couch]

Kids: Mum. I’m hungry.

[Sighing sound can be heard, and the female can be seen looking down]

[Image changes to show the girl banging on the door and shouting]

Kids: Mum. Mum.

[Image changes to show the male talking to the young girl]

Dad: Leave her alone child, she’s saving the environment.

[Laughter can be heard, and the image shows the male smiling and winking while the girl looks at him]

Thank you.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a pinpoint with a cardboard box inside and photos of a car, and various buildings above and text appears: Step 3 – Connect Solutions, Facilitate action through information and delivery of aligned products and services] 

James McGregor: Alright, so you can see it’s the same message, we’re, the messaging’s around zoning, but the sizzle is actually getting away from your kids is how we frame that problem. So, that particular video is something that if you’re stuck at home at the moment, that probably resonates with you and it might be something you’d share with your friends, so now we get content that actually injects ourselves into that social ecosystem. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Poll Results]

The final step is then connect in the solutions which is sort of supply from the marketplace. Right, so what we’re going to do now, is we’re going to, I just want to check in on our survey results which we’re going to put up on the screen. So, I can’t see them, so I’ve got to go have a quick look at a screenshot.  So, we’ve got on terms of websites, so LinkedIn looks like the primary thing for most people. We’ve got a very high number of you think that you’re willing to help out, spend five minutes, if you could spend five minutes on social media once a week, you’d actually be interested in doing that and also, well overwhelmingly at 100% on should we do something about sustainable housing? 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a line of people jumping in the air on the left and a person working on a laptop connected to a network of people on the right and text appears: Become an Agent for Change, Do you believe that we should make Australian homes more sustainable?, Can you spare 5-10 minutes per week for just 8 weeks to shift the dial on sustainable housing in Australia by helping us test this behaviour change concept?, Join us as an Agent of Change/Citizen Social Scientist]

So, so, what you’ve all just told me there is that there’s a lot of people active on social media, you’re willing to put in five minutes once a week if that’s all you have to do to shift the dial and become a citizen scientist, and so, now we’re going to move on to our, this is where I’m going to ask you about becoming agents of change, right. So, so our agents of change, I mentioned in that communications framework are the people who activate this online discussion around topics and act as a social modeller, so that we, we act out the behaviours that we want others to mimic right, and so what I’m actually going to want is, out of this webinar today, is for those who are interested is become one of those agents of change and help us with this research program. So Danie alluded to it, this big research project just about the launch, where we’re going to launch the TV show but also evaluate its impact and we actually need your help to make that happen.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: The Big Little Experiment, (happening right now), Aim – To test and measure the effect of social modelling, Method, Step 1 – Open a new browser window, Step 2 – Go to the following url www.bluetribe.co/tvexperiment, Step 3 – Click the share button on the YouTube video and post the video to your preference of social media platform, Step 4 – Use “normative and social influence” technique in the post by adding a comment like “Everybody is going to be watching this show – can’t wait…”, Step 5 – Add the hashtag #renovateorrebuild so we can collect data]

And so, as the very first thing we do, I actually want to do a live experiment, right this second, right. So, I’m calling this the little, big sorry the big little experiment right. So, this is an experiment where we’re going to put in this effect of social modelling so since everyone’s at home watching this on computer, what I want you to do right now is to open up a new browser window alright, so you don’t lose us here from the webinar. You’re probably used to doing this with your, with your different work meetings anyway and I want you to go to this particular website, so this is on our website, we knocked this up last night as an easier way to describe where to go, so you go to www.bluetribe.co/TVexperiment. When you get there, there’ll be a YouTube video which was that little teaser video for Renovate or Rebuild earlier that I showed you. 

What I want you to do is click the share button up on the top right-hand corner of that video when you get there and post it to your social media platform of choice. So, I’ve got YouTube analytics in the background here which I’ll show you later and see how we go, and then remember Danie talked about this idea around normative messaging, alright, so everybody’s doing this, right, you create that idea that everyone else is doing it therefore it’s OK for me to do it as well. So, I want you to include in your post some sort of normative message. Alright, so something along the lines of, “Hey, everybody’s going to be watching this show.  I can’t wait till it comes out”. Or, “Everybody, we know, everyone wants energy efficient homes these days, this is finally a show that’s about that”. Include that normative messaging in your post and then include the hashtag #RenovateorRebuild so that we can actually track how effective this is. So, we have 30 seconds to do that and then I’ll move on to the last couple of slides, because I can see Anthony’s going to cut me off in a minute anyway.

[Image shows a new slide flicking up and then the image returns to the previous slide]

Anthony Wright: We’ve had a couple of comments, James, that the website might not be working.

James McGregor: I tested it before. Although it might not show, because I didn’t optimise that page, I actually put it together very, very quickly. 

Anthony Wright: It might just have too much traffic at the moment which is a good thing.

James McGregor: Oh yeah, so that was bluetribe.co not com so that might be an issue forward slash TV experiment. For those on LinkedIn, a lot of people use LinkedIn, I'm going to post this same experiment on LinkedIn shortly so if you miss it now, you can sort of catch up on it there. 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a line of people jumping in the air on the right with a sunset background and text appears on the left: How to participate, Sign up as an Agent of Change at www.taskforcez.com.au, First experiment just happened, Assist recruiting CSIRO research survey participants (ie send link for survey to anyone you think needs a more sustainable home, Each week during the TV show the taskforce members will take 5 minutes to do the following – Post weekly trailer for upcoming episode, Interact with a post asking which design you liked the best, Share a funny edutainment video about a sustainability topic]

So, so I mentioned before we want you to be part of one of these change agents for us, so we actually created an online site where we actually, it’s like a staging point, called Taskforce Z right, so one of the key stakeholders that was part of the birth of this concept of creating a TV show, her grandfather served in the second world war as part of a small commando unit called Special Unit Z who would, were a very small force and deep behind enemy lines when they achieved really big things, so we thought it was only appropriate to use that sort of, to draw on that as inspiration for the name of this group because we’re a small group trying to change the world and the, but the Z is for zero of course, Taskforce Zero, so if you go there, there’s like a staging point, you can sign up there. You can also get access to the video from there.  

First experiment, we just did. Part of this, we also would ask you to help recruit participants for CSIRO research. So, it’s likely that the people you have, the reason you’re here today, is you’ve been trying to convince people and you’re not sure how to talk about sustainability to actually shift people towards more better behaviour. They’re the people we want you to get this survey out to so more information will come out in the next couple of weeks, again through that Taskforce Z platform. We’ll post all the information and then each week, during the TV show, we want the, our agents of change to do three things. So, the first thing is to post a weekly trailer, so for that upcoming episode. After each episode we’re going to have a post that’ll say a poll, you know, did you like the renovate design or rebuild design and then we’re going to share out one of those funny edutainment videos like we saw on the motherhood zoning. So that’s your five minutes a week and it will be, make a huge impact in terms of the quality of the research and the outcomes that we get from seeing if this actually can shift the dial.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Conclusion, The strategy employs a systems level evidence and science-based approach to driving the mass market uptake of sustainable housing, The communications framework can be used for any sustainable product or service, for Renovate or Rebuild it is anticipated that this approach will reach an audience of 5million+, Economic modelling by the CSIRO suggests that the use of a mass media campaign and the demand driven approach has the potential for half of all homes built to zero energy standard by 2030 (increasing by two thirds by2040), We need your help! Sign up to www.taskforcez.com.au]

So, just to wrap up, you know, we’ve taken a very evidence-based approach. It’s based on science to try to drive the uptake in sustainable housing. I actually think this communication framework can be used for any sort of product or service and we’re expecting quite a savvy audience and we need your help. Honestly, we can’t do this on our own. I love saying sustainability’s a team sport because it requires a big group of us to shift the dial so if you can help out, please head over to that taskforcez.com.au 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: “The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”, Steve Jobs]

and I just want to leave you this one final sentiment. Alright, so the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. So please come and join team crazy. You’ve probably had plenty of people who think you’re a bit crazy because you keep getting in their ear about things like climate change, but actually, you’re exactly the people we need to make this happen so I hope you can come along for the ride because that’ll be exciting whatever the outcome.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing The BlueTribe Company logo and text: Contact James McGregor, CEO, The Blue Tribe Company, P +61 411 204 570 Email james.mcgregor@bluetribe.co, www.bluetribe.co]

Anthony Wright: Thank you very much, James. That was great. 

[Image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

And it seems that some of our users, sorry, our listeners are managing to get through to that website and others aren’t. So, James if you’re able to post the link in the speaker Chat here, I’ll see if I can get Lachlan or Eric to put that in the Chat for all of our participants as well to go through to, because it’s not clickable on your presentation obviously.  Now we’ve got a few questions that have come through, but there’s probably still time for a few more once we’re done with those. If people want to get your questions in you’ve got a minute or two left to get them in and I will direct them to our speakers. So, what, to get started a lot of our audience is energy raters and so on and one of those energy raters has written into us to say the tendency of their clients is to ask for minimum standards. How do they convert someone to a higher standard of home and what kind of messaging does an energy rater use when a customer might come in their door and ask them to lower the energy rating as close to minimum standards as they possibly can? How would they frame that conversation and, and answer that question from the client? Does anyone want to volunteer to answer that question? Or do I have to volunteer one of you?

[Image changes to show James talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

James McGregor: I can, I can have a crack at that one if you want.

Anthony Wright: Great.

James McGregor: So, we recently, we’ve been dealing with this, we’ve been rolling out some training with volume builders around marketing and sales and there’s a technique, that was, this was a project that was developed out of, or testing the sales training. So, the New South Wales Government did some research around how we convince volume builders to try to upsell sustainability. And so, I think regardless of what the, you’re trying to get across to them, as I was saying earlier, it always needs to come down to that problem first. And so, Ben alluded to this earlier, right, so one of the challenges of sustainability people is they think the mission is enough and it’s not right. You know, There is no one, with the exception of maybe people at this webinar, who are waking up this morning saying, how can I reduce my carbon footprint? Consumers aren’t thinking that. They’re waking up, how am I going to get the kids to school, how am I going to, well how many bedrooms do I want, what size garage, which of the 5,000 tile choices am I going to select for the new kitchen. 

They’ve got all these problems they’re trying to solve right, so, so and people make decisions to get rid of pain points and problems alright, so if you’re trying to convince them to upgrade to a higher star-rating you need to start to articulate things like what’s the benefit of a higher star-rating? A higher star rating means the home needs less energy for heating and cooling and it’s going to be more comfortable. I’d start by asking questions to elicit the problem around what’s your existing house like living in summer? And they go, “It’s stinking hot. We can’t sleep the night” and then ask what effect that has on them? Well, it means I’m cranky in the morning, I’m not very productive at work because I’m very tired and then flip it around and say, what would it mean for you if you lived in a home that that wasn’t the case? Well, actually I’d probably sleep really well I wouldn’t have to run the air conditioning much, I’d save some money and then you pitch the idea of upgrading a solution once they’ve articulated what it means to them and Ben sort of touched on this as earlier as well, right, what’s in it for me? Right. That’s what people want to know, so frame it in terms of what’s the benefit to them. It might be that they want to show off to their mates. It might be that they want the kids to be safe, alright, but find out what that is and then talk to them about upgrading to a higher star-rating.

[Image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Great, thanks James. Did anyone want to add anything to what James has suggested?

[Image changes to show Danie talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Danie Nilsson: I’d just probably reiterate that as well. Oh, sorry, Ben, jumped in over the top of you. I’d just probably reiterate that again so it comes back to the frameworks that I spoke to, which the first steps are, you identify those barriers and then you identify those drivers to behaviour as well and the key thing is how that is relevant to the individual person or the society that you’re aiming to change and then once you’ve identified them you go, OK, well, how do we remove as many barriers as possible? And then how do we promote as many of those drivers? And another key thing to remember here is people get overwhelmed with information and when there’s too many choices, so the clearer that you can simplify that message and get those options across, the more likely that you are actually to have a positive effect at the end of that.

[Image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Thanks Danie. Ben did you want to…?

Ben Peacock: Yeah, I was just going to say that I did agree with all of that 100%. 

[Image changes to show Ben talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Correlating things, I think, helps too. The first thing I said, why would you do that? And then you go, would you choose the minimum star-rating on a car, or would you choose the minimum star-rating on a washing machine? Because generally what you’ll find is the reason they’re choosing that lower thing, is they don’t understand what they’re choosing so if you can correlate it to, no, no, no it’s just like when you’re choosing a washing machine. You’re choosing the higher rating because you know that’s going to save you energy. It’s the same on your house, it’s just on a bigger scale. So, giving people a shortcut to something they understand.

[Image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Great, thank you Ben. I’m going to summarise a couple of questions in my next one because we’ve only got ten minutes or so. It seems we’ve got a few New Zealanders in the audience. Welcome everyone from overseas. James, how big is this show going to be, 9 Life is a bit niche, is it going to be in New Zealand? Is it going to make it to the mainstream? How do we, how do we get this message even bigger than 9 Life?

[Image changes to show James talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

James McGregor: So, so, so the show is being premiered on 9 Life and yes that is very niche but actually the audience that lives on 9 Life is actually the target audience we want for the show so actually, it’s probably the perfect place for it to go. You’ll start to see, at the moment, for those who love this style of TV, you’ll realise that the current season of The Block is currently on. So in the next couple of weeks you’ll actually start to see some TV commercials on during The Block to promote the show because that’s sort of the audience that’s going to be interested in this. We’re going on immediately after The Block so every Monday night prime time spot, so The Block finishes at 8.30pm and our show’s on immediately after that so hopefully that audience moves across.  The show will also get a rerun on the main Channel 9 network sometime in the next 12 months. We don’t know exactly when that will be and we’re also at the moment in discussions around US, distribution to the US market as well so there’s an international option in the US. You might get to watch the show in America as well sometime after the Christmas, so lots, lot happening. So, it is only our first attempt people please, so give us a bit of a break but hopefully Season 2’s bigger and better and we end up at the Logies, next year.

[Image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Thanks, James. To extend that a little bit, Ben and Danie, how important is it to kind of flood every channel, for people to get this social norming from whatever channel they watch, from whichever demographic they’re in or can we target smaller subsets of the community and expect that social norming to migrate to other demographics? Ben, would you like to have a shot at that first?

[Image changes to show Ben talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Ben Peacock: Oh, sorry. Look, even the biggest comms budgets target because it doesn’t matter almost how much money you have there’s no way you can kind of speak to everyone so inevitably yeah you want to start with, funnily enough, you want to start with your most influential. It’s really interesting, that people always think I want to get beyond the usual suspects but as, Bob Brown actually taught me this. He said, “No you don’t. You want to engage and rile up your usual suspects.” Because when they’re feeling confident and like empowered and like they have a message for their friends and like they’re, they’re happy with what they’re doing, all those sorts of things, they will spread the message for you. So just activating your first followers, is really, really, really important so finding out who’s already with you and going, “Finally here’s everything I wanted to know”, because then they will spread that message out and what you want to do is figure out who’s your first audience? Who’s the next audience? And if you can just get them first to, inevitably we all live with fairly, fairly, small budgets in sustainability so that highly targeted approach, I think, is definitely the place to begin.

[Image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Danie, did you have anything to add?

[Image changes to show Danie talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Danie Nilsson: Yeah, I agree with all of that as well. As James said, and Ben, it’s really important to make sure that you are targeting that specific sample in that demographic, so what works for one group isn’t necessarily going to work for everyone. So that’s why we did a pilot episode and we looked at different cohorts and different segments of demographics of the population and go, well where do we need to pitch this and where’s it going to work and that’s what we’ve done in this instance and  I wish I had the statistic off the top of my head, but I don’t but I do know that there is actually really interesting research out there that shows when you’re trying to create mass change at scale, the tipping point is not as far as what we might expect. So you don’t need to necessarily get 50, 70, 80% of the people to start creating change. Once you, there is a statistic, so I’ll try and find it again for my own reference as well, but once you reach a certain percentage and you get over that tipping point, things can start to slide and head in that direction, much more quickly than you anticipate, so I think this is ultimately a really great start. 

[Image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Cool, thanks Danie. That’s great. Look, I’m going to, again wrap up a bunch of questions in, in one multipart question again, and this should be our last question probably before we close out. There seems to be, you know, an understanding amongst the audience that we sell the sizzle not the steak, but a little bit of concern that if you sell the sizzle too much, do people forget what a steak is? Or how to install it properly in the case of insulation? Is there a concern that in selling a mass media, highly relatable, highly shareable content, that we lose the necessary technical detail and don’t end up addressing the problem that we really need to solve? I don’t think I’ve hit you first Ben, so you can have first stab at this one. 

[Image shows Anthony listening on the main screen]

Ben Peacock: Different strokes, different folks. You know, we’re talking about, the conversation today is making it mainstream. 

[Image changes to show Ben talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Now, that means, does, you can’t be, you just go back to selling the steak. If you’re talking to a butcher you want to be telling them very carefully about the steak and how the steak and how to cut a steak properly and what makes a good steak, so when it comes to your technical experts you’re going to tell a different, very different story and you’re going to help them understand very different things and so absolutely, there’s a, you know, I guess, I almost look at things these days as story style, substance style. Here’s a story for the audience you need. Now what is the substance they need backing it? 

Now how am I going to take that out with style? So, the story is different for different audiences. The substance level is also different. For a technical audience, you’ve got to have a lot of substance and understanding and detail that they can get their teeth into, whereas for the average mainstream audience it’s just compare the energy bill sort of level of substance. And their style is use of funny things like the piece that James showed you. I think if you break it down to that, and go, every audience has a different relationship between those things. A slightly different audience, a different need for a different level of substance and it and probably, I guess, funny, is, everybody likes funny, most people, though having said that, there will be someone who watches that, what you’ve shown James and goes, this is more serious than this, you know, there’s always someone. So, so what is this, what works for that audience is relevant too. So, as I say, today we’re talking about mainstream, that technical audience probably does need a slightly different approach. 

[Image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Great, thanks Ben. Danie, do you want to have a crack at that question as well? How do we avoid misinformation? 

[Image changes to show Danie talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Danie Nilsson: So, I guess what came to mind for me, is that we are actually drawing, as James mentioned, we are leveraging off emotional appeals, but there are a whole other range of strategies that have gone into this. It’s not just a narrative-based approach and as James mentioned on, what’s really important here is this secondary content. So, once we’ve engaged people in, in these audiences, we’re sending them to this secondary content which has more of that didactic approach in showing people, OK, how do you, how do you complete this behaviour change? How are you actually going about it? Sending them to the right resources. This approach is really exciting, because I actually noticed it myself with the latest David Attenborough documentaries. They were trying to do this themselves. So, they started to get on social media and do little polls and so forth. I don’t know, my assumption was there actually wasn’t behavioural scientists or social scientists behind the scenes doing that, but it’s starting to be the way forward and it’s a really effective and innovative approach and I think it’s going to see really beneficial results.

[Image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Thanks Danie. James, I’ll give you the last word on this and the call to action if you want to get it. Lachlan and Eric I hope you’re out there, able to drop links or whatever we need into the Chat. To close out James, how would you answer that question?

[Image changes to show James talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

James McGregor: So, yes, so we’ve been, I’m an engineer, like, I design stuff, so I’ve got, I think in those technical terms but the average punter doesn’t alright so, so what we’ve actually tried, tried really, really hard in the TV show to sort of address both those issues. So, what we need is people emotionally invested in, I want a home like that, what they see on the show, so it’s got heaps of natural light, it’s well-insulated, a beautiful place to live in winter and summer and it’s got really, really low running costs. And how you sort of cover off on that, make sure it gets built right is that we’re actually using the NatHERS rating, right. 

So, the NatHERS provides some of that technical control and so, and what we do is we position a home that’s 7-star or better. So, every single episode, the team’s aiming to get 7-stars or better for their designs, alright. So, and so NatHERS then has a whole lot of technical controls under it. You can’t get the 7-stars unless you have these quality things in place, so, so we’ve tried very hard to do that. Danie mentioned exactly that, the secondary content, so you know, prepping, fittings from the website to your home so if people want to dig into the detail and get the technical information, they can. 

So, but as Ben also said, the people on this, on this webinar, you may not be the audience for this show, right. It’s designed at mainstream, it’s not designed for sustainability professionals. So you know, you won’t, you won’t hear climate change talked about at all, I don’t think. Sustainability gets touched on very, very lightly. We, we focus on all of that sizzle, right, which is a sustainable house, we just don’t necessarily call it that a lot of the time, so. So, in terms of call to action, as Danie said, we can’t do this without your help, you know. This is like a, I call it the big little experiment but it, it’s as far as we know no one’s done this before and we can’t actually do it without the people who are listening in for us today. So please, please, please, if you, you can, and you can give us five minutes a week, just for eight weeks jump over there to taskforcez all one word dot com dot au and sign up to that platform or we’ll be posting stuff out on social platforms and things and be part of those change agents to help it happen. Because we’re all here, because we believe in the same thing but none of us can do it on our own right, so let’s hunt together as a pack and see if we can change the world, one reality TV show at a time.

[Image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Thanks James. And what was that airing date and time, one last time?

[Image changes to show James talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

James McGregor: So, it’ll go to air on 4th of October, so 4th, at 9pm on the 4th of October, because there’s actually an NRL match on that night so it’s half an hour later, but then, every other Monday night at 8.30pm on Channel 9 Life. 

[Image changes to show Anthony talking on the main screen and the participants can be seen in the Participant bar at the bottom of the screen]

Anthony Wright: Excellent. Thanks James. Now I appreciate that there’s a few questions I haven’t managed to get to, so as usual, Lachlan and I will try and put some answers together to post when the recording goes live. Thank you so much for attending everybody in our audience and thank you so much to our speakers. I have had, just an overwhelming amount of positive feedback come in on my e-mail alerts and LinkedIn connections and so on, so I’m going to be scrolling through LinkedIn alerts for the next 20 minutes, just on the basis of this. There’s heaps of positive feedback, really appreciate the brains trust and the real masterclass in how to affect mainstream social change. With, that’s about it too, a perfect webinar, 2pm on the dot, where everything has run reasonably smoothly. I thank you all for the wonderful job you have put into your presentations and thank our audience for being here. Sign up to our website. Lachlan will put it in the link in the Chat if you want to receive notifications on future webinars. Other than that, we are all out. 

[Image shows Anthony smiling and waving to the camera and James can be seen waving in the Participant bar and Danie and Ben can be seen smiling]

Have a great week, everyone.