Organisations adopting circular initiatives is imperative to enable a sustainable world. But how does this affect customer centric models?
In the fourteenth episode of ‘Clarasys presents: Simply Sustainability’, Clarasys’ Harriet Shelton and Jacob Brockman chat with Dr. Merryn Haines-Gadd, Research Fellow at the University of Exeter within the Exeter Centre for Circular Economy.
The trio discuss why organisations must consider circular initiatives, the part customers should play in the design process and how organisations can successfully combine the customer-centric mindset with circular ambitions.
Listen here or read on for an edited transcript.
Harriet Shelton: In today’s podcast, I am absolutely delighted to be talking to Merryn Haines-Gadd, a research fellow at the University of Exeter, specializing in the circular economy, and she will be joined by Jacob from Clarasys.
Clarasys have been working really closely with the University of Exeter to conduct research on the topic we’re going to discuss today, and we’re super excited to launch our design toolkit in April, which I’ll share more on at the end. So let’s start with some introductions. I’m Harriet and I’m a CX lead at Clarasys.
Merryn?
Merryn Haines-Gadd: Hiya, I’m Dr. Merryn Haines-Gadd I’m a research fellow out of the Exeter Centre for Circular Economy. And I generally conduct research that helps companies to improve the sustainability and the circularity of their products and services.
Harriet Shelton: Thanks Merryn, Jacob?
Jacob Brockmann: Heya, I’m Jacob Brockman and I am a consultant at Clarasys.
Harriet Shelton: Thanks guys. So our focus for today’s discussion is working through what customer experience means in a circular world. Customer experience, or cx, and the idea of putting the customer at the heart of design, it’s been around for a long time. It’s a well-established mindset. Some questions we have for today:
So I guess the first part of our discussion before we tackle those big questions is just to set the scene on this idea of moving away from linear to circular models. So we collectively believe that circular is a global imperative. Can we, and without taking up the entire podcast, I appreciate it’s a big topic, just briefly outline for listeners what we understand to be the reasons for this?
Merryn Haines-Gadd: I think I could probably jump in with that one to start out with. So generally what we’re seeing is that there’s a lot of like fluctuating materials as well as a lot of supply issues they’ve been caused by the pandemic and the war. There’s also a lot of increased urgency from sort of the climate change community to act.
And we are seeing as that’s kind of being filtered down into things like regulation. So governments are starting to, , outlying kinda standards and rules that companies need to follow. And I think the last thing that I would’ve put here is that there seems to be a bit of an increased demand from customers.
So the drive for environmentalism has been around since about the seventies and so like 50 years on where these ideas are now starting to finally permeate in sort of the general consciousness. So yeah, we’re seeing industries, governments, consumers are all becoming a little bit more switched on to what it means to be sustainable.
And we feel, at least from our perspective at the University of Exeter is that the circular economy is a really great framework that can help us to meet these carbon goals and to act and live in a more sustainable way.
Harriet Shelton: I think you’ve put that so well there. I love that point on customer demand. So if you are not doing it, it’s likely that your competition will be, which is really key for people to be thinking about. Great. So let’s now try and tackle our bigger question today. So should the customer be at the heart of the design of circular initiatives?
Harriet Shelton: Let’s break it down a little bit. My first question to you both is, what is the case for the customer being considered in the design of circular initiatives? And can we just lift and shift the customer mindset and the ways we see that in the practice of design today to the design of circular initiatives?
Jacob Brockmann: I’m happy to kick off on that one, Harriet. The way that I probably approach this question is that the thing that I keep coming back to is that the fundamental assumption of our research is that we need to move to a circular economy. Right? And in that sense, the way that we think about the customer does shift a little bit.
We go from thinking about the customer, I guess as an end goal, to the customer as an enabler for circularity, and I think that really is quite a significant shift and we need to be cognisant of that. We need to be conscious in calling out that’s a different way that we’re approaching the problem. Right? I think what’s really fascinating about a lot of circular business models is that they require customers to take on new roles and behaviours. And there is a shift from customers just as users or consumers as a product, to actually being stewards and maintain as a value of products and resources. And I think that’s a really fascinating shift, right? So the key CX challenge, I guess in that context becomes how do we get customers to take on these new behaviors that are required of them under circular . Models? And that’s a fascinating challenge, right? That’s a different way of thinking about CX and it’s a different way of thinking about sustainability as well.
Harriet Shelton: What would you guys say the risks are associated with not considering the customer – why not just design circular initiatives?
Merryn Haines-Gadd: Well, yeah, if I could add to that, I think, basically there’s no use in designing the most perfect circular product or service that nobody wants to use or wants to own, that is a waste in itself. And we have seen a number of different circular products and services hit the market and either fail or just remain as kind of small pilots, for very particular situations.
Just to sort of couple that with what Jacob was saying is that a lot of this comes down to the fact that circular products and services need to compete with linear products and services on the market. And our linear products and services have been designed to be easy and convenient and disposable. And, , he’s right about these roles and responsibilities and behaviors and stuff because, fundamentally consumer behaviours are a response to the systems that have been designed around us. We use, and we consume and we discard stuff because we are being guided to do so by companies, by the infrastructure that that sits around us.
We need to be aware of that and coming back to the risks around that, I think a lot of that is about that, we’re not moving fast enough and that the planet is gonna suffer. Ultimately, we will suffer as the planet suffers. But also, , there will be companies that will be doing this, and they will be the first to market.
They were the ones who will be, adopting or, capturing those customers that want these kinds of products and services as well.
Jacob Brockmann: I think I’d just jump in quickly and add to that Merryn, I think, and specifically to address, that risk point that you brought up, Harriet. I think there’s a real risk with the design of a lot of circular initiatives, and this is probably something that’s true of sustainability initiatives in general, that the people who are responsible for sustainability in the organisation are not necessarily talking to the people who are leading on customers and cx.
And one thing that’s quite common with circular initiatives is people start to worry about how things are gonna work on the backend, and they don’t think so much about what the reality is gonna be for the customer. And when you are not able to join that thinking up, there’s a huge risk there, right?
Because, quite obviously if the initiatives aren’t acceptable to the customer, then they’re not gonna fly, they’re not gonna be successful. We’re not gonna achieve our goals from a customer standpoint. And we’re certainly not gonna achieve them from a circular standpoint either.
Harriet Shelton: Yeah. And that actually leads quite nicely, I suppose, into my next question. It sounds like we’re in agreement that the customer is important, but it’s not the only important consideration. So we’ve got these two mindsets then. We’ve got customer mindset, we’ve got circular mindset. How do we bring those together? What comes first? Is it customer? Is it circular?
Merryn Haines-Gadd: I think it’s really interesting. It’s trying to find balance, right? And so, at least from my sustainability perspective, I always feel that we are expanding who we’re designing things for. Customer is king, isn’t that the expression that, like what the customer wants is what we need to be providing for?
But that is what has caused us to get into the situation to begin with. So we now need to be expanding and understanding the wider stakeholder perspective around this and creating this balance between providing value, meeting the needs of consumers while at the same time not actively harming or being wasteful, in the way that we’re doing it.
Jacob Brockmann: I’d absolutely agree with that, Merryn. And I think, again, to try and answer the question of what comes first, I think it’s not so much about one coming before the other, but the two enabling each other. As we were talking about for the customer enables circularity in the sense that they’re required to take on new behaviours.
So if, we’re talking about a refill scheme, then the customer needs to obviously engage with that refillable package, bring it back, whatever those roles are that’s required of them. But circularity can also offer new experiences to the customer. We’ve seen lots of really interesting examples of that throughout our research.
I guess our role as CX designers or people who are designing circular initiatives is to think about how we can have that as a value exchange that flows freely between the customer and circularity. Those are things that can work together.
Harriet Shelton: Yeah. I really love that, Jacob. And you’re right, we have heard that in our research. Guess building a new relationship with either your existing customer or new customers that haven’t been interested in your proposition before is a really exciting, prospect for organisations that they should definitely be leaning into.
Just to push a little bit more, I guess on combining those two mindsets, are there any aspects of either, that are kind of no-go, it can’t be touched, or the red lines for when these mindsets are combined?
Merryn Haines-Gadd: I dunno if I’ve got a necessarily a no go. I mean there are certain environmental lines that we definitely shouldn’t cross, but it’s one of those things that I suppose we’ve talked about before, about this being a bit of a, you’re trying to find the innovation sweet spot between all these different factors. Viability, feasibility, desirability, circularity. And that creates a bit of this tension. We’re trying to meet all these different demands, but I think that tension is really interesting and I think it’s a really amazing opportunity for innovation. We really need to be seeing circularity as an opportunity to make better products and services.
It’s easy to design something that provides a kind of one-off transient experience that then you forget about and you dispose of. But, to design something that provides a long-lasting, meaningful experience that endures with you over and over again, that is something that maintains and is your life for a long time, is to me what I think, good design is all about and that we need to be pushing these boundaries a little bit.
But really embracing the challenge and I think calling out to designers, people who design things to just really, push it a bit further. I’d say, I dunno if that answers your question?
Harriet Shelton: Jacob, have you got anything to add?
Jacob Brockmann: I think that’s a pretty awesome answer. I might leave that one actually, I’m happy to stick with Merryn for that one.
Harriet Shelton: What I like about what you said Merryn, and it sounds like organisations now have to factor in both of those mindsets, but actually you are talking about quite a revolution in innovation in design, like a real opportunity to start doing this better and designing better things. It does feel as with any sort of revolution, transformation, it feels like quite a fundamental change. What are organisations doing to make that shift? What have we seen from our research and from organisations we’ve been talking to?
Jacob Brockmann: I’d be happy to jump in on this one. I think from my perspective, organisations that are doing circularity well are doing two things. I think the first one is that they are approaching the circular economy as an opportunity to capture new markets, to design new experiences for their customers, and in doing that, have a really clear understanding of what the link is between the customer segment that they’re targeting and what their circular value proposition is for that specific customer segment. For example, one of the participants in our research, was a large department store and they had really tailored their occasion wear rental, to a sort of younger demographic, they saw that as an opportunity for them to break into a sort of younger customer group. But other circular initiatives like mattress return was something that was quite relevant and quite appealing to their maybe older customer base who didn’t even necessarily have that much of a vested interest in sustainability or circularity. So I think that’s an interesting point.
And at the risk of monologuing, I said there was two points so I’ll say the second one. I think organisations that are doing circularity well are thinking about circularity more widely than just as a communication problem. I think there’s a tendency to just lament the fact that customers don’t care about sustainability or they don’t care or they don’t understand what the circular economy is. But I think if we’re just gonna wait for customers to catch up in that sense, or try and drill the message into them, then I’m not actually sure we’re ever gonna get to where we need to be. And a lot of the outcome of our research, and I think we’ll probably touch on this later, is trying to think about some of the other levers that we can pull on to drive customer behaviour change that don’t just rely on the customers caring about sustainability in order for us to enable circular business models.
Merryn Haines-Gadd: Yeah, that’s really interesting and I think one of the things you see is this idea that it’s put, it’s that idea of responsibility, again, pushing the responsibility of the circularity of the product to the customer and saying, we’re doing everything we can. If only our customers would change their behaviour, everything would be fine.
And that’s just a bit of a cop out. And we see that with a lot of other companies we talk to and we see it as being something that is, I think sometimes used as a little bit of an excuse. And so what we feel that organisations need to be doing is having a better understanding of what really behaviour change is. How they can help their customers to be thinking differently about their own behaviours and what their role is in enabling these behaviours. Because as Jacob said, it’s a value exchange. So what is everybody’s part in making this possible? And I think the companies that are really embracing that and thinking about it meaningfully are the ones that are sort of leading the way.
Harriet Shelton: That’s really nice that the behavioural change aspect is for both of you, you’ve mentioned that has been really important. I was gonna ask a little bit about approaches, methods, tools that we might commonly see in innovation. And obviously this is a big part of the work we’ve been doing to develop our toolkit.
How does behaviour change tie into the methods, approaches that people might be using? What changes about the approach in design?
Jacob Brockmann: I’m happy to take that one. It’s probably useful at this point to talk about one of the key behaviour change frameworks that we have used in our research and that we are using in our circular economy toolkit as well, which is the com B model.
What the com B model is, is it’s a behaviour change framework, which essentially posits that there’s three main levers that drive behavior change. And those are firstly, capability. So that can be physical or psychological, and that’s got to do with a customer’s skills to perform a certain task. So for example, if you have a, a refill scheme in a supermarket, do they understand how that works?
Or, will they have the psychological capability to remember to bring the container back at the end of the journey? The second thing is O so opportunity, does the customer, have the relevant opportunity? So for example, is there a refill store near enough to their home that they can use?
Then the last thing is motivation. So, is the customer motivated to engage with that product or service? So again, to summarise Com B so capability, opportunity and motivation. And yeah, I’ll pause there cause I think Merryn, you could probably expand on that in a, in a better way than I did.
Merryn Haines-Gadd: No, that was a really, really great, overview of the approach and, I mean there’s so many different behaviour change models that have been developed in the last sort of 20 years. There’s the fog model that is often used, in CX as well, and behaviour change stuff. There’s loads of different kind of design models that we see where people are using things like emotion to drive change in behaviours.
But I think the truth is that the different model you’ll need will depend on the context with which you’re designing it. And, we’re seeing, different people use different things. But for us, we’ve selected Com B ’cause we felt this is something that has been used a lot in health service.
It’s been used generally, because it enables long-term behaviour change, which really helps to develop new and different habits. And they’ve seen it kind of really work within the health service. So this is one of the reasons why we selected this model in particular.
Harriet Shelton: I suppose we’ve talked about there in that shift that organisations need to make. We’ve obviously been talking about circularity, CX practitioners, skillsets. We then started to talk about behavioural change. There’s quite a lot of disciplines now coming together. Do you see organisations as being set up with the right skills, the right people to do this? Are organisations prepared for this shift?
Merryn Haines-Gadd: Absolutely. And I think in terms of like organisations or whether or not they’ve got those kinds of skills, I think we think as academics and as an education organisation. We do a lot of training. We train a lot of companies in different spaces. We train designers, we train people in marketing, lots of technical people.
And, I think just generally as it goes forward with most companies, Specialisms thinking is always a bit siloed just because of the way organisations are arranged. People only think and operate inside particular product lines or inside particular departments.
And what’s interesting about the circular economy and circular products and services is that we need to be designing these more complex systems that involve way more people. You’re not just selling a product that goes out to somebody and then it sits in their home and jobs done. When you’re selling a product now that perhaps might need maintenance contracts or a dedicated service team to talk you through how to repair it or where to send it if you need to get it repaired.
Or how to send it back, things like that. And so I think what we are seeing, there’s a few companies that are doing really interesting things. I know Phillips have an internal team that upskill their people on, circular economy and circularity. And we still do a lot of training with them as well. But there are companies that are starting to really upskill their knowledge and capabilities around economy. But it’ll just take time.
Harriet Shelton: Yeah, and it’s a real shift for companies where they have been working possibly in those separate functions, teams, departments, in a more siloed way, just bringing people together. It’s not natural potentially for that collaboration to happen. There’s a skills piece, but there’s a collaboration piece of where do people come in? How do people work? What’s their responsibilities within this new type of design process. I think that’s a really under thought part of this problem actually. Jacob, do you have something to add?
Jacob Brockmann: Just really quickly on that Harriet, I think it’s a great point that there’s a tension there and there’s a sort of feeling of, it’s a bit uncomfortable. Like these are people talking to each other who probably don’t usually collaborate that much within an organisation, but again, that comes back to this whole point that there’s an opportunity, right? Like that’s a real productive tension. That’s a real opportunity for innovation and new conversations and yeah, exciting new ways of approaching business models, customers, whatever it may be. I mean, we ran a workshop a couple of weeks ago, where we had a situation just like that, right? We brought together people from all over the organisation, that worked in very different departments from things that were very customer focused to things that were quite technical or very specific to sustainability. And, it was a really fruitful conversation, right? Because there’s a tension there, but there’s also new ideas that flow out of that, which I think was awesome.
Harriet Shelton: Great. I love that positive message, Jacob. Thank you. So moving into kind of our final discussion – as a reminder, our starting question for today’s discussion was, should the customer be at the heart of the design of circular initiatives? And we’ve talked about the coming together of customer and circular mindsets and how they need to be balanced throughout the design. I’d now like to talk a little bit about the impact on the end outcome of that process. So the initiatives themselves that are being designed and the customer’s engagement with it. If we’ve typically designed experiences with customers at the heart of them, and we’re now balancing that with another equally important consideration, have we seen a detrimental impact to experience? How are customers responding to circular initiatives?
Merryn Haines-Gadd: That’s an interesting one. I think there have been positive and sort of negative outcomes of these types of products and services. Essentially, as Jacob mentioned earlier, we are asking the customer to be part of the circular value chain. And we’re asking them to help us keep products and materials in use for longer.
We are asking people to get their things repaired rather than just take it to the tip. We’re asking people to return it back to companies, whether or not that’s posting it or taking it somewhere. Asking people to rent things maybe rather than owning them. And I think what we are seeing is that that’s, it’s a little bit weird and people are struggling a little bit with that uncomfortability, that lack of familiarity with operating this way around products. People used to do this in the way that they bought and sold products in the past, but because of just the way that things have been designed in the sort of last 20, 30 years, we have forgotten how to do these sorts of things.
Do these sorts of practices, such as refill, repair, rent, daily sort of stuff. And I think just generally in terms of examples of companies that are doing this, and what they’re finding is that some are doing it and some aren’t. Some of these incentives do work. Some companies we work with, there’s a company, called Rapanui. They give people a voucher if they return an item for recycle and they make organic T-shirts, cotton t-shirts. And they find that works quite well with their customer base. Whereas we know other companies have tried return schemes in a similar way and are getting no traction. And so, it’s really interesting to see. It’s bit scattered, I’d say.
Jacob Brockmann: Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting question. Has there been a detrimental effect on customers? I don’t think we should shy away from the fact that it is hard to get customers to engage with circular initiatives and there is an element of absolutely. Like we’ve stressed throughout this podcast, that you want to be trying to think about ways that you can design great experiences for your customers and that the circular economy is an opportunity to do that. But there are also gonna be times when you need to use the stick a little bit, and that might involve, simple things like driving down the price per unit of cereal in a supermarket to make that more appealing for customers to engage with. But I think again, it comes back to that point of you have to understand your customers well to know whether that’s gonna be effective or not. Right? For one customer base, sure. Like lowing the price might be an effective way of doing that. But for another customer base, if you’re thinking about a young mom that comes to the supermarket with three kids, maybe the most effective way of engaging them is to have some sort of limited edition container that the kids love and that they’re excited by. And maybe that’s a more effective intervention for that group. So there are times when you are gonna have to really push customers towards things and maybe that won’t be a better experience, but where there is opportunities to improve that experience, then we should really look to do that. I think I went around in circles a little bit there, but I think there was some sort of good point in there somewhere.
Harriet Shelton: I guess listening to both of your responses there I think this idea of detrimental impact, disappointment in life tends to come when expectations aren’t met. And so I think what you were saying, Merryn there about, we sort of lost our way in being able to contribute as consumers to these models that might have been there in previous generations. Comes a little bit from our expectations of what we think that we want from a product or a service. And so it goes back to our earlier discussion about, not just passing on the buck of responsibility to the consumer. Actually, organisations need to adopt a responsibility for communicating and educating and bringing awareness to consumers to be able to bring them on that journey and actively designing interventions, just being aware. Actually this will feel worse for our consumers because it’s not what they expect. Okay, so how can we address that? How can we design for that? What are we gonna do to build into our design to work around it? It feels like there’s a link back to what we were just discussing earlier in the chat.
Merryn Haines-Gadd: No. Absolutely. And yeah, so that comes to some of the series that we found throughout this research was looking at things around consumption work, and that’s actually something that we drew on a lot when developing a lot of the tools and materials just to understand what is the real effort in the work that is required by the consumer in a circular journey compared to a linear journey? And how do these compare and where are the key moments, key interventions that occur along the journey, along the experience that we need to be mindful of?
Because there are gonna be some moments of tension or moments that are not as easy or convenient as, say a linear way of doing things. I mean, just to give you an example, like a real bug bear of mine is soft plastics recycling. Soft plastics are recyclable. They are very easy to recycle and they have a really great recycling efficiency. But they’re not collected at curbside. They are something that you need to collect in a bag and then take to your nearest supermarket in order to make sure they go in a very particular place. And again, you have to remember how to do it. But organisations are saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, our packaging is totally recyclable, and that is true, but it isn’t being recycled curbside.
And so there is this extra mental labor, physical labor that the consumer needs to enact in order to make it really circular. And so just being mindful of that, I think is a really important step.
Harriet Shelton: Thanks, Merryn. I’m just looking at time and it’s quickly passed. So I’m gonna try and attempt to wrap up what has been a really interesting discussion. So I guess what do people need to be thinking about? Customers are important to the design of circular initiatives? That’s an agreement I think we’ve come to. But they are not the only consideration. Organisations need to transition from a pure customer centric mindset to being able to balance customer and circular. And that comes with a whole array of transformation challenges. And finally, organisations need to be aware of the new roles and behaviors customers will need to adopt. Being really mindful of effort and work, like you were just saying, Merryn in order to adopt these circular initiatives and design for them intentionally.
If this discussion has been of interest to you, as I mentioned at the top, we, Clarasys have been working really closely with the University of Exeter to conduct research on this very topic. We’ll be launching our design toolkit in April aimed at supporting organisations, embed the customer in the design of circular initiatives. If you’ve got a circular design challenge and want to find out more, get in touch with us, and we’ll also be posting the links to the toolkit after the launch in April.
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