Next week’s Corporate Sustainability Mastermind Group meeting is going to consider how to engage customers in Sustainability. This is a huge issue as the bulk of many products’ environmental impacts are in the ‘use’ phase and/or are determined by customer behaviour. Take food, for instance, not only is the cooking of the food a big chunk of its lifecycle impact, but storage and meal-planning will determine how much food actually gets eaten and how much goes in the bin unused.

However, when I hit Google to try and find the latest thinking on customer engagement, I didn’t get much to go on. So, as usual, I made up my own model, the final version of which came to me over my early morning cuppa today. I thought I’d throw it out into the public to see what the response to it was.

It is, as you can see, the classic 2×2 business school matrix. The level of innovation and communication give us four broad categories:

• Instruction: providing information e.g. the ‘Wash at 30°C’ campaign, the new ‘fridge’ logo for food;
• Choice-editing: developing new products and services where the choice of being unsustainable is removed e.g. B&Q refusing to stock patio heaters, software to automatically shut down networked PCs at the end of the working day, product-service systems etc;
• Dialogue: the customer can get in touch to query options or peer-to-peer support – help lines, chat support, forums, face-to-face user networks, transparency services;
• Collaboration: new products/services are co-produced with customers, e.g. the NetWorks project between Interface and Aquafil.

Thoughts?