Handling Climate Change Deniers in Green Marketing Research

For years our clients in the energy sector have been innovating ways to make energy production and distribution more sustainable and encouraging their customers to engage in green practices when it comes to making choices about the ways they consume energy.

Energy companies face many challenges in making their businesses more sustainable, not the least of which are customers whose opinions and beliefs are contrary to the corporate goal.  In nearly every green marketing research project we conduct, we encounter a group of consumers who do not believe in climate change, or who do but disagree that the solutions being implemented are appropriate. Whether testing green messaging, energy efficiency program concepts or rate sensitivity, this segment fundamentally disapproves of the constructs being evaluated.  So what should we do about this group when planning our research project?

How we choose to handle them can vary depending on the business problem, the specific topic, and the research task at hand. Three potential paths forward:

1. Screen Them Out

This is the most dramatic solution. We identify those whose opinions run counter to the mission, and do not bring them forward into the interview. While this is the cleanest approach, it means that your participants are not representative of the population as a whole. That is an important consideration in the analysis and should be factored into weighting and reporting.

2. Treat Them as Hostile

We’ve heard of this in legal proceedings, and it can apply in market research as well. Rather than taking them through the survey as if they are in agreement with the research proposition, we can make allowances for them to keep them engaged and answering honestly. This can include acknowledging that we understand they may not agree with the content, changing the context of a question to make it more palatable to answer, skipping over content that doesn’t apply to them, and affording them the opportunity to elaborate on why they feel the way they do.  Keeping them in the survey in this manner gives us options for how to analyze the results on the back-end. We can remove them from certain questions in the analysis or treat their answers separately.

3. Do Nothing

It may be as valuable to get the opinions of people who disagree with a sustainability initiative as it is those who are in agreement. Since making allowances for them can influence the results, there are times when it’s justified simply to ask everyone the same questions in the same manner.

Regardless of which path you choose, a key action is to identify their opinions about sustainability, which gives the analyst more flexibility in managing the analysis and can lead to a deeper understanding of the insights.