Social normalisation: Using marketing to make green normal

Journal of Consumer Behaviour

Ruth Rettie, Kevin Burchell, Chris Barnham (2014)

Most green marketing backfires by making sustainable choices seem special when they should seem normal. New research shows consumers adopt what they perceive as mainstream, not what's flagged as virtuous.

Link to study

What the evidence shows

The evidence indicates that green marketing has underperformed not because consumers lack environmental concern, but because it positions sustainable products and behaviours as a niche “green” category rather than as normal, mainstream behaviour. Grounded in the well-documented attitude–behaviour gap in environmental psychology, the findings show that consumers are more influenced by their perception of what is “normal” (i.e., what most people do) than by environmental values or information alone.

Across six qualitative focus groups combining photo-elicitation and discussion of green marketing materials, researchers examined how UK consumers classify behaviours as green, normal, both, or neither. From this, they developed a “social normalisation” framework and a two-axis positioning map (normal/not normal × green/not green) that categorizes behaviours such as recycling, driving a 4x4, buying organic food, and taking foreign holidays.

The core strategic implication is clear: to accelerate adoption, marketers and policymakers should reposition green behaviours as normal—rather than emphasizing their greenness—and correspondingly reposition unsustainable behaviours (e.g., driving to work, flying) as no longer normal.

Key Findings

Consumers readily classified 261 self-photographed items as "green" or "not green" without needing information on carbon impact — meaning green/not-green judgments are intuitive and social, not calculative.
Recycling was the most salient and universally adopted behaviour among participants (79 of 261 photographs, 30%), consistent with the paper's account of recycling as an activity that has become both "green" and "normal."
Ideas of "normal" are not static: participants repeatedly described how practices (e.g., packaging use, clothes-washing frequency, plastic bag use) have shifted generationally, supporting the paper's claim that normalisation is a time-dependent social process, not a fixed consumer trait.

Stand-out data points

30%: share of all participant-submitted "green" photographs depicting recycling — the single most normalized green behaviour identified.
Qualitative — "You don't even think about it… it's just, it's just normal": a participant's description of driving a car, illustrating how "normal" status can suppress critical evaluation of a behaviour's environmental impact even when the person acknowledges it isn't green.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

Actionability Suggests messages score better when they depict a behaviour as something "people like you" already do, lowering the perceived step required to act.
Clarity Supports scoring messages higher when they frame a behaviour in everyday, taken-for-granted terms rather than technical or moralizing "green" language.
Emotional Resonance Highlights guilt and moral framing ("you don't want to be seen as the bad one") as a real but double-edged emotional lever — useful context, not a recommended tactic.
Beneficence The normalisation strategy can genuinely help advocates lower psychological barriers to real behaviour change, and is compatible with integrity when applied honestly (e.g., accurately depicting a behaviour's actual prevalence).
Non-maleficence Flag risk — "normalisation" framing can slide into manufactured or exaggerated descriptive-norm claims (implying a behaviour is more common than it is). Understories should caution against messages that assert false popularity to manufacture social proof, since this crosses from legitimate reframing into misleading claims.

— non-exhaustive.