The Intention-Action Gap: Why Good Intentions Don't Reach the Checkout
Good intentions don’t translate to purchase intent, behavior change, or revenue growth because of the gap between what people say they intend to do and what they do, especially when living or buying more sustainably.
What Is the Intention-Action Gap?
The intention-action gap is the difference between what people say they will do and what they actually do.
It is sometimes also called the value-action gap or say / do gap. It appears wherever price, convenience, habit, social norms or cognitive effort intervene between an intention and a buying decision (or action). In sustainability it is the distance between stated willingness to buy responsibly and observed purchasing behaviour.
Part of it is down to how are brains are wired. For example, we’re all susceptible to ‘projection bias’ (i.e. when we overestimate how much our future preferences, feelings, or behavior will resemble our current state or behavior). New Year's resolutions and gym membership usage being prime examples! And well know never to go grocery shopping when we’re hungry!
When it comes to buying more sustainable brands and products, then, depending on the category, the say / do gap can be pretty wide. For example, the WFA / Kantar Sustainable Marketing 2030 Report, finds that 97% of people say they are prepared to live more sustainably, but only 13% are actively changing their behaviour.
The distance between those two numbers is the intention-action gap and many brands and businesses are leaving money and positive impact on the table by not finding, quantifying and closing it.
THE GAP
An 84-Point Problem That’s Leaving Money On the Table
NYU Stern's Sustainable Market Share Index, shows that Branded products marketed as sustainable now hold a 25.4% market share and products marketed as sustainable achieved a 5-YR CAGR of 10.9% vs. 4.0% for the total CPG market and just 2.2% for conventionally-marketed products.
The demand is real, but most of it never actually converts. And so brands tend to respond by spending more on story-telling and communicating their commitments (which addresses the intention and the 97% who are already persuaded).
Here at grounded, we focus on the ‘action’, driving the behavior change and growing the 13% of those who aren't necessarily following through. And, it's not just a consumer behavior change problem either. It's a corporate behavior change problem too.
Many well intentioned sustainability and purpose driven initiatives struggle to gain investment, traction or support because the teams championing them cannot clearly connect them to growth strategy or value creation. In other words they can’t tell their CFO what the intention-action gap is worth, build out the business case or prove out the ROI.
If you're struggling to get buy-in and good intentions aren't translating into revenue growth, we can help you identify the biggest gaps, quantify the lost opportunity and build the business case - to make sure your teams get aligned, you can prove out the return on investment and execute behavior change driving campaigns that make a difference.
THE FRAMEWORK
How We Find Measure and Close Intention-Action Gaps
1. Finding & Sizing the Gap
Determine how large your intention-action gap is, by category and by stage of the consumer experience journey — and then how it compares to the category and your competition. We do this using a generative AI Landscape Assessment tool that scrapes public (and private) intelligence and information and then automatically identifies the biggest intention action gaps preventing your brand or business from commercializing sustainability — along with a strategic recommendation on how to close the biggest gap — quantifying that lost opportunity.
2. Map The Stakeholder & Value Chain
Once the biggest ‘in market’ external gap has been identified, we'll switch focus and work with you to map out your value chain that connects all of your key stakeholders together - isolating the bottle-necks that have the potential to create risk and misalignment - impacting decision making and behavior across your value chain.
3.The Biggest Barriers & Drivers
Once we know the biggest internal and external barriers, we then often use Implicit Association Testing (IAT) to measure the unconscious associations that are influencing how people perceive and buy your brand. In other words - the unconscious thoughts, feelings, values and dispositions that influence their behaviors. These are the ‘drivers’ that we map against the competition and then cluster - using them to overcome those barriers and influence buying behavior - often at a category level.
Closing the Gap in Practice
See our case studies
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Frequently Asked Questions
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Research tells you what people say. Gap analysis measures the distance between what they say and what they do, then quantifies it.
Almost all of them do — that is the 97%. The commercially useful question is which of them act, and what stops the remaining 13% from making a better buying decision
Frequently, and it is often the real blocker: a sustainability goal that never makes it from the ESG report into the brand or business plan to drive differentiation and competitive advantage
The gap exists in every category we have measured; some larger than others, but we are yet to find a category where it doesn’t exist.
Finding and closing the intention-action gap is an approach - supported by a series of qualitative and quantitative reseatch studies and our one proprietary generative AI platform. It can take a little as one day or up to several weeks, depending on the methodologies that are chosen.
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