This week in Sustainable Marketing, we are talking about Consumer Behavior. It may be odd to think about sustainable marketing and consumer behavior together, however, it plays a key role in ensuring that more and more people continue to become and/or maintain sustainable lifestyles. Much of the reason that people struggle when searching for things has to do with weighing their perceived benefits to their perceived costs and evaluating their alternatives. In this blog, I will explore the article by Glenn Hurowitz titled Here’s how pressuring corporations can save the Amazon from destruction.

No matter the progress, we simply won’t get a handle on deforestation or climate change more broadly until the meat industry changes – or people eat drastically less meat.

The quote above was the biggest takeaway for me, personally, when I read this article. While the Amazon Rainforest had seen much deforestation from massive, uncontainable fires, it has also had a significant amount of deforestation because of the increase in cattle farming. According to the article, meat is “far and away the single largest driver of deforestation, with cattle and animal feed combining to drive more deforestation than all other commodities combined.”

This poses the important question of “why are consumers unaware of the harm that their consumption and constant demand of cattle has on the environment?

According to an article by the WWF, 80% of the current deforestation has to do with cattle ranching. As a result, the cattle ranching also has caused the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere. This also equals 3.4% of current global emissions. The article also states that “cattle farming increases the risk of fires, and are a significant degrader of riparian and aquatic ecosystems.”

This is important in terms of consumer behavior because it is important that consumers of meat understand the choices that they are making. It is important that consumers understand the benefits to eating less meat. Quite literally named “the lungs of the earth,” deforestation of the Amazon is not doing good to the earth. If we understand consumer behavior and are able to give them alternatives to evaluate, consumers may come to the conclusion that their lifestyle needs to change in order to preserve the Amazon and our planet. Understanding consumer’s psychological factors will help to understand why consumers make the decisions that they do.

Once consumers understand that a decrease in consumption of meat is desirable not only for sustainability purposes, but  for the good of our world, offering and giving them other options to substitute will help. Consumer behavior gives us the opportunity to look into and understand consumers, their preferences, and why they make the decisions that they do.