Marketing to help motivate tree-planting in India

Between 1990-2020, roughly 420 million hectares of forest were lost globally, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The global tree cover has diminished at a rate of 10 million hectares between 2015-2020, contributing to an estimated 4.1 gigatons of annual carbon emissions through land-use changes.

Forest cover loss at this rate has resulted in a significant loss of ecological biodiversity. Because trees play a critical role both as a carbon sink and as a protective guard during climate disasters, such an alarming rate of deforestation has severe climate-change implications.

India, a country highly vulnerable to climate shocks, exemplifies this global pattern. From 2015-2020, India witnessed an alarming average annual loss of 668,440 hectares of forest. With a significant proportion of poor households exposed to severe climate impact, such substantial loss of tree cover impacts local weather patterns and the economy significantly. With increasing demand for agricultural land and supporting infrastructure, deforestation is unlikely to slow down in the foreseeable future.

Marketing as a means to motivate planting trees

Motivated by the need for change and building on recent evidence from large-scale field experiments on the impact of marketing interventions on household behaviour, a team led by researchers at London Business School, Columbia University and Iowa University initiated a research project to encourage individuals to plant more trees on their farms, thereby enhancing local green cover.

The team is made up of twenty-three marketing academics who are collaborating on the design and testing of messaging strategies to motivate a significant section of the population to take up tree-planting on their farms.

The research will take the form of a large-scale field experiment in Uttarakhand, an Indian state in the foothills of the Himalayas, to assess the impact of the expert-designed messaging strategies, which rural women entrepreneurs will utilise, along with AI-created marketing content, to market tree saplings to households in the village. A mobile app-based, geo-tagged tracking mechanism will be used to monitor tree growth and survival rates.

In line with the three sustainable development pillars – lives, livelihoods and environments – the project will work with rural female entrepreneurs to operationalise the marketing interventions and sell tree saplings, then track their survival over a six-month period. Learnings from the study will directly impact the livelihoods of the rural female entrepreneurs, while trees on farms can help local communities become more resilient to climate shocks.

Mobile phone usage is ubiquitous across India, with a high proportion of the population using WhatsApp. The rural female entrepreneurs will therefore use WhatsApp as their primary digital communication channel to share the researcher-designed messages.

The project will employ the latest generative AI tools to transform the interventions into various communication forms. For example, the intervention prompt will be used to generate a video and localised image, which will then be shared across WhatsApp groups. A mobile app will capture the geo-tagged images to track tree-growth outcomes and deploy machine-learning models to validate outcomes.

Next, a unique ID will be generated for each tree planted and survival rates will be tracked throughout the period of the study. At the backend, all data related to the tree network will be recorded on a blockchain infrastructure to ensure accurate and transparent tracking.

Groundbreaking project design: competition becomes collaboration

The project came about in a highly unusual way. Columbia University’s Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business Gita Johar, a former President of the Society for Consumer Psychology (who also taught at LBS) had led on a presidential platform addressing climate change while at the Society. Typically, research in consumer psychology takes place online and through undergraduate students in labs. Gita reached out to the Wheeler Institute on account of its reputation for doing work “in the real world”.

“There’s only so much you can do with undergraduate students and online panels around climate change, so Gita reached out to me and asked if we knew anyone who might be willing to collaborate on large-scale experiments on how to combat climate change. We’d been working with social enterprise Dharma Life for a while, so they were an obvious partner to call on,” said Rajesh Chandy, Professor of Marketing and Academic Director of the Wheeler Institute.

Another collaborator agreed: "This field experiment represents a unique opportunity to test how well theoretically designed marketing messages can motivate people to engage in a pro-social behaviors, both in the short term (by planting trees) and in the long term (by ensuring the trees survival)," said Cathy Cole, Emeritus Professor of Marketing at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa.

All marketing-intervention ideas were sourced through an open call by the Society of Consumer Psychology, with thirty-nine teams submitting proposals. Following evaluation by a panel of experts, thirteen ideas were shortlisted, and a conference was arranged bringing together the organising team and the thirteen finalist groups, who pitched their ideas to the panel. The ideas were then pilot tested in the field through Dharma Life entrepreneurs.

London Business School doctoral researcher Mithilesh Shah, who is leading the project for the Wheeler Institute, reveals how the idea of using multiple academics from different institutions came about. He noticed a lot of commonalities during the pitches. “Given the constraints of implementing thirteen interventions in the field, we ended up asking the finalists, rather than do another round of competition, why don’t we all collaborate?”

The insights from the field tests led to three marketing interventions and two control groups being formed. All team members are working within their respective groups to craft their messages, which will be then utilised in the final marketing intervention.

Could blockchain be used to generate funding?

The project makes use of another potentially groundbreaking innovation in the sustainability domain: using blockchain to generate fundraising. Planting trees to save the planet sounds like a no-brainer in the West. “It’s one thing for us to say we’ve got to plant trees. In the real world, you need people on the ground to plant them, so what’s their motivation? People don’t just plant trees because they’re a good thing; especially people in rural communities who are time- and resources-poor. They may know that the climate is changing and the world is warming up and there are bad environmental consequences, but going out and planting trees is an abstract concept for them – they need to see a more concrete benefit,” said Rajesh.

The person on the ground must have an incentive to take action. You also need a marketing effort, a training programme and an infrastructure, explained Rajesh. “It costs money to persuade people to plant trees and someone has to pay for all these things,” he said.

One way to make the project sustainable may be through selling carbon credits. The difficulty here is that carbon-credit schemes are controversial for many reasons; not least because of the difficulty of verifying schemes such as tree-planting and potential for scams. (For example, sellers may act fraudulently by over-counting the numbers of trees planted, or not plant them at all, or by selling the same carbon credit multiple times.) This means that companies are looking for verifiable, transparent and trustworthy carbon credits; for which sellers can charge a higher price.

Mithilesh explains how using blockchain technology would obviate this problem. As soon as the rural entrepreneur plants a tree, they take a photo and immediately upload the picture and other relevant details to a blockchain. “We’re still figuring out the exact interface where this information will be accessed, but it will probably be a website. Anyone can go to the website and see the photo of the tree and exactly where it’s planted. Once the blockchain is created for the tree, we can put it on a carbon-credit platform for corporates (or anyone) to buy. The money could be used to maintain the trees and the households may receive returns based on their tree-related investments. We’re still figuring out the exact mechanism and we’re a long way from that at the moment, but it is theoretically highly possible.

Another massive benefit the generative AI technology has brought relates to cost-savings. “The prompts involved – the images and videos and so on – need to be very sophisticated. You can’t just show people pictures of random villagers somewhere in India. The images need to resonate with locals in specific parts of the country and be realistic enough to motivate action there,” said Rajesh. (Here is an example of AI-generated video content being prepared for the experiment: http://tinyurl.com/4at2axfp).

“Normally, we would have had to take a camera crew to the foothills of the Himalayas and get a set of actors to engage with villagers and describe events,” said Rajesh. “In fact, while we’re sitting at our desks, our colleagues in the field are developing the content entirely using AI and generating images for subtle marketing campaigns that would otherwise have cost tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of pounds to create. In this respect, AI is a kind of magic – we’re living through a remarkable period.”

Collaboration between large companies

The research is also a great story about collaboration between large companies. Accenture, who are providing support in the form of blockchain and related technology, and Siriti, a design firm based out in Mumbai, India.

Rajesh reiterates the collaborative nature of the study from an academic-field practitioner point of view. Former LBS student Gaurav Mehta, along with Gita, were the prime drivers on the academic and practitioner side. Gita sourced all the marketing-intervention ideas through the Society of Consumer Psychology, which initiated and is leading the project, while Gaurav is providing the support of the female entrepreneurs at Dharma Life and is the person who will be selling the outputs to potential carbon-credit buyers. “The blockchain-related Sui Foundation is helping to support it financially and we’re hoping to get additional support from Columbia University (through Gita),” said Rajesh.

The combination of academic expertise and field knowhow is proving a potent force.

explains Rajesh. “So, you have this wonderful collaboration not only with these large groups of academics, but also with practitioners. Of course, there are tensions that play out every week, but that’s only to be expected in such a multifaceted, multidisciplinary project.”

Gita also emphasised the collaboration between multiple academics and the field partner. “There are so many decisions to make when taking a research idea on messaging about tree-planting and implementing it in a field study, such as localising the content, adapting the creatives, translating to local language and context, and thinking about how to measure success.” The study is a true collaboration, she said. “I look forward to seeing the results on what message framing is most motivating for tree-planting and to seeing this intervention scale across India.”

By generating new insights into the impact of marketing interventions, not only does it contribute to academic knowledge but it also motivates enterprising women to instigate change within their communities and the environment, said Rajesh. “And change the planet for the better,” he added.

This research was supported by the Wheeler Institute for Business and Development at London Business School.

To learn more about the researchers mentioned in this article, please visit the Wheeler Institute Research Portal.