Enabling Canadian consumers to make more sustainable choices in daily life

Most of us are conscious about sustainability but find it hard to actively make a change in our daily lives. We are overwhelmed by the ‘better’ choices out there and are confused about what is truly ‘more sustainable’. This is the exact dilemma that the LEAP team within Unilever set out to solve. The aim of LEAP is to make sustainable choices simple, preferred and seamless. 

Given that Unilever’s brands and products are used by 3.4bn people across the world, everyday, the opportunity to scale innovation and impact are apparent. The team wanted to explore new digital ventures and sustainable initiatives that can help achieve the goal of enabling 1bn sustainable actions. We helped Unilever to develop a vision and quickly build, validate and launch multiple new business models by cross-pollinating learnings from different markets.

• Visioning
• Discovery 
• Ideation
• Problem solution fit
• MVP 
• Pilot

Visioning

Through a set of workshops with the leadership team at Unilever, we developed a vision for LEAP to orchestrate a Sustainable living platform. This vision encapsulates different  opportunities to engage consumers and help them make more sustainable choices with a sticky retention model. One of the opportunities being- ‘enabling consumers to save and redeem rewards for sustainable actions they take’. This is the opportunity that was pursued further in the French and Canadian markets. 

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Discovery

With the challenge clear - how to empower consumers in making sustainable decisions, we focussed on two different emerging consumer segments in the French and Canadian markets: eco-actives and eco-considerers. During consumer discovery, we interviewed dozens of consumers, and other stakeholders in the CPG retail supply chain to identify their needs, pains and gains related to making / facilitating more sustainable choices. 

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Ideation 

Through separate design sprints for each market we identified the different market-specific solutions to focus on. Re:Generate for the Canadian market is a loyalty program that rewards users for making the more sustainable purchase decisions in the supermarket with monetary benefits and additional ‘do good’ rewards like planting trees or donating meals. 

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Problem solution fit - Build, Measure, Learn, Repeat

Using an iterative approach, the team validated the desirability of the solution, the user experience and user interface design with real users through multiple experiments (such as live tests, surveys, user Interviews, Ideaswipe tests). The aim was to see if users comprehend the Re:Generate value proposition, can navigate through different functionalities without (or with minimum) hurdles and to test which ‘do good’ rewards resonate better with Canadian consumers. 

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MVP

We followed a ‘low code, rich learning approach’ while developing the Re:Generate MVP (Minimum viable product). Utilizing low code tools enabled us to develop a fully functional web-app in a matter of 3 weeks. The build itself helped validate the feasibility of the techstack and core functionality (features) in the front and back end. 

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The MVP was used to gain insight into real consumer behavior upon its launch. Alongside a paid panel of users, social media campaigns were used to drive traffic to the web-app to validate if it is possible to acquire ‘real consumers’ if launched into the wild. This was accompanied by continuous monitoring, optimisation of features and growth experiments for a 4 week duration. 

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Pilot

Upon successfully validating key desirability, feasibility and viability assumptions using the MVP web-app, Re:Generate (renamed to Leap Rewards) was developed and launched as a native app on both App Store and Play store.

Since November 2022, the oneUp team has been working on further scaling the reach, user engagement and overall impact of the app, using a metric-based optimisation approach across the PIRATE funnel. Additionally, we are helping the LEAP team structurally build their data engine to measure the sustainable impact of the app, and gain commercial insights.

From vision to venture - oneUp has helped Unilever develop, validate and pilot Leap Rewards in the Canadian market.