How Sensemaking Helps Us Understand Vegetarians and Vegans in Australia

The innate drive to make sense

Psychologists[1] have found that when people are confused and uncertain about what to do their innate drive to try to make sense of it all kicks in. The name for this drive to make sense is ‘sensemaking’.

This insight into behaviour in confusing situations offers some lessons to marketers working in highly evolving markets. One world that is evolving rapidly and very differently across the APAC region is that of vegetarianism and veganism as dietary choices and the related innovation of plant-based foods.

While only about 2% of the Australian population is vegan, the proportion of people identifying as vegetarian has been growing steadily and now stands at around 12% of all adults. Some of these vegetarians also eat meat or fish occasionally, some eat meat substitutes while others avoid anything containing meat or meat-like completely. Working out the drivers and challenges for consumers in making these choices is a key part of predicting how this market will develop.

 

What do we know about drivers and challenges for this market?

Research in Australia shows that people choose vegetarian, vegan, and plant-based foods for very different reasons. Some are turning to these diets for ethical reasons, some for sustainability, some for taste, and others for health. Motivations may be different in different cultural contexts.

That is the easy part. Much of the rest is puzzling because some people are not behaving in predictable ways. Some people become vegetarian and keep eating eat fish or chicken. Some vegetarians avoid gelatin and leather and some don’t. Some try veganism and then go back to eating meat. It’s a puzzling marketplace.

Well, it’s puzzling when looked at from a conventional research perspective because conventional research focuses almost exclusively on individuals and not their social groups. In contrast, eating food is a social activity. We eat together often and use mealtimes to create social bonds. The problem is that people have multiple social groups – close family, wider family, colleagues, and different sets of friends.  Any social belief has the potential to cause some kind of social conflict.

 

What is sensemaking?

The potential for this conflict between individual needs and different social groups is why the sensemaking perspective is helpful. Sensemaking is a social process that involves people trying things out, talking, thinking, and rethinking. In fact, one of the insights from sensemaking is that talking helps people think.

Based on the work of the many social scientists who work in sensemaking[2] I have created a model to describe what sensemakers do when they try to figure out what type of vegetarian or vegan to be. I have used that insight to design a form of qualitative research called sensemaking research.

Sensemaking interviews:

1. Are best thought of as a conversation between equals, in contrast to the usual unequal power dynamic of a conventional interview.
2. Start with questions about out how the person has behaved, followed by questions about the thoughts that resulted from this action. This is because we often do something to help us think
3. Encourage people to tell stories because talking helps us think, and stories are how we make sense of experiences.
4. Focus on all the senses, because we use all our senses to make sense.
5. Include specific questions about social group membership and social conflict.
6. Assume that people change their minds, and reframe their thinking
7. Expose the challenges and tensions and compromises that people make.

 

Seeing people as sensemakers

Our sensemaking research taught us to see people as active sensemakers.

• Rather than seeing vegetarians eating meat as a puzzle, sensemaking shows us that it is simply people working things out as they go along.
• Rather than seeing a choice to become vegetarian or vegan as someone’s fixed identity that they should for some reason maintain forever, sensemaking sees people as learners working out how to get their diet right for them as individuals and as members of social groups. Some consumers feel that their vegan or vegetarian diet is ‘who they are’, it is part of their identity, so that they won’t compromise on it, and are prepared to lose friends or disconnect from family to maintain their sense of self. Others feel that ethical concerns are not as important as family bonds.

 

Three tips for conducting a sensemaking research project

To conduct a sensemaking research project, it is important to design it in ways to understand how individual decision-making works in social settings. How you will do that will depend on the category you are working in, but some tips are:

1. First, think of people as ‘sensemakers’ rather than simply as ‘consumers’. Expect people to try to make sense of their world.
2. Individual conversations. The researcher needs to spend time having a naturalistic conversation with the other person, treating them as a person not as a ‘respondent’. You want the other person to talk to you, to help them think.
3. Use stimulus material to reflect the five senses, and to help people talk about their social world and any social challenges they face in a way that is culturally relevant to them. Base this material on cultural analysis such as semiotics or discourse analysis. In Australia for example, many plant-based foods are marketed using extreme language for example describing eating meat as “immoral”. For vegetarians experimenting with plant based foods when in a suitable social setting, this extreme language did not resonate.

In conclusion, sensemaking research is based on the very human insight that people make sense of things and that the making sense process is one of experimenting, talking and changing minds. It is ideal for any researcher or marketer working in a market that is complex or changing rapidly. Seeing people as sensemakers helps us interpret consumer behaviour that seems contradictory or puzzling.

 

[1] Nick Chater, George Loewenstein, The under-appreciated drive for sense-making, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 126, Part B, 2016, Pages 137-154,

[2]  For example, N. Sharma.  Sensemaking: Bringing theories and tools together  December 2007   Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 43(1)

 

Photo by Ella Olsson on Unsplash