Many responsible companies are committed to promoting sustainability and circularity, but suffer from not being able to communicate these concepts and efforts to their users and influence them. KPN is one of these companies. This project aims to find effective approaches to communicate with customers so that they can engage more deeply in the KPN’s circular supply chain. Taking into account time constraints and customer expectations, the scope of the project is narrowed down to KPN in-home services and products in 2C market.
Literature review on circular economy and sustainability and green marketing is further conducted, which further proves the value that sustainability communication can bring to the company. The existing research of KPN shows that customer’s perception of sustainability is relatively low when experiencing KPN services and products. To better understand the context and the reason behind this research result, desk research and customer journey analysis are conducted. Various findings lead to that the main problem in the current situation is sustainable information asymmetry, and the design should focus on installation, daily use and maintenance phases where customers have the highest opportunities to reach sustainability information.
This thesis adopts the 10 principles for providing product sustainability information from United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and International Trade Centre (ITC) as the design guideline. These principles are further developed to detailed design requirements and desires, which lay a foundation for the latter ideation. Design iteration was carried out between multiple creative sessions, employee validation and customer interviews. In the end, a solution that consists of six concepts proposed to solve the design challenge. Through ways like communicating in personified tone, clearly displaying useful or interesting information and nudging customers to take sustainable action, customers can perceive the high sustainability of KPN while having an optimized user experience. A roadmap with three horizons provides a possible implementation plan for KPN. Although in this report, the researches and designs are related to KPN in-home product, the results of the project are of interest to companies that are also facing low customer-perceived sustainability.