Everything about Duwtje is easy to like: the small Hanseatic town of Zutphen, where the agency is located, is the epitome of picturesque; the company building at the edge of the city centre is a trendy former day centre redone in garage style, and the two directors welcoming us on a beautiful Friday morning in May are perfect hosts. Plus, who wouldn’t fall for the charms of Duwtje’s raison d’être? Companies and organisations wanting to help their clients or employees create a better world (sustainable purchasing, more exercise, and other great things) come to Duwtje to help them realise the desired herd behaviour. In other words: a world where good intentions lead to resounding results. And that’s no sinecure, according to Duwtje’s promotional materials: “80% of people have good intentions; 8% of them actually realise these intentions.”
Duwtje effect
This morning, the building shows traces of last night’s company party, with chopping boards and an open bottle of red wine rubbing shoulders with piles of books and other expressions of the Duwtje effect. A poster on the wall describes this effect in a nutshell: two nudges (‘duwtjes’) for more sustainable buying behaviour at the Zutphen HEMA. Nudge 1: the shelves carrying regular clothing display images of how damaging and wasteful regular cotton is. Nudge 2 comes in the form of a reward: for every three sustainable products they purchase, customers get a special HEMA bag with the inscription “Sustainable clothing? I DO care.”
The poster also addresses a crucial question: Do these nudges really have the desired effect? We read on: “For articles priced the same or slightly higher than the non-sustainable alternative, sales went up by no less than 21%.”
“When you look at the final result, it seems so simple, what we do,” says Liza Luesink. “But,” says Joyce Croonen, “you’ve got to understand that there’s a phase before that: when we accept a project, we first make a careful study of the environment, and analyse the behaviour. Only then do we sit down at our desk and come up with solutions. The latter is the creative phase. And if the client wants, we can also make an impact study of the realised solutions.”
The idea for Duwtje originated during their studies: both founders completed a Master’s programme in Social Psychology that seamlessly grew into their real-life work. The link between their graduation (in 2009) and the creation of Duwtje one year later was an internship at the Tax and Customs Administration. They both enjoyed it so much that it led them to create a rarely seen ‘behavioural team’, i.e. a small group of people within the Tax and Customs Administration who worked on encouraging notorious procrastinators to file their tax return on time. One of their solutions was to stick a personal post-it on the blue envelopes, “with greetings from your tax officer.” A mere two years later, the women dared to take the next step and open their own agency. That was twelve years ago.
The Tax and Customs Administration’s behavioural team was apparently not able to prevent the blunders of the Benefits-team.
Croonen: “Our team fell apart. There are still some people working professionally on behavioural change, but they are now fragmented and spread across the Tax and Customs Administration.”
Aren’t you simply itching to take on a project from the Tax and Customs Administration? They certainly look as if they could use some help.
Luesink: “We’d love that. Do you know what the problem is with internal departments? They always end up becoming infected with the habits already present in the slow and cumbersome organisations they’re part of. This makes it hard to keep on creating new, out-of-the-box, pathways.” Croonen: “Tax administrators spend their days looking almost exclusively at discrepancies on returns, delays, and fraud, which represent 5% of all returns.” Luesink: “If you work in a department like this day after day, you lose sight of the fact that 95% of returns are perfectly fine. Your day-to-day work colours what you see. That’s why a fresh perspective from outside, of the kind that Duwtje can offer, always has added value.” Croonen: “Then there’s the creative process. Behavioural experts are mostly good at data analysis. A department may be good at mapping the problem, but you shouldn’t underestimate the process at the end. The hardest part is coming up with solutions.” Luesink: “And working out the details of these solutions. A project is only successful if it’s sound both creatively and in terms of content. It’s no coincidence that we have designers in our team.”
Success stories
They bring out a card set reminiscent of old-fashioned parking discs, with an arrow indicating how long you can park. A clever Duwtje design that initially faced some challenges due to government regulations against forging parking discs. The card set is the final result of a project from Delft University of Technology. The problem: students would claim a study place, leave for a break, and keep a spot endlessly occupied that could in the meantime have been used by others. With these cards, students who leave for a short while can indicate how long their spot is free for, leading to study places being used much more effectively.
Croonen: “Since we were working for Delft, we thought that we had to come up with a technological solution. Something digital. But that didn’t work at all. Then we came up with the parking disc solution. It turned out to be effective, and far less complex.” Luesink: “Simple things are often the hardest.” Croonen: “When you look back, and the solution seems so logical that everyone thinks: Why didn’t I think of that?”
The Delft University of Technology parking disc is one of Duwtje’s success stories, collected since 2021 in their book, Duwtje in de juiste richting (Nudge in the right direction). In this mix of theory and practice, Luesink and Croonen talk about the four levers of behavioural change (ease, resistance, norms, and motivation), and illustrate them with a selection of completed projects. For example, a project in the agricultural sector, on the delayed delivery of mestbrieven (manure quota notices) - the solution: using digital letters, since paper letters tend to get dirty. Or a project from the municipality of Deventer, for a square where visitors and inhabitants tended to leave litter (the solution: a photography gallery on the square with portraits of local inhabitants, gazing sternly at visitors to compel them to behave better. To leaf through the beautifully designed book, the reader has to constantly turn the book around, a practical illustration of Duwtje’s credo: “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got.” Luesink points to the slogan adorning a window near the entrance door. “Time for something new. We want a new motto.”
Croonen suggests on the spot inviting our readers to think along: “Think of a motivation for changing direction, in one sentence. The three best submissions will receive a free copy of our book.” The theory of behavioural change – known in academia as ‘nudging’ – originally comes from the US. Social psychologists, including some in Nijmegen, have made ample room for nudging in research and education, a development that Duwtje now reaps the benefits from. Luesink: “We’re literally applying what we’ve learned. Every day, for twelve years now.” Croonen: “We didn’t want to remain in our ivory tower. Now we can put into practice everything we’ve learnt about the brain, and about how behaviour works. In this way, we can change things in the real world.” Luesink: “We’re still focusing on the research aspect. We try to include an impact study in all our projects.” Croonen: “We also try to bring these studies to the university. But it’s a challenge. How can we demonstrate that our interventions are the reason behind the behavioural change? In real life, there are always so many factors that play a role.”
Nudging is not uncontroversial in the literature. How does steering people towards certain behaviours align with freedom? What is the distinction between desired behaviour and manipulation? And what does ‘desired’ behaviour actually mean? After all, nudging can also be used in other ways, to induce people to buy too much, or the ‘wrong’ things, or even unhealthy food products. Think of the shelves loaded with sweets near cash registers and the healthy, often more expensive products on the lowest and highest shelves – never at eye-level. “That doesn’t have to be the result of nudging,” answers Luesink. “Supermarkets simply know in practice what incites people to buy things. It’s called Capitalism.”
Primark
Where does Duwtje draw the line? Can someone come to them for help in getting their spouse to change their objectionable behaviour, and nudge them in a different direction? The answer is ‘no’. Duwtje only works on group processes. Can a chain like Primark or Action ask them for help in keeping their clients in the shop longer and encouraging them to buy even more? Again, no. “At Duwtje, we only do things we believe in,” says Croonen, “things we believe in as a team. If there’s any doubt, we gather around to discuss a potential project.” Luesink: “What we want is a more sustainable, healthier world, with less waste.” Croonen: “If the only goal is economic growth, our answer is ‘no’. You can earn a good living with projects like these for a few years, but in the long-term, we would just fade out.” Luesink: “Making the world a little more beautiful, that’s what gives us energy.”
This idealism doesn’t mean that a company like McDonald’s would necessarily be shown the door. If the goal is to encourage people to buy salads or a McPlant, Duwtje is the right address.
Do you have an example of a project that you were doubtful about at first?
“We were once approached by an energy company that presented themselves as a green company. During the interview, it became apparent that they were more into greenwashing,” says Luesink. Croonen: “In fact, they were only interested in making money and getting as many clients as possible.” Luesink: “We were out of there in no time. What we did do, though, was help the local green energy cooperative, at a reduced fee, with a campaign to attract more clients.”
What is your as yet unfulfilled dream project?
Luesink: “How to stimulate people, when buying clothes, to look beyond new to reused and shared clothing. I’d love to get stuck into such initiatives.” Croonen: “We now work a lot with the Dutch government. I’d like to work sometime with a company like Zara, to encourage more sustainable purchasing.” Luesink: “We’re also working on a project from Jumbo to nudge people to purchase more local products. It’s a pilot from a branch in Twello. It would be fantastic if it could be rolled out at national level.” Don’t you ever get discouraged, with billions of euros spent on nudges in the wrong direction, and your team working on a Jumbo in Twello? Luesink: “You’ve got to start somewhere. Every big change starts with small steps.” They’re both referring to the start of their success: the behavioural team at the Tax and Customs Administration. In that team, we had an expression, says Croonen: “Speed boats that make the oil tanker change its course.”
Bureau Duwtje
In 2010, Liza Luesink and Joyce Croonen founded the Duwtje consulting agency, now a team of fifteen. Over the past twelve years, they’ve successfully applied their methods in over one hundred small and large organisations, as reported on their website. In addition to consultancy, Duwtje also offers workshops and training programmes. In 2021, they published their book, Duwtje in de juiste richting (A nudge in the right direction). The book teaches four steps for applying “the 16 most effective behavioural techniques.” It can be ordered via their website at www.duwtje.com.
Duwtje is giving away three copies of the book to the best submissions for a new motto, to replace their current “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got.” Send your submissions to info [at] duwtje.com (info[at]duwtje[dot]com).
Text: Paul van den Broek. This is the translation of an article that was previously published in Radboud Magazine #72. Photography: Duncan de Fey