Marketing & Sales · Specialized Marketing

Make the SHIFT — Behaviour-Change Marketing at Maple & Meadow Foods

A four-round, intermediate sustainability-marketing simulation set inside Maple & Meadow Foods Co., a mid-size Canadian packaged-foods company in Vancouver (CA$480M revenue, CA$38M marketing budget).

4 rounds MBA & Masters English, Español

Preview

About this simulation

A four-round, intermediate sustainability-marketing simulation set inside Maple & Meadow Foods Co., a mid-size Canadian packaged-foods company in Vancouver (CA$480M revenue, CA$38M marketing budget).

A retailer scorecard has ranked the brand 11th of 14 on 'helping consumers reduce waste', and a leading grocery chain threatens to de-list slow-moving SKUs at the autumn category review. ~70% of the company's Scope 3 footprint sits in consumer use and end-of-life, so it cannot hit its 2030 target without changing consumer behaviour at scale — yet its flagship recyclable packaging is recycled only 28% of the time and two prior CA$6.5M 'go green!' awareness campaigns moved measured behaviour under 1%.

Playing the Sustainability Marketing Lead with a fixed, no-top-up CA$4.0M budget, you (1) diagnose this as a behaviour-change problem, not an awareness gap, prioritising target behaviours and mapping their psychological barriers; (2) select SHIFT levers (Social influence, Habit formation, Individual self, Feelings & cognition, Tangibility) matched to each behaviour's barrier rather than one-lever-fits-all; (3) allocate the CA$4.0M across on-pack, in-store, app/loyalty, digital and partnership channels — trading cheap reach against cost per conversion — and design a measurement that can prove uptake and 90-day habit-retention with a control group; and (4) defend the plan to a sceptical CMO and board against the failed-campaign benchmark, naming the biggest backfire risk and a scale-up evidence gate.

The math rewards behaviour-and-retention strategy and honest substantiation, and penalises the five classic errors — another awareness campaign, one lever for every behaviour, optimising for reach over conversion, unmeasurable claims, and ignoring retention or over-claiming into greenwashing.

Final KPIs track Behaviour-Change Uptake %, Habit-Retention %, Claim Credibility, and Cost per Conversion against the failed-campaign benchmark.

Who it is for

An intermediate simulation for participants who already know the core concepts of the subject, designed for master's and MBA programmes.

How a session runs

  1. The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
  2. Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
  3. The simulation can be run in English, Español.
  4. The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.

Decisions participants make

The decisions participants make during the simulation:

  • How do you reframe the problem the board is funding?
  • Which target behaviour do you make the campaign's priority?
  • What barrier between intention and action are you actually removing?
  • How rigorously does the team set measurable behavioural baselines (vs vibes)? (%)
  • RECYCLE (low-observability, repeated): which SHIFT lever fits the barrier?
  • FOOD WASTE (private, hard to feel): which SHIFT lever fits the barrier?
  • SWITCH to plant-forward (one-off, identity): which SHIFT lever fits the barrier?
  • A normative message risks backfiring. How carefully do you guard against norm misfire? (%)
  • Allocate the CA$4.0M across channels (in CA$M — must total 4.0)
  • How will you actually prove the behaviour changed?

What participants track

What participants follow on screen as the rounds go by:

  • Uptake, Retention & Credibility Trajectory

Subjects covered

Designed for courses in Specialized Marketing.

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