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). 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.