L'Oréal Paris Global

Leading a board-level workshop to make shampoo refills the default choice

Circular economy Workshop Consumers France

Challenge

For L’Oréal Paris, a prime lever to cut plastic is getting people to choose a shampoo refill instead of buying a new bottle every time. But that switch hits the classic barriers of green behaviour: convenience trade-offs, no social pressure to change, and confusing choices. The brand’s global board wanted to understand what really drives refill adoption, and how to shift it.

Solution

We ran a discovery workshop with L’Oréal Paris’ global board. Using our behavioural model, we mapped the individual, contextual and social influences on refill purchase, from price and habits to the conformity effect that makes people copy their peers. We then used our Rainbow Wheel™, a database of 60+ interventions developed with University College London, to open concrete directions, from making refills more desirable to testing on specific audiences.

Impact

The board came away with a shared, science-based reading of the refill challenge, a menu of intervention directions to explore and a test-and-learn path to validate them. Rather than another awareness campaign, L’Oréal left with the foundations for making refills the easier, more desirable default, and a clear next step into deeper research.