Conservatives fiercely resist behaviour change, but a six-point communications strategy designed to advance buy-in of heat pumps is a working model for engaging hard-to-convince groups.
When Anja Floetenmeyer-Woltmann steps onto the stage, she is determined to change minds.
In her work with the Mein Klimacoach (My Climate Coach) campaign in Hannover, Germany, Anja sets out to convince what she refers to as a “centred milieus” – a largely traditionalist and often older demographic – to switch from domestic oil and gas boilers to heat pumps.
That’s no easy task. A photo of the audience says it all: uniformly unimpressed, marginally hostile, with arms firmly crossed. And yet, by the time Anja is done, the same room looks very different: people appear to be relieved – even happy.
Our CityChanger has worked in communications for the past 30 years, specialising in the energy transition and climate protection. So accomplished is she, that Anja has positioned herself as a “systems accelerator,” uniquely aware of the levers necessary to make hard-to-convince groups listen and act.
So, while this is a story about how Anja has influenced Germany’s position in the uptake of heat pumps, her methods can be adopted to nudge behaviour change for almost any troublesome topic. Cameras at the ready!
Hannover’s Heat Pump Problem
The Region of Hannover, with its 21 municipalities, is committed to achieving climate neutrality, aiming to offset any emissions it creates by 2035.
As energy inefficiency of the built environment is one of the biggest contributors to emissions, the cities see heat pumps as a readymade tool to support this objective, but that requires buy-in from homeowners.
People need to believe that phasing out fossil fuels is an issue that won’t go away and will only become more expensive if action isn’t taken.
Properties most often belong to older, wealthier, conservative types, not the early adopters who are intrinsically interested in new technologies and can be self-motivated by climate protection. To bridge that gap, Anja says we have to avoid talk of sustainability, but instead “align action with personal values. It has to be personally relevant.”
My Climate Coach
For two-and-a-half years, Anja was managing director of the Climate Protection Agency of the Hannover Region, during which, with her “savvy team”, she developed a multi-channel marketing campaign targeting the region’s full range of stakeholder groups.
The My Climate Coach has delivered 218+ events, including 52 in-person in 2023, and reached more than 4,000 people. It’s caused an 85% activation rate – the proportion of people who said they would implement at least one follow-up step. In a region of 1.2 million inhabitants, that’s a significant number and a big win for climate neutrality.
In 2024, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Klimaschutz of Germany (then Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klima der Bundesrepublik Deutschland) approached Anja to scale up the strategy, to promote heat pumps as a viable choice on a national scale. Leaving the Climate Protection Agency, our CityChanger was hired as a solo entrepreneur for the Deutsche Energie-Agentur (dena), where she played a role in developing the strategy, presentation, and content for the National Heat Pump Week – seven days of activities organised in collaboration with 35 technical experts like energy agencies.
It was for this that Anja coached 150 experts for dena to deliver her six-point communications strategy, which specifically addressed the pain points of the target audience, the “centred milieus”; a milieus being what the Sinus Institute defines as a “psychographic target group segmentation in the German-speaking market” – a group of people who think the same.
This resulted in a threefold increase in applications for heat pump subsidies – a clear indication that people could be motivated and were ready to tackle the switch.
Understanding a Sceptical Audience
To understand the effectiveness of the six steps, we first need to know what Anja was up against.
The centred milieus are social groups that tend to be untrusting of new technology. The language that works for “savvy, eco-conscious, early adopters” rarely lands with this demographic.
Everything that’s new will be always labelled as potentially unsafe: a renewable system with electric cars, heating, and energy is met with scepticism for no other reason than it is new.
Added to this, there are three common reasons why climate comms falls short even for a general audience:
- People are not given agency or equipped with the right tools to act.
- Most climate communications – including scientific articles, news reports, entertainment, and arts projects – focus on raising concern, not presenting storytelling and easy steps, which leaves the public feeling concerned but powerless.
- Climate action almost exclusively focuses on consumer choices or activism, rather than helping individuals take responsibility for what they can change, such as their own behaviour and homes.
The Six-point Strategy
To counteract these challenges, Anja’s six-step system is based on cognitive dissonance research, like the work of Kris De Meyer from University College London, which advocates for simple steps and practical support available from a single source.
As effective as it is, there’s a lot to take in, so Anja – or anyone she’s coached to deliver the presentation – encourages the audience to keep their cameras handy. On a handful of slides, a camera icon indicates a Cheat Sheet – a quick reference guide people can snap and refer to again later.
1. Loss Aversion – Up the Pressure
Live sessions start with talk about money.
Affordability is more important among senior, conservative types than economic viability, i.e. they’re more interested to hear about how they can afford a heat pump over the long-term promise of return on investment. Like many countries, Germany offers subsides which make this easier, but this needs framing in a wider context.
We need to talk about future heating needs, and how fossil fuel prices will increase, whilst the infrastructure will be used by fewer houses, pushing up the costs for gas-powered heating even further.
Anja shows participants how heat pumps already have a massive market penetration rate in cold, Nordic societies where they need an efficient, reliable heating system. “This is what fosters trust in the technology .” As in the Nordics, Germany’s shift to heat pumps is accelerating, Anja tells the room: in ten years’ time, the massive increase in market share will probably have caused subsidies to dry up, so why wait?
Remember that threefold increase in interest for subsidies? “Half of the applications I would attribute to us talking to more than 50,000 people in more than 550 events all over Germany within this [Heat Pump] week,” Anja says. “But all of the applications are proof that risk aversion and loss aversion are strong motivators.”
She’s referring to the idea that people were making use of access to high subsidies while they lasted: with a collapse in government imminent, there was a chance that the incoming administration would lower them. Those who stay ahead of the curve gain the most – by spending the least.
2. Social Proof – Herd Mentality
Next, our CityChanger asks whether anyone in the room of 150-200 present still heats with gas or oil. This is not to name and shame anyone, but “because they need to show each other that they’re all in the same boat”.
In 2024, less than 7% of German households used a heat pump; in 2025 that figure has risen to about 10%. Anja compares that to Scandinavia: in Norway, it’s 65%, and Denmark is even higher.
This is what Germany lagging behind looks like, what, ‘We are silly not doing it’ looks like. This is all shown with one picture. Isn’t it brilliant? I love it.
This triggers an instinctive human reaction, one that tells us to follow the herd, as there’s safety in numbers.
Industry experts predict that the number of domestic households heating with fossil fuels will halve over the next decade, “and the other half will be lagging behind,” Anja tells the room. “And I’m not sure there will still be high subsidies by then.” Markets are kicked into action by subsidies, she clarifies, and the programmes “usually stall when this is achieved”.
3. Risk Mitigation – A Basis of Reliability
The spread of misinformation – unintentionally false reporting – and disinformation – purposefully misleading claims – damages efforts to educate the public about the climate crisis and undermine efforts to mitigate it. So much so, in fact, that some believe it should be criminalised.
The truth does little better for our cause.
“Conventional wisdom says that awareness and concern will lead to action,” Anja tells us. Yet, in reality, tales of doom and gloom – however true – are likely to lead to feelings of helplessness and apathy.
We won’t make advances by explaining how heat pumps work, either, which is the approach many “communicators” in the field – mostly technicians – take.
“There are studies on that: the more you know about the technology, the more difficult it feels to you and the less you will want it.”
That’s why the campaign provides information households do need and respond to:
- a shortlist of information that they need to gather – such as their energy use, which subsidy applications to ask for
- recommendations for trusted heat pump retailers and installers, who were also invited to attend Heat Pump Week events, creating low-barrier opportunities for attendees to access this support in one place.
4. Status and Belonging – Fear of Missing Out
The presenter asks for a show of hands: in terms of heating system installations each year, how much of the market share do the participants think heat pumps currently cover? Ten per cent? Some hands go up. Twenty? Never any hands raised.
Then comes the big reveal: it’s almost half.
In 2023, heat pumps featured in 28% of all Germany’s heating system installations. “Now, in the first half of 2025, it’s 52%,” Anja explains. “It’s not niche, it’s the majority. It’s a mass market.”
Although only accounting for 7% of households, there were already 2 million heat pumps active in German homes in 2024. Instead of feeling like an outsider for swapping to heat pumps, people realise they’ll soon be the odd ones out for not doing so.
If there’s no peer pressure and the neighbours are not doing it, nobody will do it. But if you tell them that half of the recent installations are heat pumps already, you will counter the false narratives.
5. Simplification – Minimise Effort with Easy-to-follow Steps
Meaningful change is (assumed to be) too complex. Myth!
It’s true that heat pumps work best as part of an energy efficient building envelope, so it may benefit households to consider shallow retrofitting measures as well, such as draught proofing, double glazing, or loft insulation. Laying on resources to enable people to do this alongside “clear and structured implementation steps” for switching to heat pumps will reduce the friction that prevents people seeing the process through to the end.
“The smaller the first step, the better” because it gets momentum underway. “Then a concept of self-persuasion kicks in.”
6. Empowered Choice – Creating Agency
The concluding step is the call to action; not one that prescribes what the audience members should do, but rather leaves them feeling that they:
- Are not alone
- have enough relevant information as well as the freedom of choice
- only need do what they can manage.
We create agency when we don’t tell people what to do, just how it’s done and how they can do it.
Ensuring the energy in the room does not dissipate after the event, Anja prescribes storytelling as a way to keep the passion and information exchange flowing.
As part of Mein Klimacoach, journalists were commissioned to create a podcast using recordings from the events. Like Anja’s Cheat Sheets, these provide a reference point for people to revisit in digestible formats and at their own pace.
In Hannover, homeowners can also sign up for weekly question and answer sessions online and e-newsletters featuring relatable, human stories of groups or individuals addressing clean heating and retrofitting at a household scale, reinforcing personal agency and ensuring old barriers don’t resurface.
Not Everyone is an Ally
The campaigns have transformed the communications in the Hannover Region.
My Climate Coach reached “property owners more than 3 million times annually,” Anja reveals, and 1,000+ session evaluation surveys have returned a 97% recommendation rate.
It’s natural progression that Anja now works with the industry and ten German cities to deliver a nationwide heat pump road show, with the biggest events bringing in up to 1,000 homeowners at a time.
Not that we’ll convince everyone, and that’s okay, Anja says.
As CityChangers, we can only do so much. It’s best to focus our energy on those we can reach. Chances are that the others will follow in their own time.
We don’t have to educate everybody because of the herd instinct. We can leave the naysayers behind, that’s not a problem. They will eventually follow.
The key is to be the advocate the audience needs, Anja concludes. We must walk in their shoes and take their concerns seriously. “If they get the information they need, follow-through will be easy. Just don’t call it change or even climate protection.”
Communicating with Centred Target Groups: Key Takeaways
Benefits:
- Finding ways to break down socio-political barriers opens pathways to behaviour change
- As a large group, convincing the centred milieus to act may lead to wide-scale impact
- Hard-to-engage groups can become beneficial allies – especially when behaviour becomes normalised and others “follow the pack”
Challenges:
- The six-point methods only works if people are told that this is their free choice, whilst providing information about how action is personally beneficial
- Even if a campaign is orchestrated by authorities, delivery needs to be bottom-up and empower the public to go the next step
- Each next step must be simple and achievable so the customer journey can be seamless – too complex or technical, and people will switch off
How to get started:
- Highlight how behaviour change – not stagnation – is the norm, while pointing out the increase of fossil fuel prices
- Make it easy: give people simple, practical steps to get started and the information they need to carry on
- The attempt to convince risks reactance, so it’s best not tell the public what to do, but give them the agency needed to make the right choices for themselves