Behaviour change 101 (actually there are a few but this is one) decrees that in order to move a behaviour then making adjustments to the environment in which the behaviour occurs can be very effective.
Many of your classic nudges play to this principle.
The fly 'target' in urinals, mirrors at the cake counter and the eyes on the poster behind the honesty box, for example.
Road safety is one of those areas that is problematic for those trying to modify behaviour.
Speeding in particular.
Often Road Safety communications have relied on fear campaigns or threats of death or punishment, however theres a mountain of research that suggests framing any kind of road use as ‘death-defying’ is not always a good strategy, it can be (unconsciously) received as a kind of challenge, especially among males.
It's also apparent that the only real feedback we get about our behaviour on the road is when its too late.
We get a speeding ticket, nearly hit another road user or get hit ourselves.
Even armed with this knowledge, making environmental interventions is hard.
There have been some decent attempts, including the rightly celebrated Swedish Speed Camera Lottery - developed for Volkwagen's Fun Theory project - whereby drivers driving at or below the speed limit were photograhed and entered into a prize lottery, the winnings were funded came from the fines collected from fining the drivers who did not obey the speed limit.
What this also demonstrated is that, government and policy can only go so far.
On the road interventions can only go so far.
The real environment where the behaviour occurs is inside the vehicle (and inside the drivers head).
All of which is why we were attracted to the experiment in the video below. conducted for Volkswagen in New Zealand by our friends at Colenso BBDO.
They say
'In a controlled experiment, we created a replacement panel for the speedo in four Volkswagen Golfs. They followed all of the clarity and safety restrictions of a standard speedo, but the dial was personally hand written by a loved one. This simple, personal mnemonic aims to remind drivers what they have to live for at the exact moment they consider speeding.'
Aside from the techno wizardry the interesting thing for us was the core behavioural nugget at the centre of the idea.
It's been well documented that priming people with pictures of babies faces can trigger caring and nurturing behaviour in adults.
So by inserting primes of the drivers own children right into the operations of the vehicle - amplifying the prime with a bit of extra Darwinian urgency - makes it extra cool.
For agency types it's also encouraging to see our peers being properly engaged by their clients in using their smarts to experiment around problems other than those that are exclusively communications or advertising.
By all accounts the experiment nudged the subjects driving behaviour in this instance - albeit a small sample - but its easy to imagine subsequent iterations or adaptations using this kind of thinking to address other problem driving behaviour (drink driving? spacial awareness re: cyclists etc are just two) and from a commercial standpoint then as a mass customisation tool, on a global level, then it's easy to see the possibilities.
File under: designing environments to optimise the chances of a desirable behaviour, through (at least partly) unconscious influence.
Every week now there seems to be another social media marketing disaster, usually revolving around the hijacking of the campaign hashtag or - as in the case of the lamentable #freshinourmemories debacle most recently - the hijacking of a 'branded' meme generator gizmo.
Blamestorming from the chattering classes obviously divides it's finger-pointing towards either the agency or the client.
I'll always tend to look at the agency and wonder what on earth they were thinking.
It's grade-A Dunning-Kruger.
In the #freshinourmemories case it appears that the agency in question may pay heavily.
Their website has gone offline completely and other clients have been reported to have dumped them.
But this hurts us all. It makes the whole industry looks bad.
To those who would blame the client - they signed it off etc - I would say, perhaps.
But then don't expect clients to come to agencies for strategic counsel for much longer.
Do we want to be just implementers?
Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. He'd be having a laugh at this business.
But here's a question.
Would there have been the same kerfuffle if the campaign had been a bunch of press ads and posters, for example?
Media that had to be paid for.
We conducted a small survey on supermarket shopping behaviour using the agency staff as our sample group of around 50.
It was relatively unscientific, however, the aim was to crudely test one particular covert thought.
We simply asked our respondents if they used a shopping list when visiting the supermarket.
For those who answered 'yes' we asked them to provide an example of a typical shopping list.
For those who answered 'no' we asked them to jot down what their mental list might typically be, anyway.
This gave us some interesting feedback - scribbled paper lists were by far the most popular, followed by self-text messages - and among this group no-one used a list-type app.
But that wasn't what we were really looking at.
Recently we've been reading Herb Sorensen's 2009 book 'Inside the Mind of the Shopper'.
His research that suggests that:
1. Around half of supermarket trips result in baskets of 5 items or less.
2. The most common basket size is just one item.
(This data is further referenced in the Byron Sharp textbook 'Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice' Chapter 8.)
Close to 90% of our responses contained 5 items or fewer.
The other 10% were 6.
For psych fans, and in the context of of Millers Law - The Magic Number 7, this was also curious.
The 'law' asserts that humans can retain 7 (plus or minus 2) pieces of information easily in working memory.
It turns out that this is less of a law and more of a decent hunch, the real number is closer to 5.
We could infer then, that shopping lists (list apps or other ‘solutions’) don’t necessarily add any utility to shoppers. We are reasonably capable of remembering 5 things.
More on shopping technology in a minute.
So our data was obviously slightly skewed as midweek shopping trips will be more likely to be quick trips, but you get the general idea, and our mode was 2 (pretty close to 1).
(Milk, bread and tissues in case you are wondering.)
Again, all this was interesting but not what I wanted to observe.
What I was looking for was specific brand name mentions.
And among the 86 different product categories listed by our respondents were only two instances of brand names.
Everything else was generic category - bread, milk, fruit, meat, tissues etc.
This seemed to be clear indication that, for the most part, people set out to buy from categories first, brands come second.
Of course preferences do exist, but these are more implicit rather than explicit.
In many fmcg categories brand either doesn't exist or is invisible (meat, fruit, vegetables) might exist but have little or no effect (bread, milk) and in the categories where it does have some influence the brand that gets bought is the one most salient at the point, and context of purchase.
Familiarity, popularity, habit and availability drive FMCG categories.
Unlike fashion or cars for example there is no 'display' or 'social' value for consumers.
One's choice of washing powder does not signal anything to anyone else.
It is simply something to be consumed.
Display value is only a marginally stronger pull anyway.
This is the eternal conundrum for commodity type brands.
All of which is the long way round to looking at Amazon Dash.
The Dash Button is a single-use Wi-Fi enabled ordering device for a selected set of partners including Gillette, Pampers, Tide and Olay. You press it and it orders directly - and frictionless - for you.
The promise of, for example, self-replenishing fridges, has long been part of the lore of 'the internet of things' and this appears to be Amazon’s play in that area, allowing customers to instantly repeat buy partner brands without thinking about it, more importantly, without being distracted by a competing brand at the shelf.
For the remainder of this piece we need to put aside any notions of could/should.
Amazon (and the other SV corporate giants) winner-takes-all disintermediation of every category imaginable is another debate.
Though as Andrew Keen quotes in 'The Internet is Not The Answer'.
“In Darwinian terms these new corporate giants are just the latest stage in the evolution of the public corporation, they exist to create wealth—vast quantities of it—for their founders and shareholders.
Their imperative is to grow and achieve dominance in their chosen markets—as well as in others which they now deem to be within their reach. They are as hostile to trade unions, taxation, and regulation as John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie ever were in their day. The only difference is that the new titans employ far fewer people, enjoy higher margins and are less harassed by governments than their predecessors.”
For FMCG brands, however, this is of little concern. Distribution is distribution.
What's interesting here is not the idea that push button instant replenishment is anything to do with notions of brand loyalty (active, in an attitudinal sense).
But is everything about enabling 'loyalty' in the passive behavioural sense.
On the one hand, commodity products with no display value can try and create 'meaning' by spending on huge emotional advertising - eg P&G's 'Thank You Mom' and the like.
Being famous and familiar will always be important.
But the Dash Button is somehow more refreshingly Nietzschean in it's acceptance of the kind of emptiness of consumption. In reaching acceptance that it will never be loved Tide is now happy just to be bought.
Sorry young millennials.
You are not special.
Your old Gen X mums and dads were just as confused as you, in their day.
'Ultimately, the uneasy relationship The Stranglers had with the punk scene reflected the need that the various protagonists within the movement had for 'authenticity'.
In 'The Culture Of Narcissism', Lasch had noticed that in the late-industrial cultures of the West, in which basic needs had become easily satisfied, and new wants had to be created by the propaganda....a “cult of authenticity” had emerged within “the spectacle” of consumerism that fetishised spontaneity and the confessional.
Punk’s most glaring, and therefore most sensitive, internal contradiction was that it was a largely manufactured movement that was intended to give vent to the organic, spontaneous rage of British youth.
The Stranglers weren’t marginalised because their “opportunism” made them less “real” than the other punk groups. They were marginalised because their established history drew attention to the inauthenticity of the others.'
Identity, Status, Structure and The Stranglers by Phil Knight.
