Home > Socialmarketing > If everyone’s at it . . .

If everyone’s at it . . .

Here’s a great case study of the popular element of making something fun, easy and popular.

Of course you have your own moral code, of course you do, your own sense of right and wrong, just as MPs do.

So imagine you park your bike in a bike-shed. A sign says: no graffiti. On your return, you find a leaflet stuck to the handlebars. What do you do with it? Chuck it in the street, or bin it elsewhere?

That depends, says Ramsey Raafat from University College London, who describes a set of curious experiments in Holland.

“When the riders or owners returned to their bike, 33% of the people chucked the flyer, littered, broke a norm.

“But when there was a slight manipulation, everything’s the same – we have our bike shed, bikes, prominent ‘no graffiti’ sign – but now there’s graffiti in the area, so a norm has been violated. Now interestingly in this situation, a whopping 69% of the riders when they returned chucked the flyer. And so in this instance when one norm’s violated – the graffiti violation – there’s a massive effect on another norm of littering.”

Is that a surprise? We’ve always known that behaviour is sometimes easily influenced. How else, you might have found occasion to ask, does the nice lad from the nice family next door become a lout in a mob, lurching, swearing, singing offensively down the road? Because his frame of moral reference temporarily stops at those around him. He sees no one else.

For more details read the original story here. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8133834.stm

To use this in marketing sport its useful to use your marketing materials to demonstrate that others like your target audience think of this behaviour as normal.

For example – 80% of office workers find that walking the stairs every day helps them de-stress.