Does shaming work?
A local council in South Australia is proposing to make residents use clear rubbish bins to “shame” people into recycling. Does shame work as a behavioural strategy?
Clear bin initiatives
While peculiar, the idea of clear plastic bins is not entirely new. Mindarie Regional Council in Western Australia trialled their “Face Your Waste” campaign in 2018. According to the ad agency behind the WA campaign, the trial of 20 bins resulted in significant media...
The three C's of designing a behavioural solution
Bri explains that in order to overcome resistance to behavioural influence, you need to focus on:
- Capacity
- Clarity and
- Confidence
The Simplification Paradox
It was 1876. William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company was approached about a new invention through which people could speak with each other - the talking telegraph.
Orton, well regarded as the leading electrical expert in the country remarked “There is nothing in this patent whatever, nor is there anything in the scheme itself, except as a toy.”
Having had his invention rejected in this manner, Alexander Graham Bell went ahead and established...
Unfu*king prioritisation
Alongside the current decluttering and unfu*king ourselves craze sits the perennial issue of prioritisation.
It’s something we grapple with on an individual level; “how should I spend my time?” and an organisational level; “where should we spend our resources?”
The tangle is not at the extremes – it is obvious what we should definitely do or not do – but the murky middle.
So I’ve been working on a way to behaviourally...
Motivating the unmotivated: The Zorro Technique
Most of the techniques I talk about deal with subconscious influences on behaviour; how the time of day impacts who gets out of jail or how music in a shop can change what people buy, for example.
But today I want to help you have conversations with people. In short, how to lead an individual or group through the need to change so they get on board and stop resisting you.
Bri’s Zorro Technique
Created in 1919 by American writer Johnston McCulley, Zorro is a fictional character who...
Acoustic encoding and other tricks to get into your customer's brain
Lodging yourself in the headspace of your customer is the goal of most marketers. Having a “share of mind” helps in your quest to gain “share of wallet”.
Key to this is your use of language; how you string words and sounds together. The opportunity is to capitalise on Availability Bias – your customer’s tendency to rely upon things that come readily to mind.
With that in mind it seems good timin’ to explain how rhymin’ gets the...
Behavioural Economics has a sticky date problem
Enjoying a weekend away with friends recently and we decided to share dessert. What better on a winter's night than the sweet decadence of a gooey, melting, sumptuous Sticky Date Pudding?
And it arrived.
Only it wasn't as we expected. In fact, we had to confirm that they had given us the right dessert.
Oh yes, it was a Sticky Date Pudding.
It was a deconstructed Sticky Date Pudding.
Dry portion of cake to the left. Sauce in a smear to the right. A quenelle of ice-cream in the...
You've been primed! Will Smith shows us how to influence the subconscious.
There’s a scene in the recent Will Smith movie, “Focus” where as a seasoned con-man he is involved in a high stakes bet.
He lets the gent against whom he is betting randomly choose the number of a football player from the teams below them in the stadium.
If Will Smith’s off-sider (Margot Robbie) also chooses the same random player, Smith wins. If not, he loses everything.
Spoiler alert, both choose player 55 and Smith wins.
Turns out that there was nothing...
