shopping bags to carry their purchases home. But because of the Social
Currency associated with some of these retailers, many consumers reuse the
bags rather than tossing them. They use the Victoria’s Secret bags to carry
their gym clothes, toss their lunch into a Tiffany bag, or use Bloomingdale’s
famous medium brown bag to carry papers around town. People even reuse
bags from restaurants, discount stores, and other places that are not status
symbols.
Clothing retailer Lululemon takes this idea one step further. Rather than
make paper bags that are relatively durable, it makes shopping bags that are
hard to throw away. Made of sturdy plastic like reusable grocery bags, these
bags are clearly meant to be reused. So people use them to carry groceries
or do other errands. But along the way this behavioral residue helps provide
social proof for the brand.
Giveaways can also provide behavioral residue. Go to any conference,
job fair, or large meeting where presenters have set up booths and you’ll be
stunned by the amount of swag they give away. Mugs, pens, and T-shirts.
Beverage cozies, stress balls, and ice scrapers. A couple of years ago the
Wharton School even gave me a tie.
But some of these giveaways provide better behavioral residue than
others. Giving away a makeup carrying case is fine, but women usually
apply makeup in the privacy of their bathrooms, so it doesn’t make the
brand that observable. Coffee mugs and gym bags might be used less
frequently, but their use is more publicly visible.
People posting their opinions and behavior online
also provide behavioral
residue. Reviews, blogs, posts, or other sorts of content all leave evidence
that others can find later. For this reason, many businesses and
organizations encourage people to Like them—or their content—on
Facebook. By simply clicking the Like button, people not only show their
affinity with a product, idea, or organization, they also help spread the word
that something is good or worth paying attention to. ABC News found that
installing these buttons boosted its Facebook traffic by 250 percent.
Other sites push, or automatically post, what people do to their social
networking pages. Music has always been a somewhat social activity, but
Spotify takes this a step further. The system allows
you to listen to whatever
songs you like but also posts what you’re listening to on your Facebook
page, making it easier for your friends to see what you like (and letting
them know about Spotify). Many other websites do the same.
at whether the public service announcements seemed to decrease marijuana
use.
They didn’t.
In fact, the messages actually seemed to
increase drug use. Kids aged
twelve and a half to eighteen who saw the ads were actually
more likely to
smoke marijuana. Why?
Because it made drug use more public.
Think about observability and social proof. Before seeing the message,
some kids might never have thought about taking drugs. Others might have
considered it but have been wary about doing the wrong thing.
But anti-drug ads often say two things simultaneously. They say that
drugs are bad, but they also say that other people are doing them. And as
we’ve discussed throughout this chapter, the more others seem to be doing
something, the more likely people are to think that thing is right or normal
and what they should be doing as well.
Imagine you’re a fifteen-year-old who has never considered using drugs.
You’re sitting at home watching cartoons one afternoon when a public
service announcement comes on telling you about the dangers of drug use.
Someone’s going to ask you if you want to try drugs and you need to be
ready to say no. Or even worse, the cool kids are going to be the ones
asking. But you shouldn’t say yes.
You never see public service announcements for avoiding cutting off
your hand with a saw or not getting hit by a bus, so if the government spent
the time and money to tell you about drugs, a lot of your peers must be
doing them, right? Some of them are apparently the coolest kids in school.
And you had no idea!
As Hornik said,
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