Harnessing Social Pressure

Marketers are good at using peer influence to sell products, but few executives understand that it can motivate customers to help companies achieve other goals, such as saving money. Even fewer seem to be aware that the improper use of peer influence can elicit behaviors contrary to what was intended.

Hotels, for example, don’t exploit peer influence when trying to get guests to reuse towels, even though the daily cost of providing fresh ones can run to $1.50 a room. My colleagues and I set out to see if we could boost participation in one hotel’s towel-reuse program by placing signs with various messages in randomly chosen rooms. We increased participation by 26% over the standard environmental appeal by truthfully stating that the majority of other hotel guests reused their towels. The increase in compliance was even greater when we communicated that most of the guests who had stayed in that particular room were reusers.

But peer influence can have strange effects. In a study led by the social psychologist Robert Cialdini, signs at Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park lamenting that many previous visitors had stolen petrified wood not only proved less effective at reducing pilferage than signs simply asking visitors not to take souvenirs, but resulted in more theft than when no signs at all were dis- played. And in research I conducted with Wesley Schultz and several colleagues, California households that were informed they were using more electricity than their neighbors reduced their consumption, but those informed that they were using less increased their consumption by 8.6%.

The lesson is that people respond strongly to messages about the behavior of others, particularly similar others; the more similar the other people, the more potent the effect. But beware: A publicized behavioral norm becomes a “magnetic middle,” drawing people toward it. To avoid inadvertently encouraging your best-behaved customers to backslide, try showing approval for their behavior. When the message to the below-norm California electricity users included a smiley face as a sign of approval, those households continued to consume at their original low rate.

Via: Hbr