An article in this morning's Wall Street Journal caught my eye. Although it is not the point of the article, I was intrigued by the results of a study led by social influence researcher Robert Cialdini.
When hotels left a message asking guests to please reuse their towels to help the hotel save energy, 84% of the guests refused. When the message was, instead, "Partner with us to help the environment," almost twice as many guests, 31%, reused their towels.
When the message was changed to "Almost 75% of guests reuse towels," 44% of guests responded by reusing their towels. And when the message became even more local and specific--"75% of the guests who stayed in this room reuse towels"--49% of guests began reusing their towels.
Local and specific. "Dine out more often" or "Denny's: Real Breakfast 24/7"--these messages are easy to tune out. But to a local audience: "New desserts at the Cup & Saucer," or "Cup & Saucer Sponsors Little League" may sound corny, but unless you're just passing through, they are important stories that you want to know about. "Considering retirement, Smith may close Cup & Saucer" is a grabber.
I suspect these local messages are sticky for the same reason we want to know what guests who stayed in our hotel room did with their towels. Local people, specific places where we go or could go to spend our money--these are a degree of magnitude more important to us than some international chain's ads. National advertisers are so used to the automatic multiplier of media like television that they don't seem to realize the impact that the web will have on community, localcast, advertising.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment