Behavioural Economics in Action: A Case Study
Work
Our agency is getting our head around the principles of behavioural economics and it’s starting to inform our thinking and improve our ideas dramatically. I see behavioural economics as rather executional – it doesn’t help frame the problem, the behaviour to change, or the overall strategy – but once all of that is clear it can be extremely effective in helping devise very effective solutions and ideas.
This is a campaign for a business called Good Goods, who has a toilet paper called Who Gives A Crap. The campaign nominated as one of the Top 12 Entrepreneurial Campaigns world Wide by Indiegogo in 2012. It also just took out the Grand Prix for Australia’s PR awards, Commcon. The campaign involved CEO Simon Griffith’s sitting on a toilet until people had donated $50,000. We decided on this activity as we had seen the principle of scarcity work in many other crowd sourced programs. By giving people only time limited opportunity to get involved in something ‘silly and talkable’ we hypothesised that it would create demand, and it did. Further, we provided social proof the campaign was working, encouraging others to join in.
The other key element of behavioural economics principles informed was the prizes we offered for donations. We offered very high end prizes (up to $2,500 donations) to anchor the expected donations as high as possible (we presented the list in ascending order of donation – in retrospect it should have been in descending order). We also ensured there was an honour role to further incentivised donors with public recognition.
In the end 1333 people donated a total of $66,000 dollars. We learned a lot about human motivations and how to incentive action.
Have a look at the video for you behavioural economics junkies out there if you can help inform us on other behavioural economic principles we’ve used it would be appreciated.
