Making Behavior Fun, Popular and Easy

If you know social marketing extraordinaire Nancy Lee, then you have heard this saying. Recently, on the social marketing listserv, some dialogue has been shared in response to Nancy Lee and Philip Kotler’s article in Stanford’s Innovation Review titled “Best of Breed,” which looks at corporate social marketing. This could be its own post, but alas, I want to focus on the message of being fun, popular and easy.

Why? Because whether it’s social marketing or corporate social marketing, you are still working to effectively change or influence behavior for good–and an effective way to do so is making your desired behavior fun, popular and easy–which is exactly what started bubbling through on the social marketing list serv as others started sharing some of their favorite fun, popular and easy social marketing initiatives. Enjoy–and when you find yourself running around ragged, ask yourself: Is anyone having fun? Is this easy for people? and go from there.

The Piano Staircase

To encourage passerbyers to take the stairs rather then the escalator (and thus promote physical activity), this group turned the stairs into a piano–whenever you stepped on a stair a different sound would echo–in effect, making taking stairs more exciting than an everyday escalator. I can’t find the source, but it apparently had a 60% success rate. Who’s behind it? Volkswagon. Apparently, Volkswagon has been trying out some experimental marketing based around “The Fun Theory” to see if they could create desired behaviors if the action was made fun. You can read more about the piano staircase and other initiatives such as the recycling arcade and more at TheFunTheory.com.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw

The Pink Glove Dance

You may have seen this one already, as it’s been circling the blogosphere for a while. But, it’s an example of everyday people–hospital employees–finding a way to make their job fun while communicating a message–that you aren’t alone when taking steps to prevent breast cancer, like getting a mammogram.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEdVfyt-mLw

Musical Hand Sanitizer

Aas part of Volkswagon’s initiative, they are hosting an awards program on the best “fun” applications for healthy and good behaviors. One entry was a University who had installed hand sanitizers to prevent the spread of germs during the flu season. They found few students using them. Thus, they adopted the fun theory and installed some sounds. Each time someone went for hand sanitizer, a funny noise was created. Results? With the sounds included, students were seven times more likely to use the germ-reducing resource.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9nCRJo73oI&feature=player_embedded

Pedestrian TV Traffic Light

In this example, you get some free entertainment while waiting to cross the street. Instead of staring at a red outline of a person wishing it to change with your desired mind control, this traffic light shows TV clips–vidoes from YouTube, funny clips from TV shows, etc. This way, the hope is that you’ll actually wait until it’s safe to cross the street.

Make Your Watermark

Design you own bottle at the vending machine. Granted, I know bottles and paint on bottles isn’t good for the environment. But if you can’t quite get that change initiated, then check out what this group did. To encourage people to buy water over sugary pop or juices form the vending machine, they enabled it so people can design their own water bottle from the vending machine at the point-of-purchase. Now that’s easy, and fun!

Fun, Popular and Easy…Online?

More examples are found on the FunTheory.com Web site mentioned earlier, and I have to admit–it’s fun just looking through them. But, my mind started going: How can you make your online and social media communications fun, popular and easy to help you achieve your behavior change mission? Now, that’s a weighty question. Then, I started thinking about what is it in a Web or social media behavior change initiative that makes it fun, popular and easy:

FUN: Community-based, drive accountability of others through accountability, collaborative in nature
Example: Certain online communities help training for a 5k easier by focusing on accountability or making the desired behavior fun by making it social. Other communities, such as the Sister to Sister Foundation’s online community focusing on healthy behaviors for heart health amongst women. These type of communities make healthy behaviors fun by creating accountabilty and making the behavior social.

POPULAR: Driven by influencers and respected peers in the community or content area the desired behavior resides.
Example: AIDS.gov video-storytelling. AIDS.gov encouraged state officials to create their video on why its important to get tested for HIV. Another example? HHS’ flu PSA contest. Not only was this driven and announced by the HHS Secretary herself, but it was also supported and promoted by all of HHS’ agencies. And it’s winner–come on, who’s more popular than a rapping doctor?

EASY: This may be the most important when it comes to the online arena. Because, for people to use the technology combined with the messages, etc., the technology must first work. It must incorporate usability best practices, be accessible and depending on your audience, address literacy issues, including technology literacy. You technology could be great, but if it’s too complicated and no one uses it, it’s just techology.
Example: Most recently, AIDS.gov hosted the “Face AIDS” campaign asking people to join in. The effort involved a few steps, but AIDS.gov made it easy and fun by creating a collective flickr account to display all the images. Here’s a thought: Some social media is easy to adopt. one click and your a fan, one click and you are a follower. One click, and you’ve downloaded a healthy recipe book. One click and you have a mobile app to track your physical fitness. How can your organization leverage these easy tools for behavior change?

What about you? What are some of your favorite fun, popular and easy social marketing efforts? Any of those take place online?

8 thoughts on “Making Behavior Fun, Popular and Easy”

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Tre ~ December 17, 2009 at 4:05 am

Wow. Hey Alexandra. Awesome read. Truly. I’d seen the piano but not the others. How true it is that when something is fun it engages and inspires. This is exactly the reason I responded so well to the #twestival global campaign when it launched a year ago to promote #charitywater.org. This is surely what grabbed me to find out more about http://blogher.com initially 2 years ago. I used to teach middle school and actually much more aware of my ‘fun’ behaviors back then. I had to be! Here’s to revving up the level of fun in my life and my work. Thanks so much for this!!!

Alex Post authorDecember 17, 2009 at 7:18 am

@Tresha Yes! I almost put down Twestival and Tweetsgiving down as FUN online examples as they both really tap into community and make fundraising and awareness=building a social event (even if those aren’t specific behavior change initiatives).

“Here’s to revving up the level of fun in my life and my work.” I’ll toast to that!

Susannah Fox December 17, 2009 at 10:41 am

Great post, Alex!

As for fun & easy behavior change, see: http://getupandmove.me/

It’s a way to challenge friends to take short breaks from our sedentary lives – to walk for 15 minutes, run for 5, dance for 2 songs, etc.

Stand by for a #getupandmove challenge from me (since we follow each other on Twitter I can send it via DM).

Alex Post authorDecember 17, 2009 at 11:20 am

@Susannah Yes! Dancing for exercise? I’m there. I knew there were FUN forms of encouraging physical fitness that I’ve seen on Twitter that also drive accountability by challenges, contests etc.–I just couldn’t recall them in the wee hours of last night. So, thank you for highlighting this one as it’s new to me.

Nedra December 17, 2009 at 10:50 pm

Alex, this is a great compilation of examples! FYI, thought you’d like to know that the “fun, easy and popular” mantra we all throw around originated with Bill Smith of AED. But has become part of the SM canon!

Mike Newton-ward December 18, 2009 at 8:51 am

Alex, I like your discussion here. To provide some historical context (and Nedra beat me to the keyboard here), I first heard the phrase “fun, easy, and popular,” used to define social marketing by Bill Smith from the Academy for Educational Development, 5-6-7 years ago at the USF social marketing conference.

It is important to note that fun, easy and popular is shorthand for things we know from theory about what influences behavior. FUN-refers to whether the population views the behavior having actual or perceived benefits for themselves. EASY-refers whether the population has access, knowledge, skills, products, etc to do the behavior. POPULAR-whether there is support for the behavior change among the various networks (familial, social, cultural, racial, professional, etc) to which members of a population belong.

All of this is based in work from a wonderful consensus conference that NIMH held to find commonalities among the proponents of various behavior change theories. Although that work was focused on efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, I believe it has broad applicability to other health behaviors, as well. The work is summarized in a very nice chapter: Fishbein, Martin, Harry C. Triandis, Frederick H. Kanfer, Marshall Becker, Susan E. Middlestadt, and Anita Eichler (2001), “Factors Influencing Behavior And Behavior Change,” in Handbook Of Health Psychology, ed. Andrew Baum, Tracy A. Revenson, and Jerome. E. Singer, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 3-17.)

Alex Post authorDecember 18, 2009 at 9:54 pm

Hi Mike,

I saw your post on the social marketing list serv and loved its elaboration on the concept of “fun, popular and easy” and love that it ties back pretty directly to theory. I will be sure to look up the citation you reference. Thanks! -Alex

Jen McCabe December 29, 2009 at 9:51 am

Hey Alex-

Thanking Susannah for the intro and recruiting you to try getupandmove.me!

Would love to have your feedback. We’re in very early stages (v2.0, less than a month old) and already the emerging behaviors as users redefine fitness in the social graph using ‘microchallenges’ is fascinating.

We haven’t yet integrated with personal biometric trackers like FitBit or WakeMate (for sleep), but are considering it in the future – as well as telemedicine integration for challenges and self-reporting on metrics important for preventive health in conditions like diabetes, etc.

Planned future features include Facebook Connect integration, group challenges, export activity to calorie counters, etc.

The app uses Twitter.com OAuth to login, but Facebook integration is coming soon.

To get started, challenge your friendly founders @jensmccabe (me) and @shazow (Andrey Petrov, former 23andMe engineer) to kick the tires and burn off some excess holiday cheer.

Looking forward to moving with you!
Jen McCabe
Founder, Contagion Health
Getupandmove.me
@jensmccabe

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8 thoughts on “Making Behavior Fun, Popular and Easy”