On a recent trip to Paris, I stayed in a hotel where cards were placed in the bathrooms urging customers to reuse towels and turn off the lights, stating the tremendous environmental benefits of doing so. Highlighting the environmental benefits of behaviour should nudge individuals to make more eco-friendly decisions, right? Especially with the global focus on combatting climate change? Not necessarily.
In Richard Shotton’s The Choice Factory, he mentions a study done by Cialdini’s 2008, which showed that the industry-standard messaging, often stating environmental benefits, was not the most effective but the most used. He convinced a hotel chain in the US to change the messaging to include social proof to see if it increased towel reuse rates. Simply adapting the message to include social proof boosted uptake from 35% to 44%; this showed that hotel guests are especially motivated to reuse their towels when they learn that most others have chosen to do the same thing, not because it helps the environment. Similar findings have been replicated in restaurants, with weight management and even tax returns. So, what is social proof, and why is it so effective?
Everyday adverts are rife with information on social norms; in fact, we’re so used to the messaging that we might not even notice it. We are fed information that ‘eight out of 10 people choose one brand of soap over another’ or that ‘teeth-whitening toothpaste has become more popular than normal toothpaste’. Consumers are continuously educated on what everyone else is doing; more specifically, they get information about descriptive norms, which refer to how most people behave in situations, in this instance, hotel guests’ eco-friendly behaviour (Cialdini, 2008). Descriptive norms inform both our public and private actions by telling us what behaviour is likely to be effective in a given situation (Cialdini, Kallgren, and Reno, 1991). Essentially the behaviour of others in our social environment shapes people’s interpretations of and responses to a situation (Bearden & Etzel, 1982).
It’s 2023 and industry-standard messaging hasn’t seemed to have changed at all, even with the proven effectiveness of social proof. So why is this? Probably because most hotel chains don’t keep up with the social science literature, fair enough. However, mechanisms like social proof have broad applicability; let’s think about this in the context of brand messaging, it can be very effective, but there are still certain sceptics.
Interestingly consumers often claim that social proof has no impact on them, making brands dubious when using biases for fear they won’t be effective and consumers will clock on to them. Cialdini found that consumers claim that social proof does not affect them when in reality, it does. In another part of his experiment, Cialdini asked the group to predict their own behaviour, participants overwhelmingly claimed that they preferred the environmental message and would respond to it; however, their actual behaviour told a completely different story.
What consumers think they do and what they actually do are often two very different things. Let’s use the ever-present topic of sustainability as an example. When consumers are asked if they care about buying environmentally and ethically sustainable products, they overwhelmingly answer yes: in a 2020 McKinsey US consumers sentiment survey, more than 60% of respondents said they’d pay more for a product with sustainable packaging. Yet many CPG executives report that a challenge often faced by their company’s ESG initiatives is that it can be difficult to generate sufficient consumer demand for these products. There are many stories of companies launching new products incorporating ESG-related claims only to find that the sales did not meet expectations.
Recent research has shown that consumers are slowly shifting their spending towards products with ESG-related claims. However, it is likely far from the amount individuals might claim on self-report surveys, making it extremely important for brands not to rely solely on claimed data.
In the wise words of David Ogilvy…
“Consumers don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say!”
So, what can we learn from all this? Well, for starters, hotels need to take a serious look at their bathroom copywriting. On a more serious note, social proof can be a powerful tool to change behaviour because consumers don’t always behave how they think they do….
*Credit: The Choice Factory
Written by Rosie Mahoney, Junior Strategist, big group.