From Petrified Wood to Pints Social Proof Gone Wrong
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How does Phill test ad creative and report his results?
What I like about your content that you share, Phil, is you do all your own tests as well, don't you? So you'll say, I tested this against this, and this was the difference. It's usually just one picture of one ad one way and one picture of an ad another way. What are the biggest – obviously, my show is called Embracing Marketing Mistakes. What are the biggest mistakes you see marketers making in your area? Do you spot them a lot?
The classic one, the really funny one is, because we've spoken about social proof already, there's this concept of negative social proof. So social proof is very powerful. We do follow the actions of other people. But sometimes marketers get confused and they share that lots of people are doing an action which the marketer would consider undesirable. And they put that in their campaign. And that actually influences the wrong behavior. So let me give an example. This was a study in universities. I think it was a European university.
What common marketing mistakes does Phill notice in campaign design?
that wanted to reduce the amount of binge drinking on campus. In fact, if it was binge drinking, it must have been a British university. So let's assume it was a British one. They wanted to reduce the amount of binge drinking. And so they said the average student drinks eight pints a week. This is way above the suggested amount you need to reduce the amount you're drinking. Actually, if you understand social proof, you realize by saying the average student drinks eight pints a week will make everybody who drinks less think, oh, my God, I need to drink more. I'm such a loser. And maybe those who drink more think, oh, yeah, cool. I'm above average here. god that's quite cool isn't it so you're encouraging wrong behavior and then that study they actually found that drinking increased when they showed that this is um there's another example as well yeah i know i know it's hilarious and there's another example from an arizona park where people were stealing this petrified wood which is crystallized wood really really precious and
And people were stealing it.
What is negative social proof and why can it backfire?
And Robert Cialdini, who's the author behind the book Influence, he went into this park and he looked at the signs. And the signs say, people who enter this park steal one point or something like 100 tons of this wood every year on average. Please don't. This is a really bad thing to say.
And so it doesn't matter.
Yeah, exactly. So if I just take a little one for my daughter that weighs about two grams, it won't even make a difference. And then when he changed the signs that said, just please don't steal the petrified wood, the amount of people who stole actually decreased. And I see this all the time. If you go on Wikipedia today, probably you will see a message that says something along the lines of only 1% of people reading this message will donate. Please donate to keep Wikipedia running. The studies suggest that shouldn't work because what people will think when they read that is, oh, nobody really gives anyway and Wikipedia is quite successful. It's not going to go anywhere soon. They probably don't need my help.
Whereas if they said something like, if they wanted to use social proof, I'm in Bristol. If they said something like 4,000 Wikipedia lovers in Bristol donate on a monthly basis, could you join them? That should, according to the science, be much more effective. And I'd love to see Wikipedia testing that. So negative social proof is definitely a mistake I see a lot of companies make.
Thanks for listening to Embracing Marketing Mistakes. You've reached the end of the podcast. Hooray! What can you possibly do to help Chris and Will, the providers of this show?
How did a university binge‑drinking campaign unintentionally increase drinking?
Well, what you can help us by doing is just please give us some feedback, positive, negative, constructive. Well, hopefully not negative, but if you could give us a review somewhere, a five-star review preferably, wherever you get your podcasts, it will really help for people to find the show because there's loads of other people out there that we'd love to hear about it. And the guests that come on here, we want to give them as much visibility as possible.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How does Phill test ad creative and report his results?
0:00–0:55
2
What common marketing mistakes does Phill notice in campaign design?
0:55–1:54
3
What is negative social proof and why can it backfire?
1:54–3:23
4
How did a university binge‑drinking campaign unintentionally increase drinking?
3:23–4:10
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Embracing Marketing Mistakes
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