Who is Farhan Lalji? Rotating Header Image

What people say versus what they do

Nov 3rd, 2009
by Farhan.

I’m really digging this campaign by VW – thefuntheory.com – if you’re not familiar with it VW’s doing a bunch of “stunts” to see if making things more fun will get more people to do things. My favourite – and the one that seems the most popular – is the experiment where they painted stairs as piano keys to see if they could get more people to take the stairs (embed below).

Note: there’s some great other ones on thefuntheory.com, and I’m really hoping they keep adding new ones.

The cool thing about this is that I bet if you asked people if this would be successful they probably would have said no. I can see it now, “Making things more fun? I want things to be faster! I want things to be easier!” etc etc. But the fact is that people don’t know what they want until you give them something and watch them interact with it.

Consumers don’t know what they want. It’s up to product folks to show them something and watch and see.

Share

Posted in: business, marketing.

←
→
  • http://byekick.com/ Andrew

    Hi Farhan, this got a bit of an airing at Playful '09 in London last week (http://www.thisisplayful.com).

    One perspective was that it's a great example of using playfulness to change behaviour. The alternative is that it's actually very short-termist and has a great initial hit, but isn't sustainable (and actually, just a little bit annoying). We really need to see a bit more in the way of longer-term evidence to see the point at which the impact diminishes/plateaus as I suspect it does, but… playfulness does have a huge role to play in design (Tweetie 2's 'pull to refresh' feature on the iPhone, being a really simple recent example).

  • http://www.fiftybyfifty.com/lifeoffarhan/ farhanlalji

    Thanks Andrew. Agreed that it's probably not sustainable – however it could be sustainable, say for example in tourist locations, or other high first time traffic areas.

    But that wasn't the point. The point is that asking people what they would do isn't always true to their actual behavior.

    ________________________________