Who sucks the most?

I found an interesting project lately that I think you will enjoy.  Its called “Gumelection” and encourages passers-by to use their chewing gum to express revulsion for a particular side of an argument. The same gum they have been chewing for the past few minutes.

Ew

Once I got over my initial repulsion at the idea, I realised how clever it was.  I thought that it possessed particular characteristics that could be interesting to explore within a consumer psychology context.

What is it?

Gumelection is essentially a street art production with a political theme and, in my opinion, a clever use of nudge behaviour change techniques.

The production had two main aims;

1. To encourage people to vote on election day

2. To not litter the streets of New York with their chewing gum.

It started off with Obama Vs McCain in 2009.  Following its success, the concept branched out into many other dimensions, including polling brand-preference information. In 2012 with the Obama Vs Romney, the campaign grew bigger than ever, gaining lots of attention from popular media outlets including CNN and The Huffington Post.

Impressively, Gumelection, has been viewed over 60,000 times, has had 6.2 million search results on Google as has spawned a tonne of copy-cats. I think some have the potential of being really influential to the consumer for two main reasons; It is an excellent example of Guerilla Marketing  as well as a comprehensive example of a nudge behaviour-change technique, aiming to keep the streets clean of nasty chewing gum!!!

Guerilla Marketing

In this instance, the consumers are not those in the traditional sense, as there is no exchange of legal tender and a good/service.  Rather the target market for this campaign is the citizens of the US, in raising awareness of the election and encourage them to take part in voting.

Guerilla Marketing bases its findings on human psychology.  It targets its customers in unique and unexpected ways.  Its usually very memorable, which helps to differentiate a brand from its competitors.  This campaign has the potential to be classed as successful guerilla marketing for a number of reasons;

• Its’s novel.  Research has shown that novelty has a way of capturing our attention and making an advertisment memorable, (Berlyne and Parham, 1968).
• It’s funny.  We love to hate a bad guy.  Making devil horns on a picture of a politician you hate with your chewing gum. Sounds like fun to me.  It has been suggested that a humuours quality in an advert also has the capabilitis of caputuring our attention (Weinberger and Gluas, 1992).  There has been quite an amount of research dedicated to changing behaviour using The Fun Theory.
• It’s cost effective.

This interesting campaign has been applied to lots of other settings.  One of the first ones was AT&T vs Horizon, two mobile phone providers. This is slightly more controversial. Initially, gumelection was aimed to encourage people to vote, now two competing companies are competing against eachother. This could generate some discrepencies, especially as there is a social conformity aspect to this project.  However, it is still an engaging and memorable poster.

Nudgeing Behaviour

When we say, nudging behaviour, its something that changes a behaviour without us even really noticing – taking advantage of our implicit or ‘hot’ system.  As humans, we behave according to this system when something feels good right now. Its a fast, emotional and automatic process, (Kardes et al., 2008).  Research has led us to believe that the design of something in a certain way means can lead our behaviour so that we make particular choices (Thaler & Sunstein ,2009).

This kind of choice archatecture, or design with intent, is obvious in this concept.   Design with Intent is a concept by Dan Lockton and friends that comes with a set on 101 instruction cards with a single aim; influencing behaviour through design.  Gumnation is especially effective as a Ludic Lens.  Its virality has made it a meme, and its playfulness provokes our curiosity and makes us want to engage with the design, keeping chewing gum on the posters and not on the footpath.

I also get the impression that there is a use of Cognitive Lens when tackling the issue of voting. Getting people to commit to giving their vote with their gum, could lead to a feeling they should behave consistently with that commitment, thus increasing their chance of voting.  It also provides a social proof, detemining which side is more popular at the given time and place.

What do you think? Is this a good example of guerilla marketing or a behaviour change technique?

Gumelection Credits:

Stefan Haverkamp, James Cooper, Hedvig Astrom.