Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [49]
The wide use of a product, particularly an experience good, indicates its value. Nevertheless, this belief is sometimes unfounded and can lead people astray. In 1844, George Geddens convinced the town of Salinas, New York, to build wood plank roads. His promoters claimed “The new roads would end rural isolation, speed commerce, improve wives and daughters, increase church attendance, bring wealth to investors.” Shortly thereafter, 289 companies were formed in New York to build plank roads, and the plank-road mania spread throughout the country. However, the roads proved to have a much shorter life span than expected and bankruptcies ensued (Klein and Majewski 1994).
Social proof has a strong influence on behavior. Goethe’s 1774 novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, affected some readers strongly. Many of them dressed and acted as Werther did. And some committed suicide, as Werther had done. Because of the copycat deaths, some European countries banned the novel. Scientific studies of this “Werther effect” began around 1840. In 1910, the Viennese Psychoanalytical Association examined whether newspaper reports on suicide caused school children to commit suicide. A year later, a commission of the American Medical Association addressed the same issue. As of the late 1980s, there were approximately 90 studies; they showed that the Werther effect is strong (Schmidtke and Häfner 1988).
In a six-episode television series, Death of a Student, a suicide victim jumped in front of a train. Following its 1981 and 1982 showings, suicides rose, especially of people who were similar in age and sex to the victim in the series. For the most similar group, suicides nearly doubled during the 70 days after each showing. Suicides that involved trains increased substantially (Schmidtke and Häfner 1988).
When suicides are sensationalized in the media and shown as a way that people solved problems (e.g., financial losses), they are like ads for suicides. In 1993, the World Health Organization listed “toning down reports in the press” as one of the basic steps for suicide prevention. The implementation of this recommendation was shown to substantially reduce suicides on the Vienna subway, for example (Schmidtke and Schaller 1998).
Social proof can have powerful effects on a wide range of behavior. It is an explanation for the success of Ponzi schemes.
The U.S. National Park service posted signs to reduce the theft of petrified wood: “Your heritage is being vandalized everyday by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year mostly a small piece at a time.” It then facilitated an experiment on the extent to which the sign reduced theft. Place your bet: ___ no change; ___small reduction; ___ large reduction.
2.2.1. Show that the product is widely used
Their intrinsic worth is not sufficient … most go with the
crowd, and go because they see others go.
Baltasar Gracián, 1637
An early 1900s advertising book illustrated the effect of widespread behavior: “One man stands in the street gazing up at the top of a high building. A crowd collects with each man craning his neck. The power seemed to increase with the size of the crowd” (Tipper et al. 1921). This was tested many years later by having collaborators stand on a sidewalk in New York City and look up at a sixth-floor window for 60 seconds. The authors observed the behavior of 1,424 passers-by. When only one confederate looked up, 4 percent of the passersby stopped; when five confederates looked up, 15 percent stopped; and when 15 confederates looked up, 40 percent stopped (Milgram, Bickman, and Berkowitz 1969).
In 1995, Michael Tracey and Fred Wiersema arranged to have some buyers purchase 30,000 copies of their book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, from stores that monitor the New York Times bestseller list. Once on the list, the book continued to sell well, despite