Carrot, Stick or Nudge?

One approach is the Pledge5 campaign currently being run by Starbucks. The campaign asks people to volunteer 5 hours of their time in their community and it is part of Starbucks’ Shared Planet Initiative. In return for your pledge to volunteer, you get some coffee and a sense of belonging to a larger effort to commit one million hours of volunteer time per year by 2015. The good news is that the site counter shows that almost 1.3 million volunteer hours have already been pledged. That equals about 260,000 volunteers who are also presumably coffee drinkers who may boost Starbucks sagging sales. Good for the communities that benefit from these volunteers, good for Starbucks.

Suze Orman takes it a step further in her quest to compel women to take control of their finances. Suze’s book containing the “Save Yourself Plan” was offered as a public television pledge incentive; compelling women to open a savings account and deposit $100 per month. If they are able to sustain the savings for 12 months, Suze will give them an additional $100. Good for the women who save, good for public television as they gained contributors and very good for the propagation and equity of the Suze Orman brand (once you have one book, you are very likely to go back and get more financial management products from Suze). No doubt a very attractive carrot with a multiplier benefit.

Then, of course, there is the application of the stick; wielded, thankfully, with humor by our friends at careerbuilder.com. In the “It may be time” spot, viewers are compelled to consider looking for a new job based in a series of questions about your current job status (if you hate going to work, you co-workers don’t respect you, you wish you were somewhere else, you cry all the time…). Our punishment for not going to careerbuilder.com is a Dante-esque ring of employment hell, played out in an endless loop.

But what about gently nudging our fellow citizens into specific behavior? As noted in the NY Times on Sunday, one of the writers of the business book Nudge is joining the Obama administration in the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The premise of nudge, as noted in the article is to gently move people toward a desired behavior. The example noted: when an image of a fly was etched on the bowl of urinals in the Amsterdam airport, the amount of stray spray on the floor was reduced by 80%. Apparently a target was helpful for gentlemen. Who knew? My bank nudges me into savings by its “keep the change” product. All my debit card purchases are rounded to the nearest dollar and the difference is transferred from my checking to my savings account. Nifty. I can see what I’ve saved at the end of month. But it also requires that I have a savings account, maintain a minimum balance and pay for using it as an overdraft account. Can you say recurring revenue stream?

Given the fierce competition for any customer today, the ability for brands to provide some positive incentive, even if it’s just a little nudge, surely makes sense. And any benefit derived by the consumer or the community will provide dividends for brands poised to encourage the better angels of our nature. Or maybe just our pocketbooks.