Marketing, Urinals and Manipulation!

Sometimes, using the “Side Door” rather than the “Front Door” is the best way in.

This especially applies when you’re getting your customers to behave in a way that you want.  It’s not groundbreaking stuff to learn 99% of your customers don’t care about you, or any problems you may be having, etc.

FACT -  Customers are only interested in their own needs.  So trying to control (manipulate?) their behaviour by directly asking them to do something for you (the “Front Door” method) can quite often be a fruitless task!

However, by using the “Side-Door” method, your issues can quite often be resolved, here’s one example for you, I’ll post another tomorrow…

Airport toilet cleaners improve their Marksmen’s aim

Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, Holland had a rather smelly problem to do with their ‘Gents Bathrooms’.  Namely, more pee seemed to end up on the floor rather than in the urinals.  As a result, a whole army of pee-mopping janitors where employed to keep the problem under control.

Almost every Gents Room across the globe shares this problem.  Men, despite being gifted the ability to aim whilst peeing, all too often don’t care or bother.  Traditionally, this problem is handled by displaying notices in Gents Room’s asking patrons to try to keep everything neat & tidy.  This approach has never worked, hence,  cleaners have needed to be employed in order to ‘cure’ the problem.  The ‘vaccine’ to this problem, for years, would remain undiscovered.

However, in 2005 at Schiphol Airport, the ever resourceful Dutch found the elusive vaccine!

“yesch, if we can control the sea, we can control the pee pee!”

What they did.

They understood that men have the perfect equipment in their ‘Netherlands’ to aim effectively, but often, are too lazy to do so.

So what they did, was very simple.  They put a sticker of a fly in the middle of each and every urinal (Just like this one).

(Each sticker could not have cost more than 1 penny each.)

The Result?

Everyone who used the urinals now had a little ‘target’ to aim and as a result, concentrated all their efforts on keeping the poor little flies under constant attack!

The effect on spillage’s was a reported 80% reduction.  Not a bad Rate of Return for a sticker that costs less than a cent!

Why the “Side Door” was better then the “Front Door”

By using the “side-Door” and giving the bathroom user an ‘engaging’ experience, their behaviour was successfully manipulated into a win-win scenario.  i.e. the airports cleaning costs where down, and their toilet-visiting patrons enjoyed a cleaner environment and 30 seconds of fun (by the way of target practice)!

Another example tomorrow.

Another, cleaner, example of a “Side-Door” tactic will be posted tomorrow.  So don’t miss out on this little gem by subscribing by the rss/email link at the top of this page.

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