If you go in the men’s bathrooms at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport (and I realise some of you never will, so I’ve attached a pic), you’ll notice there’s a fly hand-painted on the ceramic of every urinal.
The flies are there because airport bosses had become concerned about the amount of time and money being spent on cleaning round the urinals.
It turned out male passengers were too distracted or in too much of a hurry to pay attention to their aim. Over time, these little spillages added up to a sizeable cleaning bill and a fairly unpleasant experience for travellers.
The airport’s facilities team tried a number of different ways to encourage urinal-users to be more fastidious: from polite cajoling to threatening notices to spot fines. Nothing seemed to make any difference.
Then some bright spark came up with the idea of the flies.
Men are instinctively competitive creatures, they suggested. You can keep giving them rational reasons to improve their aim and they’ll just keep tuning them out. Whereas, if you give them a target to aim at, they won’t want to miss.
The bright spark was right.
Accuracy in the trial urinal areas improved dramatically. Cleaning costs fell like a stone. And, since the painted flies have been rolled out to the rest of the airport, savings now run into many millions of Euros.
It’s a good example of the ‘nudge’ theory in action. It’s also an example worth bearing in mind next time someone asks you to run a ‘serious’ communication campaign.
Because the best way of getting people to change their behaviour is not to keep banging on at them with rational arguments that they’re not interested in.
It’s to reframe the problem in a way that makes them want to engage with it.
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