The Truth About My Water Bottle: Psychology and Sustainable Marketing
It’s hard to imagine how I survived without it. Every day is punctuated by it. I am the proud owner of a Chilly’s water bottle and so, apparently, is everyone else…
Walking home from the gym last week, I panicked. Where was my bottle? I tore through my bag desperately. As my fingers found the cold steel case, I started to wonder: how did it come to this? Since when did a bottle prompt such panic? What mind games put this thing in my hand?
This is the story of an irrational consumer journey, and it begins on a bus…
Stage 1: Awareness
Bright pink on one side, yellow on the other, it barrelled down the street. I was captivated by it; a two-tone holler, warbling against the urban backdrop. I caught the slogan at the last moment, but I didn’t recognise it at the time.
#ChillysEverywhere.
Chilly’s is famous for its saturation campaigns. The most well-known of them all but shut down Twitter in 2017. Just a few weeks after my encounter with the dichromatic double-decker, a familiar slogan started cluttering my news feed. On that occasion, the company’s iconic hashtag earned over 300,000 new fans and 6000 Instagram posts within a few weeks of its launch. If that traction is impressive, it’s still nothing compared to the traffic it generated.
Between 2017 and 2018, Chilly’s sold over 200,000 bottles. That adds up to a return of $2.56 for each dollar spent on advertising. So, how did they do it? How did social media become the world’s most efficient advert?
#FOMO
To answer that question, let me ask you another…. What are you most afraid of? It’s different for everyone right? There is one thing that almost every internet user has experienced… FOMO.
It has always existed in some form, but the “Fear of Missing Out” has been intensified by the ubiquity of social media. All of a sudden, we have a front-row seat to a life that isn’t ours. Whenever our friends go to an event, a sunny beach or a glamorous party, we wish we were with them. This voyeurism is guaranteed to make the compulsive-scroller feel left out. Marketers can use this to their advantage.
A few weeks after I encountered the #Chilly’sEverywhere bus, my newsfeed became a collage of designer bottles. They were everywhere: important events, sunny beaches, even parties. It seemed like all my friends were buying one. Suddenly, I felt excluded.
The explosion of Chilly’s-related images through the spring and summer of 2018 had another powerful effect on anyone who happened to encounter them. Thanks to the hyper-focused communities of social media, Chilly’s became a case study in Social Proof.
The Irrational World of Social Proof
Robert Cialdini’s 1984 best-seller on persuasion and marketing, Influence, describes the impact of consensus over individuals. The same effects have been studied by psychologists since the work of Solomon Asch in the 1950s. Both cognitive and social psychology demonstrate the power of the group to shape our tastes and judgements.
In the world of eCommerce, star ratings and reviews are used to provide Social Proof. In theatres, audience plants encourage an audience to clap, laugh and cry at the right time. For Chilly’s water bottles, social media supplied an irresistible wave of enthusiasm described by Facebook’s head of UK eCommerce, Daryl Hughes…
I didn’t know I needed a water bottle until I saw Chilly’s Bottles in my news feed…
Together with the impact of industrial-strength FOMO, this Social Proof was enough to make me want the bottle. Still, that wasn’t enough for me to buy it. Not yet.
Stage 2: Choice
There were hundreds of bottles I could choose from(S’well, Klean Kanteen, Hydroflask….). Spoilt for choice, I did not want to be swayed by what was trendy. At first, I disregarded Chilly’s as a cynical brand piggy-backing the latest trends; their bottles were covered in avocados, flamingos and rose gold. This feeling is known as psychological reactance, and it occurs any time we feel pushed towards something.
I still wanted a water bottle, but I finally chose a Chilly’s bottle because it felt like the one I needed.
Needs are not the same as desires. They are much more powerful. A common example, identified by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan in their 1985 study on Intrinsic Motivation, is the need for self-determination. Part of what makes something Cool is the way it empowers the individual, allowing them to challenge conventions.
With the advent of Blue Planet and the environmental movement, people are more willing than ever to challenge social conventions surrounding plastic consumption. Chilly’s water bottles present themselves as way for people to aline themselves with this resistance. In doing so, they appeal to a deep yearning for self-determination.
Buying
I knew I liked the bottle and the pressure to define the relationship was mounting. Ever non-committal, I hemmed and hawed, periodically going online to look at the bottle. Sometimes I’d get as far as putting it in my cart before I chickened out and left the site. Why? Spending money hurts!
I rarely feel like dropping 25 pounds at the drop of a hat and so I procrastinated. The catalyst was when I went online just to look at the bottles. I saw a message that caught me off-guard...
LAST FEW IN STOCK.
We always want what we can’t have. Qualified in 1975 by scientists Worchel, Lee and Adewole, this phenomenon is known as the Scarcity Effect. I was flirting with the purchase because it was well-reviewed (not to mention gorgeous), but it was the threat of losing it that made me act. All of a sudden, I had to have it.
Conclusion
Chilly’s came at their target audience from exactly the right angles, capitalising on biases that are hard to resist. The road-map that led to me buying one is rooted in the psychology of an irrational consumer and an expert use of FOMO, Scarcity and Social Proof.
The purchase seemed rational enough (I wanted to stop using plastic water bottles) but it was propelled by predicable features of the human mind. Luckily, I love my water bottle. In fact, I don’t know how I’d survive without it.
