I love social experiments – love’em, love ’em, love ’em.
Even before I met the astounding Paul Britton [he was one of the UK’s prominent criminal profilers and also worked with the FBI] I felt they were a powerful method to truly understand what people did/thought/felt rather than putting all my trust in something like a traditional focus group.
That doesn’t mean I don’t value things like focus groups, of course I do but they – like social experiments – are not the be-all and end-all to consumer understanding and should never be treated as such.
To be honest, one of the main reasons why I/we love to include this approach is that we believe it helps you [and the clients] actually SEE and FEEL what people do as opposed to just accepting what they claim.
Now over the years I/we have done all sorts of controlled experiments – including quite a few ‘questionable’ ones – and while this approach has got increasingly ‘trendy’ over the past few years [especially with things like The Tipping Point and the far superior Freakonomics] it saddens me this approach has been cheapened to some late night trashy television show, even though things like Candid Camera and You’ve Been Framed were around way before I was.
Anyway, whilst the entertainment version of ‘Social Experiment’s is limited to exploiting laughs [as opposed to truly creating a controlled – and as far as possible – quantifiable situation] the consumer insight value is still quite powerful, even if it is done on a very limited scale.
With that in mind, let me introduce you to a sick little film which shows how men [or at least this man] can be spineless and shallow little fucks!
