TerraCycle experiments with fun

In episode 545 from the podcast How I Built This by Guy Raz, Tom Szaky of TerraCycle explains that his team tried ways of making people put more trash into trash bins and by making the trash bins bit more fun.

For example, they added light and sound, light effects when people put something in the trash bin. Just with that change, they improved the number of people who put trash in the bins.

The Fun Theory campaign

This reminds me of the old marketing campaign done by Volkswagen called Fun Theory. In that campaign, they showed that making things a little bit more fun has a measurable impact.

For example, they created a fun trash bin that made the sound of something falling very, very deep once you put something in the trash.

They noticed that at the end of the day, the fun trash collected more than 41 kilos than the standard trash