Would you ask someone to give up their seat?

Rory Sutherland describes how potential embarrassment is an underestimated force in marketing

If I were to mention the Milgram experiment, most people reading this would think of the electric shock experiments on obedience and authority conducted in 1961. Less well-known, however, but almost as interesting, were a series of experiments from the 1970s, in which he asked his students to travel around on the New York subway asking strangers to surrender their seats.

In the end the experiment revealed you could get up to 68% of people to give up their seat when asked. But far more interesting was the effect the experiment had on his students.

When proposed to one of his graduate classes, they refused. Finally, one student, Ira Goodman, volunteered to try it with a partner. But instead of coming back after 20 trials as he had promised, the pair returned with only 14. When Dr Milgram asked what had happened, he said that it was just too emotionally painful to go through with it.

Belittling his students’ fears, Dr Milgram set out on his own. But when he approached his first seated passenger, he gagged. ‘The words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge,’ he confessed. In some instances, other people attempting the experiment were offered seats without uttering a word, since the act of summoning up courage to ask made them appear physically ill.

These findings seem to support the belief that we are social animals to our core. But, even more, they support a comment Dr Nick Southgate made to the effect that the fear of mild social embarrassment is one of the most underestimated forces in marketing.

So, of all the marketing benefits of the internet, one of the most significant (and least celebrated) is that it enables customers to engage in complex interactions without fear of the many social pitfalls you encounter when you deal with fellow humans: the freedom to ask questions without the risk of looking stupid; to chase low prices without the risk of looking mean; to act like a demanding customer without the risk of looking like a prat.

Imagine, for a moment, the last time you booked travel online. You may have investigated the prices of perhaps 17 flights on four different airlines. Now imagine the same interrogation performed over the telephone or face to face with a travel agent. After investigating perhaps three possibilities, sheer awkwardness would prevent us asking after a fourth.

Or imagine the question: ‘How much is it for a larger room or a suite?’ Simply by asking this question, we have become a hostage to the hotelier. We can of course say: ‘No, at £900 a night, the suite is a bit pricey, I’ll stick with a standard room.’ But only at the cost – viscerally felt – of a minor loss of self-respect. Online, however, you can ask the cost of the Presidential Suite and risk not a shred of embarrassment.

If you doubt this, ask yourself how many times you have bought something even after discovering at the till it is far more expensive than you thought, simply to avoid the mild discomfort of handing it back. (One of my daughters, when aged three, owed her adored $150 cashmere cardigan to this effect.)

The strong feelings evoked in all of us when we deal with other people can make or break products – some great ideas that fail because they make the user feel a little weird. Yet because they are products of our unconscious minds, these dangers may not emerge in conventional research.

When working for easyJet, I suggested that Speedy Boarding would work best if those who had paid to board in advance were given an orange hat visibly to mark them out from everyone else. Experience suggests I was right – as things stand, priority boarding on low-cost airlines is a social nightmare occasioned by the fear of being thought to be a queue-jumper, even when you have paid £15 specifically to jump the queue.

With hotels, I have long recommended they abandon the practice of insisting on carrying your luggage to your room. People generally feel uneasy about losing sight of their luggage, yet refusing the offer makes you feel like a crank or a neurotic.

But the greatest source of personal social unease in any sales environment must be the car dealership. What should be a fun visit is turned into a terrifying experience through fear of unwanted, pressurising human contact.

There are, after all, two sales processes in buying a car. The act of being sold a car is one – but, more important perhaps, is the more private process of selling the purchase to yourself. Unwanted attention generally prevents the second stage from taking place. Car dealerships could perhaps learn from my frivolous easyJet suggestion – supplying a range of brightly coloured hats at the entrance, on the understanding that nobody wearing one of these hats will be approached under any circumstances.

Rory Sutherland is executive creative director and vice-chairman of OgilvyOne London and Ogilvy Group UK.

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