campaigns that change your life

I must confess that I hadn’t know of IDEO until now. I know, shame on me (their website is great btw, you should definitely have a look at it. It’s ze innovation / design company).

Anyway, there campaign for Bank of America, ‘keep the change’, is of pure brilliance:

Based on ethnographic research that showed that target customers–boomer-age women with kids–tended to round up their financial transactions for both speed and convenience, IDEO developed a service that rounds up purchases made with a Bank of America Visa debit card to the nearest dollar, and then transfers the difference from the customer’s checking account to her savings account. That bit of financial wizardry also solved another problem: low savings rates among the members of the target demo. The campaign proved so popular that it drew more than 2.5 million customers in its first year, including 700,000 new checking accounts and one million new savings accounts for the bank. That’s no small change. (Fast Company)

Amazing. I wish my bank was doing that now.

It reminds me a bit of the Tap Project (from Droga 5), in which people are asked, for one day, to give $1 for tap water in restaurants, the money being given to charity to give clean water to people who need it.

Powerful ideas that change lives. That’s what I’m talking about. The solution is not always and ad. It actually rarely is.

And here is another one. That won’t change your life this time, but that made me laugh. Zuji, an online holiday site in Australia, wants to encourage people to take more holidays. So they are selling some items so cheaply that it helps you save for your holiday. Great idea. However, how many baked beans do I need to buy to actually save enough money for my holiday? What effect does selling cheap food have on their brand? It may work for baked beans, but it won’t work for much more products.

It’s nothing more than a stunt. A successful one mind you, it’s been talked about quite a lot, but it’s just that. A stunt. And it might be a bit confusing for punters at the end of the day.