Follow the Penguin
Sunshine Aquarium in Tokyo is a lovely place. The problem is, not a lot of people know this. Distracted by their everyday lives, they all but forgotten about the aquarium.
This is where the Japanese ad & PR agency called Hakuhodo comes in. Hakuhodo’s creative team took human distractibility as the starting point in coming up with their solution. The aquarium is only 1km (0.62miles) from the closes public transit station. To help people not get disinterested en route, they created the Penquin NAVI app: an augmented reality penguins that guide visitors right up to the aquarium’s gates. This is where the second behavioral insight comes in: humans are enamored by cute animals and NAVI penguins move like the real things. Cuteness overload basically prevents people from looking anywhere else.
App downloads are encouraged at the public transport station, via QR codes. The results of this campaign are nothing short of impressive. Aquarium attendance increased 152% in a month the campaign was ran; and people who downloaded the app spent an average 9mins with it (which is way longer that it takes to walk 0.6 miles!).
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