In this talk, the speaker explains how businesses can dramatically improve compliance and sales by tapping into customers' existing habits rather than trying to change them. He introduces the "mirror effect"—people avoid misbehaving when they can see themselves—and illustrates it with a Halloween candy experiment where adding a mirror boosted compliance from 0% to 90%. He then walks through a real‑world consulting case at a post‑Hurricane Sandy bagel shop: after identifying the primary commuter customer, the team installed a self‑serve coffee station with an honor‑system payment box and placed a large mirror behind the sign. The result was 100% payment compliance and a spill‑over of honest behavior. Finally, he shares a priming example from St. Louis airport restrooms, where a painted fly in each urinal acted as a target, prompting men to aim better and, through priming, keep the entire bathroom cleaner. The overarching lesson is to observe and leverage the habits customers already have—using mirrors, visual cues, and convenient placement—to drive desired outcomes with minimal friction.
Chapters
Do you know, we don't do bad behaviors in front of mirrors because we can see ourselves. There was a study done with children getting Halloween candy on Halloween, and there was a big bowl left out with tons of candy, and there was a big sign in front of it that said, please take children. Just one. Well, as the children came and there was no adult, there was no supervision. They're scooping it in, they're putting their bag and running it away. Right. The only change they did was they put a mirror behind it. Same bowl, same sign, just a mirror. There was a 90% compliance among children. We're going taking one. We don't want to see ourselves committing a bad act. It's called the mirror effect. This is a physical phenomena that happens. If you have a retail store or retail outlet and you want better compliance, if you want to reduce thievery, put up more mirrors, you'll be shocked of the effect it has. I filmed another episode or broadcast another episode last week on Sunday on msnbc, we went to a bagel shop. There was a bagel shop in Rockaway Beach, New York, that got devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Well, msnbc, with a lot of other sponsors, corporations came in and rescued this business and they put the infrastructure back in place. And then my job is to come in and do a consultation with the business owners. Hopefully you can get them to cry on tv, because TV loves that. Right. So first tell me about the disaster. How miserable was it? Then their eyes start going. You're like, yeah, it's horrible. That's TV business. Once they got the crying out of the way, then you want to help them through the situation and consult them. One of the challenges this bagel shop had was they hadn't defined their primary customer, really. They said, it's just people that walks in. And we set up a camera that filmed for a full week just observing the type of customers that came in. It ended up the commuter crowd, the people getting on the bus, hands down, the most common customer that came in. So then we said, well, what does this customer need that the standard, ordinary customer doesn't? They were in a major time crunch. The bus stop was right outside this deli and they would be in there and you'd see them getting their coffee. And then the bus comes, there's this fumbling and panic and people are running out the door. So clearly the solution to cater to these people was, was to make the coffee purchase extremely convenient. Well, the way to do it, we considered many. We considered there's like, almost like a jet pack you could wear and you could have a coffee filler person outside doing that. That didn't work so well in this scenario. What we figured is if we put the coffee stand right next to the door and we put a monitor up, which actually showed down the street where you could see the bus coming, people could fill up their own coffee, look at the monitor and walk out. The question though, of course is how do you collect payment there? If you have a cash registered person, it's, it slows things down and the transactions are only a dollar or two for a cup of coffee. It didn't justify, it didn't make sense to have a person stationed there. So then what we said, well, we need to do on the honor system, we're just going to put a little box up there saying, $2 for a cup of coffee, please pay it here. So the challenge that comes back is like, well, people aren't necessarily honest. You fill up the coffee and you can run. And this is where we use the power of the mirror. We placed a mirror, a large mirror right behind the coffee counter, right next to the sign that said please put a dollar here. And as of today, 100% compliance. There is going to be some people that say, screw it, I am a thief, I'm going to take it. But most people are compliant. The amazing thing also is when you have a compliance in one spot that now the priming effect takes place and they say, hey, I'm an honorable person, I do good things. The deeds continue on. And here's proof of that. I travel extensively and I go to St. Louis. I actually, I'm a co owner in a business in St. Louis. So I go to St. Louis once a quarter. Anyone ever been to the St. Louis airport? Okay. St. Louis airport was notorious for a while for the restrooms. I don't know if you noticed this horrible restroom. You would go in there and it was just filled filth. And it's this disgusting. So just bear with me. You would walk in with your shoes and you'd come out wearing slippers, if you know what I'm talking about. That's disgusting. It's also a joke. I went to St. Louis three weeks ago or four weeks ago and the bathroom was spotless. Perhaps the cleanest bathrooms I've seen at any airport in this country, or any country for the that matter. I was like, wow, they must have hired like, you know, like this cleaning crew comes in every 10 minutes to clean this up. The sinks were spotless. Where the urinals and the stalls are spotless and then I saw their trick. There was a fly placed in the urinal. Not a real one, a painted fly placed in the urinal. And every guy knows what you do when you see the fly. It's the target. Men never grow up. Habits never. Habits rarely change. Habits rarely change. And the lesson in here is every customer of ours is a human being and has ingrained habits. It's shocking how many businesses try to change the behavior of the customer. Huge science. Please clean up no mess. Please help us when there's just opportunities to leverage existing habits. And the St. Louis airport is genius because what happened was, sure enough, you go into where all the urinals are and there's like 10 here. They're everywhere. Spotless. Like you're thinking about having a five course meal off the floor in this place. It is incredible. And the priming effect takes place. So while the urinal area is clean, when I turned and looked at the sinks, they were spotless too. As I leave the urinal area and I wash my hands, I'm like, I gotta watch how other people behave. I sit in the corner, which is very awkward in a bathroom where there's some guy just sitting there like, hey, what's going on? So I don't recommend you doing this, but what I observed was person after person washing their hands, cleaning up with the towel, and then taking the towel and cleaning the sink. Before they threw it out, they had been primed. So lesson three is how do you use a mirror? Or how do you leverage people's existing habits in your own business? Let's not try to change other people's habits anymore. Let's just use what they already do. You'll be shocked how much they comply. Thank you.
