What Foursquare Learned From Pavlov’s Dogs That will Rock Your Business

Throughout college I changed my major a few times. Ironically I landed right back where I started and wound up with a degree in Psychology. I thought it would be useless until I got into business and realized that no matter what you do in business, it’s about people. Foursquare, a location based social media service you might argue, is about location, but it isn’t. Location is the McGuffin of social media right now, but it’s still about people.

When it comes to Foursquare you probably love it or think it’s ridiculous. But like it or not, location based services are going to pick up and the business models that will evolve from them, like the early days of Twitter, are yet to be determined. While the use of location based technologies is nascent at best, it’ll be fun to see how they evolve.

We don’t know exactly what will become of services like Foursquare but there is one thing they have done with ruthless brilliance that should serve as a business lesson for us all:

They’re turning us into Pavlov’s dogs.

Face it, no matter how intelligent we may be, our behaviors are not hard to condition and Foursquare (and Gowalla) have us on a leash.

A Brief History

In the 1890′s Russian Psychologist Ivan Pavlov was investigating reflex systems research which led to his description of what most of us know as “classical conditioning” or “associative learning.” In the most basic of terms what Pavlov described was this: Organisms (animals, people, systems) can be trained to respond in a predictable manner to a specific stimulus under certain conditions. In the case of Pavlov’s experiments, he observed that dogs would start to salivate when a lab technician, who normally fed them, entered the room (presumably they recognized the technician and were anticipating dinner). Eventually, he began to use a metronome to indicate feeding time, and with enough conditioning, the metronome alone would cause the dog to salivate, even if food wasn’t there. Stimulus conditioned response.

Fast Forward to Foursquare

One of the “rewards” for using Foursquare is earning various badges. The other is being declared “Mayor” (when you check in at the same location more than anyone else you are declared “Mayor” of that location). The more badges you earn, and more the Mayor-ships you acquire the more addictive Foursquare becomes because we know if we peck away at our smart-phones long enough we’ll get another reward.

As young as Foursquare is I’ve observed people going to the same place repeatedly (usually spending money there) to try to oust someone as Mayor or because they’re fixated on staying “Mayor.” Keep in mind, being Mayor comes with no material benefit in most cases, though a few business are starting to “reward” their Mayor’s in various ways. It’s simply recognition reinforced with social proof as validated by Foursquare and often tweeted on Twitter. Social validation is the real reward by the way, remember, this is about People and we crave social validation.

Badges are another matter. Do certain things and earn them, sometimes you know what to do, sometimes you don’t. But if you keep checking in the badges keep coming. More socially broadcast recognition via “accomplishment” (if you can seriously call it that).

The point is that Foursquare has created an environment where telling people where we are has become a rewarding experience so we keep doing it, and that is exactly what services like Foursquare want us to do. (Can you imagine the demographic trends and socioeconomic data they are mining!). It’s so powerful we forgo privacy (to some degree), spend money and use mobile minutes for the reward of social validation. Can your business do that?

Your Business

Now the challenge is to apply a little psychology to your business. How can you make the process of interacting with you or your business not just positive but truly rewarding such that you clients and customers will want to come back to you time and time again? Think about the power of that for a minute, if every time I deal with you it’s rewarding for me, it might make me a very regular repeat customer don’t you think? I’ll come back even when I don’t really need something because the experience is rewarding.

While every business and situation will vary I’ll give you two important clues:

1. The reward, however you make your customers feel that way, has got to come very close in time to their interaction with you. There is a direct correlation between the amount of time that passes from when they receive the reward and how closely they will correlate that reward with you or your business. The longer it takes the less powerful the stimulus.
2. It should always be positive and doesn’t have to cost anything. It’s how you make them feel. Yes, your product should be good but it’s how your customers feel about you that will keep them coming back.

This was a fun post to write and I can’t wait to hear your ideas about how you might apply a little psychology to your business. Run with it… and try not to drool every time you check in.