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Aw. Ickle bottles in ickle hats. Enough to soften any consumer's heart. Photograph: Edmond Terakopian/PA
Aw. Ickle bottles in ickle hats. Enough to soften any consumer's heart. Photograph: Edmond Terakopian/PA

Blame the nudge theory for your unbearably cute smoothie

This article is more than 8 years old
Catherine Bennett
Twee road signs, folksy labelling. It’s the latest kind of manipulation – and it’s not only maddening, but useless

In the 15 years since a new brand of smoothies introduced the style of packaging that addresses consumers as if they were the product’s ickle friends, the coming of the end of this cute, terminally patronising discourse, has continually been predicted. Even if Innocent can still get away with putting wee hand-knitted woolly hats on its refrigerated plastic bottles, for all the world as if it were run by dimwitted aunties as opposed to the Coca-Cola company, there are limits, learned advertisers have counselled, to the public’s tolerance for transparently manipulative baby talk. Especially now that so many consumers now know this tactic has a name – wackaging – and may even have begun to recoil from, rather than salivate over, formerly inoffensive words including – trigger alert – yummy, fun, respect, pure, good, planet, stuff, daddy, value and “us”.

For example: an over-familiarity that might work for fellow perpetrator Johnnie Boden, the sender of fun notey-woteys to the effect that one hasn’t been in touch for simply ages – as well as flogger of one’s personal details to random tat-purveyors – might not work, say, in the grittier context of road safety. The use of rhyming, though not scanning, ditties, as deployed by Transport for London, in intended mitigation of behavioural guidance, would surely not appeal to any organisation that respected its clients or wished to minimise homicidal ideation on the planet.

Similarly, a voice that still comes naturally to the folks at Ella’s Kitchen (owned by giant US conglomerate, Hain Celestial), in the context of organic baby-food – “We use cookies (not the yummy ones!) to make our website easy + fun” – would have to be yet more vomit-inducing if invoked by a bank that was recently fined £1.53bn for a foreign exchange rate scam. Because our daddies say that this particular way of stealing from your clients is not what the dudes at Ben & Jerry’s (owned by Unilever) would call a yummy “progressive value”!

But somebody at Barclays decided to think outside the box . Why shouldn’t a cash machine be every bit as amiable as your favourite life-shortening beverage? If not more? Indeed, if cash machines could really speak, they would probably point out that they don’t do as much harm as the 35 grammes of sugar – five grammes more that the NHS’s daily maximum – in every blessed, woolly-hatted 250ml bottle of Pomegranates, Blueberries & Acai Superfood Smoothie. In any event, the self-service machines now replacing human beings in Barclays branches have been reinvented as our super-helpful new chums, Sally, Mike and Jake. As in: “Hello, I am Sally. Here’s what I can do for you.” In response to complaints that wildly exceeded poor Sally’s remit, a more senior Barclays automaton talked about “raising a few smiles”.

As the National Trust is now demonstrating, it would be unfair to characterise such concerted infantilisation as the monopoly of abject corporations with a matching assessment of consumer capability. Concerned that visitors to their rural sites might be clueless as to rustic enjoyment and safety, the National Trust has overcome its traditional aversion to spurious sign pollution to the point of adding view-assistance in places once mysterious (“many people look but only a few see”) and expansive rhymes: “Return to the start, a new path you’ll take. It’s rocky in places, don’t fall in the lake.” Written in the wackaging professional’s finest faux-naif, the same organisation’s “Nature’s Playground” signage has urged visitors not to be shy. “Keep your mobile phone switched on,” read one, “so you can check in and tweet away.” “Please DO sit here,” beseeched further clutter, by a bench. “It’s such a lovely spot.” And, the trust urged: “Notice the beautiful wild flowers as you walk through the woods. Take pictures, smell them and enjoy your day.” For some young urban visitors, one gathers, this really would be the first time they ever smelled a picture.

Presumably it is on the basis of some compelling road-safety studies, and not just corporate gullibility, that the Highways Agency has embarked on its own exercise in quirk. Signs now being tested on the M1 range from the dubious claim “nobody likes a tailgater”, to “let’s all get home safely”, “somebody loves you, drive carefully” and, confirming everything the MP Helen Goodman told Labour party members about the dispensability of the childless, “slow down, our daddy works here”.

The scheme, according to the agency, has benefited from input from psychologists – evidently hailing from the Martian school that does not anticipate standard driver reaction upon seeing, from a motionless car, a vista of deserted carriageway, alongside “welcome to our work zone”. Also notable, assuming the agency still considers murderous driver behaviour a serious issue, is its confidence that dangerous individuals might be amenable to such mild forms of reproof. Perhaps it is building on research by Transport for London, whose now ubiquitous doggerel channels the late Mabel Lucie Attwell’s faith in the improving power of verse and applies it to as yet undisclosed effect, to antisocial commuters. “Use your eyes and heart and brain/ When seated on a busy train.” And: “I don’t appreciate the view/ Of all that litter left by you.” And (still in production) the anti-manspreading: “We know you have a massive willy/ But please, good fellow, don’t be silly”.

Supposing driver behaviour on the M1 is substantially reformed, the implications for law enforcement are, admittedly, limitless. “Let’s all not steal things and enjoy our day.” “Nobody likes a rapist.” “Somebody loves you, don’t go to Syria.”

Alas, the vagueness about “psychologists” suggests that, like so many of these wackage-era experiments, the Highway Agency’s new approach to driver lunacy rests on little more promising than copywriting fashion and a popular belief, one continually reinforced by the government’s expanded – and now independent –Nudge outfit, that the public, en masse, can be manipulated, sorry, enabled, into desired choices. But as the Behavioural Insight Team’s boosterish report reveals, the most promising soft paternalism can fail. People in Newcastle did not, it turned out, care to turn down their heating just because – nudge! – they’d been given a leaflet or a little talk. The lesson, as the team sagely remarks, “is that it is very important to test and trial interventions like this before rolling them out across the country”.

And another lesson, not mentioned by the team, but by other economists , is that it is very important to question whether the choices of the behaviourists, whether in government or in ad agencies where nudging opens up a yet more glorious prospect, are invariably wise and good. What, for instance, made the Highways Agency think that a made-up kiddie quote indebted to the Pret school of copywriting condescension (“a little girl asked us why we didn’t make gingerbread men”) might be preferable to speed cameras that build up points for offending drivers, as opposed to irritation in the law-abiding? Or preferable, indeed, to nothing? Maybe a little girl was involved.

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