Making the stairs fun

Forget the escalator, since some Swedish designers have made taking the stairs fun again.

The campaign The Fun Theory of Volkswagen is a series of experiments, captured on video, to find out if making the world more fun can improve peoples behavior.

Marketing a car doesn’t simply have to be about marketing a car by promoting its performance and efficiency virtues.

Volkswagen has launched a new grass roots experiential initiative in Sweden, which is encouraging local consumers to live leaner and greener lives. Rolighetsteorin – or The Fun Theory – involves a series of ‘social experiments’, videos of which have just gone live on YouTube.

In just four days, one involving the transformation of a stairway into an interactive keyboard has been watched almost 1.5 million times.

The aim was to prove that, if they made it fun, more people would take the stairs than the escalator. And it seems to have worked. The organizers claim that some 66 per cent of people chose to take the stairs rather than the escalator.





“We believe that the easiest way to change people's behavior for the better is by making it fun to do. We call it ‘The Fun Theory’,” explains an accompanying posting.

The VW "fun theory" website is here.