Experiment 2
the sticker campaign
The evolution of my sticker designs, some of which became integral parts of my final project:
Proposal
As another experiment based off of my gratitude journal, I would like to create a sticker campaign that actively engages an audience in reflecting on and sharing what it is they are grateful for. The project will be interactive in that I will distribute stickers pertaining to thankfulness around campus with sayings such as “be grateful,” or “say thank you!”. Each sticker will also include an email address that people can choose to email something that they are grateful for to. I will share these submissions via some form of social media, possibly Twitter, anonymously or not, depending on the participant’s preference. Being able to have people directly interact with my project in this way will enable me to see the impact of the message of gratitude playing a more active role in people’s lives.
Gratitude has become something increasingly important in my life as a result of taking the time each day to write down three things that I am grateful for in my gratitude journal. It is now something that is on the forefront of my life and has made me so much more appreciative of the positive things in my life. I believe that in a time period like the one we are living in currently, where there is extreme polarization and a general intolerance of differences in opinion, it is important to focus on the small things in people’s lives that make each day worth living. Recognizing what those small things may be in a wide range of people’s lives and sharing that with a larger audience could promote more appreciation for the opportunities we do have and what is right with the world right now instead of wrong. This subtle change in mindset could promote more cohesiveness among our community of Ann Arbor and an overall improvement in quality of life.
Research
To explore the conventions of this genre of publicity via stickers, I researched successful sticker marketing campaigns. Reddit is an example of a company that grew into a success because of a sticker marketing campaign, utilizing an advertising budget of only $500. The stickers advertising the company were put up in a variety of places as well as handed out to people who were told to “please sticker responsibly.” Another successful sticker campaign was done by Unicef, where the company placed stickers that were disguised to blend in with the floor with the adhesive side up in multiple public locations. The stickers would adhere to the bottom of people's shoes upon being stepped on accidentally and, when noticed and removed from the shoe, the other side of the sticker would depict a landmine with a message saying that in another country, this would have instead been a real landmine. This campaign is similar to mine in that it is mostly raising awareness for a specific cause rather than trying to promote a company or product. General conventions of a sticker movement or campaign just include a public, widespread exposure of stickers that convey a simple yet powerful message. The stickers should be accessible, easy to understand and able to be mass-produced.
More in line with the subject of gratitude, to assess the impact that taking time to list things that you are grateful for has, a study was conducted in 2008 by Froh, Sefick and Emmons that looked at 11 different classes of early adolescents and randomly assigned them to conditions of gratitude, hassles or no treatment. The participants in the gratitude group were asked to list five things that they were grateful for since yesterday, the hassles group was asked to list five things that were hassles in their lives since yesterday as well, and the no treatment group was not asked to list anything. The results indicated that counting things you were grateful for was related to higher levels of self-reported gratitude, optimism, satisfaction with life, and lower levels of a negative affect. This research suggests that taking the time to actually list some of the positive things in your life can lead to an overall increase in wellbeing, which is something that this experiment would promote in anyone who chooses to participate in it.
Sketch
To put this project into effect, I will first sketch out my ideas for the stickers to make sure I have solidified design ideas. I will then go to the Shapiro Design Lab to try to physically make one of those stickers using the sticker making tool there. I will create an email address (thegratitudeprojectAA@gmail.com) that I will include on the stickers, so people will be able to submit something that they are grateful for. This email address will be included with the prompt “share something you are grateful for with thegratitudeprojectAA@gmail.com and see it posted on our Twitter page!”
I will also have a social media page, possibly on Twitter, for the project where I can constantly be sharing these small tokens of gratitude with a larger audience. These will likely be anonymous, as I do not wish to ask people to provide their information to me via email. The account would be called “The Gratitude Project Ann Arbor” or something similar, and the biography of the account would be “Some things some people in Ann Arbor are grateful for.” This would give the audience context of what was being posted on the account. An example of how the format of a Tweet for this experiment would look is if someone submitted “I am grateful for my dog, Penny,” the Tweet would be “my dog, Penny.” Participants would be encouraged to include and image with their submission, as to make the post more personal and impactful. Using social media would provide a forum for people to respond and share the answers that are posted, and maybe even submit their own ideas via the social media platform or email. The joint effort of the stickers and the social media pages would hopefully raise a significant amount of awareness of the project and of gratitude in general not just for people in Ann Arbor, but for anyone who happens to come across it.
Reflection
In attempting to bring this experiment to life, I realized that theoretically I love the idea of this experiment: spreading stickers all throughout campus to promote the positivity of gratitude, which is something I am so passionate about, as well as hearing from real people some little things that they are grateful about. I also realized, however, that functionally, it would be really difficult and expensive for me to mass-produce these custom stickers I have designed. This led me to the conclusion that if I were to pursue this experiment as my final project, I would have to modify the idea a little bit and make posters with my designs on them instead of stickers. These posters would serve the same function as the stickers would have except they are much more doable for me to create and distribute.
I also was able to get closer and closer to the vision I had for the design of the stickers/posters by experimenting with drawing on a tablet in the Shapiro Design Lab, which made this a very hands-on experience for me. I ended up very happy with the direction that my designs were going and would be very excited to continue this project in the future and be able to see the impact it would actually have on the community in which it was implemented.
Works Cited
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“The 10 Most Successful Sticker Marketing Campaigns.” Alexanders Print Advantage - Web To Print Experts, 21 July 2017, alexanders.com/blog/the-10-most-successful-sticker-marketing-campaigns/.
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Froh, Jeffrey J., et al. “Counting Blessings in Early Adolescents: An Experimental Study of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being.” Journal of School Psychology, vol. 46, no. 2, 2008, pp. 213–233., doi:10.1016/j.jsp.2007.03.005.