When customers game your returns policy, copy your product, or steal your glassware, they're already telling you something. It's just not the type of behaviour your brand probably anticipated. Incentivise the Problem is the tactic that takes that signal and builds around it: reward the chaos, own the dysfunction, and let the misbehaviour become the mechanic. Here are four creative tactics from the Change Behaviour Engine that turned the problem into the brief.
- Reframe Shame into Social Proof
- Gamify the Pain Point
- Turn Damage into Currency
- Make Waste Worth Something
1. Reframe Shame into Social Proof
Make the behaviour people are hiding the thing they want to show off — and watch them do your marketing for you.
The easiest route to participation is permission. When the thing someone is ashamed of becomes a badge of honour, they don't just change behaviour — they broadcast it.
Gotland's Ugliest Lawn — Region Gotland, Differ Agency, 2022
During a severe drought, brown lawns were the visible evidence that a household wasn't conserving water — and residents felt embarrassed by them. Differ flipped the script entirely. The Ugliest Lawn competition reframed the dead grass as a sustainability trophy: the worse your lawn looked, the better your behaviour. Winners were rewarded publicly. Water use dropped 5% and the campaign generated $788M in earned reach — driven almost entirely by people sharing their own brown lawns as proof of conscience. The shame became the social proof.
The global version, also by Differ (2023), scaled the idea internationally with celebrity endorsement from Shailene Woodley, turning a Swedish regional competition into a worldwide behavioural movement. The logic held at every scale: invert what's shameful and participation follows.
