After a long day at work and your evening commute, would you be more likely to take the stairs or an escalator?  What if those stairs were a giant, fully-functional piano?

Would you recycle more if it were more fun? Litter less?

Volkswagen explored these questions in their “Fun Theory” campaign, a series of videos capturing regular people reacting to mundane tasks made fun. Piano stairs, a trashcan with cartoon-like sound effects, and a recycling receptacle arcade game all aimed to encourage better behavior among the people who encountered them. The findings were heartening: added fun made 66% more people use the Piano Stairs than normally choose the stairs over the escalator.

There have been over 10 million views of “Piano Stairs” and around one million each for “The World’s Deepest Bin” and “Bottle Bank Arcade.” These videos went viral because they’re fresh, happy, and well-executed without being overdone.

While no one can guarantee that a video campaign will spread like a virus, there are certainly things to be done right and things that can go wrong. VW successfully avoided the latter (unexpected negative brand associations, coming off as condescending or cliché, selling a product instead of a brand, etc.) and capitalized on the former. By capturing moments of joy, wonder, and helpfulness, VW created strong associations between the brand and purely positive things. Who doesn’t love seeing the look of surprise and delight on another person’s face? These moments of fun and good citizenry caught by cameras simply itched to be shared—and shared they were.

We at SCG especially like that the videos are tactfully transparent about being by VW. The brand logo shows up with the words, “An Initiative of Volkswagen” at the end of each video for a few seconds. The campaign isn’t about VW—it’s about fun. This shows a greater level of respect for the consumer than many commercials or viral video campaigns tend to. Volkswagen acknowledges that their viewers don’t want to have to tune out another sales pitch. Instead, the videos provide a lovely little boost to anyone’s mood, courtesy of Volkswagen.

Now we’d just like to see how VW can make doing our taxes fun…