Contagious: Why Things Catch On (17 page)

Observability also spurs purchase and action. As we discussed in the Triggers chapter, cues in the environment not only boost word of mouth but also remind people about things they already wanted to buy or do. You may have meant to eat healthier or visit that new website your friend mentioned, but without a visible trigger to jog your memory, you’re more likely to forget. The more public a product or service is, the more it triggers people to take action.

So how can products or ideas be made more publicly observable?

MAKING THE PRIVATE PUBLIC . . . WITH MOUSTACHES

Every fall I teach about sixty MBA students at the Wharton School, and by the end of October I’ve gotten some sense of most
of the students in the class. I know who is going to be five minutes late every day, who will be the first to raise a hand, and who will be dressed like a prima donna.

So I was a bit surprised a few years ago when I walked into class in early November to see what I’d thought was a pretty buttoned-down guy sporting a big moustache. It wasn’t simply that he had forgotten to shave; he had a full handlebar with ends almost ready to curl up on the sides. He looked like a cross between Rollie Fingers and a villain in an old black-and-white movie.

At first I thought he must be trying a facial hair experiment. But then when I looked around the room I noticed two other new moustache devotees. A trend seemed to be catching on. What precipitated the sudden outburst of moustaches?

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Every year,
cancer claims the lives of more than 4.2 million men worldwide. More than 6 million new cases are diagnosed each year. Thanks to generous donations, great headway has been made in research and treatment. But how can organizations that work to fight this disease leverage social influence to increase donations?

Unfortunately, as with many causes, whether you support a particular cancer fund is typically a private matter. If you’re like most people, you probably have little idea which of your neighbors, coworkers, or even friends have donated to help fight this disease. So there is no way for their behavior to influence yours or vice versa.

And that is where the moustaches come in.

It all started one Sunday afternoon in 2003. A group of friends from Melbourne, Australia, were sitting around drinking beers.
The conversation meandered in various directions and finally ended up on 1970s and 80s fashion. “What ever happened to the moustache?” one guy asked. A few beers more and they came up with a challenge: to see who could grow the best moustache. The word spread to their other friends, and eventually they had a small group of thirty people. All grew moustaches for the thirty days of November.

Everyone had so much fun that the next November they decided to do it again. But this time they decided to put a cause behind their efforts. Inspired by the work being done with breast cancer awareness, they wanted to do something similar for men’s health. So they formed the Movember Foundation and adopted the tagline “Changing the face of men’s health.” That year 450 guys raised $54,000 for the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia.

It grew from there. Next year there were more than 9,000 participants. The following year, more than 50,000. Soon the annual event started spreading around the world. In 2007, events were launched everywhere from Ireland and Denmark to South Africa and Taiwan. The organization has since raised more than $174 million worldwide. Not bad for a few tufts of facial hair.

Now, every November, men pledge to raise awareness and money by growing moustaches. The rules are simple. Start the first of the month with a clean-shaven face. For the rest of the month, grow and groom a moustache. Oh—and along the way, conduct yourself like a true country gentleman.

The Movember Foundation succeeded because they figured out how to
make the private public.
They figured out how to take support for an abstract cause—something not typically observable—and make it something that everyone can see. For the thirty days of November people who sport a moustache
effectively become walking, talking billboards for the cause. As noted on Movember’s website,

Through their actions and words they [participants] raise awareness by prompting private and public conversations around the often-ignored issue of men’s health.

And start conversation it does. Seeing someone you know suddenly sprout a moustache generates discussion. People usually gossip a bit among themselves until someone gets up the courage to ask the wearer what prompted the new facial hair. And when he explains, he shares the social currency and generates new devotees. Each year I see more and more of my students sporting moustaches come November. Making the cause public helped it catch on more quickly than it ever could have otherwise.

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Most products, ideas, and behaviors are consumed privately. What websites do your coworkers like? Which ballot initiatives do your neighbors support? Unless they tell you, you may never know. And though that might not matter to you personally, it matters a lot for the success of organizations, businesses, and ideas. If people can’t see what others are choosing and doing, they can’t imitate them. And, like the binge-drinking college students, people might change their behavior for the worse because they feel their views aren’t supported.
^*

Solving this problem requires making the private public. Generating public signals for private choices, actions, and opinions. Taking what was once an unobservable thought or behavior and transforming it into a more observable one.

Koreen Johannessen was able to reduce Arizona students’ drinking by making the private public. She created ads in the school newspaper that merely stated the true norm. That most students had only one or two drinks, and 69 percent have four or fewer drinks, when they party. She didn’t focus on the health consequences of drinking, she focused on social information. By showing students that the majority of their peers weren’t bingeing, she helped them realize that others felt the same way. That most students didn’t want to binge. This corrected the false inferences students had made about others’ behavior and led them to reduce their own drinking as a result. By making the private public,
Johannessen was able to decrease heavy drinking by almost 30 percent.

ADVERTISING ITSELF: SHARING HOTMAIL WITH THE WORLD

One way to make things more public is to design ideas that advertise themselves.

On July 4, 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith introduced a new e-mail service called Hotmail. At the time, most people got their e-mail through Internet service providers like AOL. You’d
pay a monthly fee, dial up from home using a phone line, and access your messages through the AOL interface. It was restricting. You could connect only from the place where you had the service installed. You were chained to one computer.

But Hotmail was different. It was one of the first Web-based e-mail services, which allowed people to access their inbox from any computer anywhere in the world. All they needed was an Internet connection and a Web browser. Independence Day was chosen for the announcement to symbolize how the service freed people from being locked into their current provider.

Hotmail was a great product, and it also scored well on a number of the word-of-mouth drivers we’ve talked about so far. At the time, it was quite remarkable to be able to access e-mail from anywhere. So early adopters liked talking about it because it gave them Social Currency. The product also offered users significant benefits over other e-mail services (for starters, it was free!), so many people shared it for its Practical Value.

But the creators of Hotmail did more than just create a great product. They also cleverly leveraged observability to help their product catch on.

Every e-mail sent from a Hotmail account was like a short plug for the growing brand. At the bottom was a message and link that simply said “Get Your Private, Free E-mail from Hotmail at
www.hotmail.com
.” Every time current Hotmail customers sent an e-mail, they also sent prospective customers a bit of social proof—an implicit endorsement for this previously unknown service.

And it worked. In a little over a year Hotmail signed up more than 8.5 million subscribers. Soon after, Microsoft bought the burgeoning service for $400 million. Since then more than
350 million users have signed up.

Apple and BlackBerry have adopted the same strategy. The signature lines at the bottom of their e-mails often say “Sent using BlackBerry” or “Sent from my iPhone.” Users can easily change this default message to something else (one of my colleagues changed his signature to say “Sent by Carrier Pigeon”), but most people don’t, in part because they like the Social Currency the notes provide. And by leaving these notes on their e-mail, people also help spread awareness about the brand and influence others to try it.

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All these examples involve products that
advertise themselves.
Every time people use the product or service they also transmit social proof or passive approval because usage is observable.

Many companies apply this idea through prominent branding. Abercrombie & Fitch, Nike, and Burberry all garnish their products with brand names or distinctive logos and patterns. For Sale signs broadcast which Realtor the seller is working with.

Following the notion that more is better, some companies have increased the size of their logos. Ralph Lauren has always been known for its characteristic polo player, but its Big Pony shirts made this famous emblem sixteen times larger. Not to be outdone in the escalation for logo supremacy, Lacoste made a similar move. The alligator on its Oversized Croc polo shirt is so large it looks as if it will bite the arm off of any person wearing it.

But large logos aren’t the only way products can advertise themselves. Take Apple’s decision to make iPod headphones white. When Apple first introduced the iPod, there was lots of competition in the digital music player space. Diamond Multimedia, Creative, Compaq, and Archos all offered players, and music on one company’s device couldn’t easily be transferred to
another. Further, it wasn’t clear which, if any, of these competing standards would stick around, and whether it was worth switching from a portable CD player or Walkman to buy this new, expensive device.

But because most devices came with black headphones,
Apple’s white headphone cords stood out. By advertising themselves, the headphones made it easy to see how many other people were switching away from the traditional Walkman and adopting the iPod. This was visible social proof that suggested the iPod was a good product and made potential adopters feel more comfortable about purchasing it as well.

Shapes, sounds, and a host of other distinctive characteristics can also help products advertise themselves. Pringles come in a unique tube. Computers using the Microsoft operating system make a distinctive sound when they boot up. In 1992, French footwear designer Christian Louboutin felt his shoes lacked energy. Looking around, he noticed the striking red Chanel nail polish an employee was wearing.
That’s it!
he thought, and applied the polish to his shoes’ soles. Now Louboutin shoes always come with red-lacquered soles, making them instantly recognizable. They’re distinctive and easy to see, even for people who know little about the brand.

Similar ideas can be applied to a host of products and services. Tailors give away suit bags imprinted with the tailor’s name. Nightclubs use sparklers to broadcast when someone pays to get bottle service. Tickets usually sit in people’s pockets, but if theater companies and minor league teams could use buttons or stickers as the “ticket” instead, “tickets” would be much more publicly observable.

Designing products that advertise themselves is a particularly powerful strategy for small companies or organizations that don’t
have a lot of resources. Even when there is no money to buy television ads or a spot in the local paper, existing customers can act as advertisements if the product advertises itself. It’s like advertising without an advertising budget.

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A product, idea, or behavior advertises itself when people consume it. When people wear certain clothes, attend a rally, or use a website, they make it more likely that their friends, coworkers, and neighbors will see what they are doing and imitate it.

If a company or organization is lucky, people consume its product or service often. But what about the rest of the time? When consumers are wearing other clothes, supporting a different cause, or doing something else entirely? Is there something that generates social proof that sticks around even when the product is not being used or the idea is not top of mind?

Yes. And
it’s called
behavioral residue.

LIVESTRONG WRISTBANDS AS BEHAVIORAL RESIDUE

Scott MacEachern had a tough decision to make. In 2003, Lance Armstrong was a hot commodity. As his sponsor at Nike, MacEachern was trying to figure out the best way to harness all the attention Lance was getting.

Lance had a powerful story. Diagnosed with life-threatening testicular cancer seven years earlier, Lance had been given only a 40 percent chance of survival. But he surprised everyone not only by returning to cycling, but by coming back stronger than ever. Since his return, he had won the Tour de France an astounding five times in a row and inspired millions of people along the way. From fifteen-year-olds dealing with cancer to college students
trying to stay in shape, Lance helped people to believe. If he could come back from cancer, they could overcome the challenges in their own lives. (Note that in the decade since 2003, it has become apparent that Armstrong may have achieved his success through the use of performance-enhancing drugs. But given the powerful success of Livestrong wristbands, and the Lance Armstrong Foundation more generally, it is worth considering how they became popular, outside of whether Armstrong’s personal story is tainted or not.)

MacEachern wanted to capitalize on this enthusiasm. Lance had transcended sports. He had become not only a hero, but a cultural icon. MacEachern wanted to recognize Lance’s achievements and celebrate his upcoming attempt at a record sixth Tour de France victory. He also wanted to use the outpouring of interest and support to raise funds and awareness for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.