Made to Stick (23 page)

Memory is important, but it’s only the first step. What about action? When the survey asked kids whether they were likely to smoke a cigarette during the next year, those who were exposed to the Truth campaign were 66 percent less likely to smoke. Those who were exposed to “Think. Don’t Smoke” were 36 percent
more
likely to smoke! Tobacco execs must have taken the news quite hard.

It wasn’t just surveys that registered the difference. A study measured teen smoking in Florida, where the Truth campaign had its
debut, versus the rest of the country. After two years of the campaign, smoking among high school students dropped by 18 percent and among middle school students by 40 percent. (About half of this decline may have been associated with a rise in cigarette taxes during the time of the study.)

What happened here? It’s the Save the Children example revisited. What is the “Think. Don’t Smoke” campaign about? Er, thinking. It’s the Analytical Hat. Remember what happened with contributions to Rokia when donors were asked to think analytically before donating?

What’s the Truth campaign about? It’s about tapping into anti-authority resentment, the classic teenage emotion. Once, teens smoked to rebel against The Man. Thanks to the ingenious framing of the Truth campaign—which paints a picture of a duplicitous Big Tobacco—teens now rebel against The Man by
not
smoking.

The Truth campaign isn’t about rational decision-making; it’s about rebellion. And it made a lot of teens care enough to do something. In this case, that something was nothing.

So far we’ve been talking about what you might expect from a chapter on emotion—complex, fundamental human emotions like empathy (Rokia) and anger (the Truth). But the main question of this chapter is even more basic: How do we make people care about our messages? The good news is that to make people care about our ideas we don’t have to produce emotion from an absence of emotion. In fact, many ideas use a sort of piggybacking strategy, associating themselves with emotions that already exist.

Consider the following sentence from a movie review:
“Rashomon
can be seen as a cinematic extension of Einstein’s theory of relativity.”
Rashomon
is a classic 1950 film by the Japanese director Akira
Kurosawa. In the film, four different characters describe the same event—a murder and rape—from their own perspectives. The movie is told in a series of flashbacks, as each of the characters recounts his or her version of events. But the characters’ tales are self-serving and contradictory, and at the end of the movie the viewer is still uncertain about what actually happened. The movie questions the existence of absolute truth—or, at least, our ability to uncover it.

So the movie reviewer, in the quote above, was comparing
Rashomon
’s “relative truth” to Einstein’s theory of relativity. But Einstein’s theory of relativity wasn’t designed to say that “everything is relative.” In fact, its actual meaning was essentially the opposite. The theory was designed to explain how the laws of physics are
identical in every frame of reference
. From Einstein’s view, things don’t look unpredictable; they look surprisingly orderly.

Why did the reviewer link
Rashomon
with relativity? This reference doesn’t look like an appeal to Einstein’s authority; it claims that
Rashomon
is the cinematic “equivalent” of Einstein’s theory. Instead, the analogy seems intended to create a sense of awe—when we watch
Rashomon
, it implies, we will be in the presence of something profound.

The theory of relativity is borrowed, as an association, because it lends an aura of emotional resonance—profundity, awe—to the movie. The movie review above is just one example among thousands. “Relativity” becomes, in a sense, a color on the idea palette. When you want to conjure up awe, you dab your brush into “relativity.” Other scientific terms—the “uncertainty principle,” “chaos theory,” the “quantum leap” of quantum mechanics—are also colors on this palette.

In 1929, Einstein protested, “Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll…. It does not mean that everything in life is relative.” To Einstein’s chagrin, the number of people trying to tap into the resonance of “relativity” began to exceed the number of people who were trying to understand relativity.

When associations to certain terms are drawn repeatedly—sometimes with precision, sometimes with crudeness—the effect is to dilute the power of the terms and their underlying concepts. When everyone paints with lime green, lime green no longer stands out.

Research conducted at Stanford and Yale shows that this process—exploiting terms and concepts for their emotional associations—is a common characteristic of communication. People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick. The research labeled this overuse “semantic stretch.”

Let’s look at a nonscientific example: the word “unique.” “Unique” used to mean one of a kind. “Unique” was special.

The researchers used a database to examine every newspaper article in each of the top fifty newspapers in the United States over a twenty-year period. During this time, the percentage of articles in which something was described as “unique” increased by 73 percent. So either there’s a lot more unique stuff in the world today or the “uniqueness bar” has been lowered.

Perhaps some skeptics, contemplating robot vacuum cleaners or Paris Hilton, would protest, “Hey, there
is
a lot more unique stuff in the world these days.” But at the same time that the word “unique” was rising in popularity, the word “unusual” was falling. In 1985, articles were more than twice as likely to use the word “unusual” as the word “unique.” By 2005, the two words were about equally likely to be used.

Unique things should be a subset of unusual things—unique (i.e., one of a kind) is about as unusual as you can get. So if there really were more unique things today, we should see more “unusual” things as well. The fact that unusual things are getting less common makes the rise in unique things look like a case of semantic stretch. What we used to call “unusual” we now stretch and call “unique.”

So where’s the emotion in “relativity” and in “unique”? Here’s the punch line: The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don’t yet care about and something they do care about. We all naturally practice the tactic of
association. What “relativity” and “unique” teach us is that in using associations we can overuse colors. Over time, associations get overused and become diluted in value; people end up saying things like “This is really, truly unique.”

The superlatives of one generation—groovy, awesome, cool, phat—fade over time because they’ve been associated with too many things. When you hear your father call something “cool,” coolness loses its punch. When your finance professor starts using the word “dude,” you must eliminate the word from your vocabulary. Using associations, then, is an arms race of sorts. The other guy builds a missile, so you have to build two. If he’s “unique,” you’ve got to be “super-unique.”

This emotional-association arms race creates problems for people who are trying to make others care. In fact, as we’ll see, the arms race essentially bankrupted the term “sportsmanship.”

In the last chapter, we discussed the coaching seminars held by Jim Thompson, the founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA). Since 1988, when he founded the PCA, Thompson has struggled with an important problem. How do you clean up the bad behavior often associated with youth sports? In grappling with this problem, Thompson had to confront the issue of semantic stretch.

The tennis player John McEnroe was once the poster child of poor sportsmanship, with his racket-throwing and bratty arguments with officials. But today McEnroe’s behavior wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at many youth sports games. Bad behavior is now common not only among athletes but also among parents and other spectators. According to the National Alliance for Youth Sports, nearly 15 percent of youth sports games involved a confrontation between parents or coaches and officials, up from 5 percent a few years ago.

Sportsmanship was once a powerful idea in athletics, but Thompson felt that it had become a weak term. “Sportsmanship trophies are seen as consolation prizes for losers,” he says. One woman told Thompson that her high school basketball coach said that if his players ever won a sportsmanship trophy, they’d have to run laps. Thompson adds, “Sportsmanship seems like it is mostly about not doing something bad: ‘Don’t yell at officials. Don’t break the rules.’ But it’s not enough to simply refuse to do bad things. We need to expect much more of participants in youth sports. Unfortunately, ‘Be a good sport!’ is not the rallying cry that we need to transform youth sports.”

Everyone enjoys hearing about real examples of good sportsmanship. Thompson uses the example of Lance Armstrong, who reacted unexpectedly when one of his chief opponents, Jan Ullrich, crashed during the Tour de France. Instead of taking advantage of this lucky break to increase his lead, Armstrong slowed down and waited for Ullrich to remount. He later said that he rode better when he was competing with a great athlete like Ullrich.
That’s
sportsmanship.

Thompson knew that people still admired the underlying ideals of sportsmanship. Parents
did
want their kids to learn respect and manners from athletics. Coaches
did
want to be mentors, not just victorious taskmasters. Kids
did
want their teams to be respected by others. All three groups sometimes slipped up and acted like jerks. But Thompson saw that the need and the desire for sportsmanship remained, even though the term “sportsmanship” had lost its ability to motivate good behavior.

“Sportsmanship” had been stretched too far. Like “relativity,” it had migrated far afield from its original meaning. It used to refer to the kind of behavior that Lance Armstrong showed Jan Ullrich. But over time the term was stretched to include unimpressive, nonchivalrous behavior, like losing without whining too much or making it through an entire game without assaulting a referee.

Thompson and the PCA needed a different way of encouraging people, not just to avoid bad behavior but to embrace good behavior.

They called it Honoring the Game. People care about sports, they care about the Game. It’s a way of making the point that the Game and its integrity are
larger
than the individual participants. “Honoring the Game” is a kind of sports patriotism. It implies that you
owe your sport
basic respect. Armstrong wasn’t being a “good sport;” he was Honoring the Game. And Honoring the Game also works for people other than players. It reminds anyone that sports is a civic institution. It’s unseemly to mess with an institution. It’s dishonorable.

Is there any proof that Honoring the Game works? Consider the data gathered by a basketball league in Dallas, Texas: “In the 2002 basketball season, on average there was a technical foul called every fifteen games. Since that time, we’ve conducted six Double-Goal Coach workshops. In the 2004 basketball season, there was a technical foul called every fifty-two games.” A baseball league in Northern California found that after Positive Coaching training, there was a dramatic reduction (90 percent!) in the number of people who were ejected from games for bad behavior. Team morale improved so much that the number of players enrolling in the league increased by 20 percent. The only complaint was that they were running out of fields.

Thompson doesn’t want to change just the culture of youth sports. He wants to change the culture of all sports: “I have a fantasy. I’m watching the World Series and a manager comes rushing onto the field to berate an umpire who made a call he disagrees with. On national TV, Bob Costas says, ‘That’s really too bad to see the manager dishonoring the game of baseball that way.’” (As a side note, notice how wonderfully concrete this vision is.)

Youth sports hasn’t been purged of discourtesy, but Thompson is making a tangible difference in the places he’s reached. And, with Honoring the Game, he has managed to sidestep semantic stretch and peg an idea that makes people care.

The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps
into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we’ve either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.

We’re searching for ways to make people care about our ideas—to make them care about the African child Rokia, about smoking, about charity, about sportsmanship. We make people care by appealing to the things that matter to them.

And what matters to people? So far, we’ve dealt with associations, but there’s a more direct answer. In fact, it might be the most obvious answer of all. What matters to people? People matter to themselves. It will come as no surprise that one reliable way of making people care is by invoking self-interest.

In 1925, John Caples was assigned to write a headline for an advertisement promoting the correspondence music course offered by the U.S. School of Music. Caples had no advertising experience, but he was a natural. He sat at his typewriter and pecked out the most famous headline in print-advertising history: “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano … But When I Started to Play!”

This is a classic underdog story in fifteen words. People
laughed at him!
And he
shut them up
through his playing! (The headline is enthralling enough that it makes us overlook commonsense reactions like, Um, why would anyone laugh at someone sitting down at a piano? When was the last time
you
laughed at someone who sat down at a piano?)

The headline was so successful at selling correspondence courses that it’s still being ripped off by copywriters decades later. Sixty years later, the following knockoff headline increased sales by 26 percent over the previous year: “My Husband Laughed When I Ordered Our Carpet Through the Mail. But When I Saved 50% …” (Our publisher rejected the following subtitle for this book: “They Laughed
When We Wrote This Book. But When They Woke Up in an Ice-Filled Bathtub …”)