Made to Stick (26 page)

Dan Syrek is the nation’s leading researcher on litter. He has worked with sixteen states—from New York to Alaska—on antilitter initiatives. He often begins his projects by selecting random stretches of road—from interstates to farm roads—and walking the roads personally, a clicker in each hand, manually counting litter.

In the 1980s, Syrek and his Sacramento-based organization, the Institute for Applied Research, were hired by the state of Texas. Texas
had a serious litter problem. The state was spending $25 million per year on cleanup, and the costs were rising 15 percent per year. The state’s attempts to encourage better behavior—“Please Don’t Litter” signs, lots of roadside trash cans marked “Pitch In”—weren’t working. Texas hired Syrek to help craft a new strategy.

The standard antilitter message is emotional, but it tends to focus on a limited set of emotions. There are appeals to guilt and shame, as in a spot that shows a Native American shedding a tear over litter. There are also appeals to our feelings for cuddly wildlife, such as the campaign starring a cartoon owl who says, “Give a Hoot—Don’t Pollute.”

Syrek knew that this type of messaging wouldn’t solve Texas’s problem. In his view, those kinds of ads are just “preaching to the choir.” What Texas needed to do was reach people who weren’t inclined to shed tears over roadside trash. The profile of the typical litterer in Texas was an eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old, pickup-driving male who liked sports and country music. He didn’t like authority and he wasn’t motivated by emotional associations with cuddly owls. One member of the Texas Department of Transportation said, “Saying ‘please’ to these guys falls on deaf ears.”

“We found that people who throw the stuff are real slobs,” Syrek says. “You had to explain to them that what they were doing was littering.” Syrek kept with him a photo of a macho-looking man in a pickup truck. “This is our target market,” he said. “We call him Bubba.”

Designing an antilitter campaign based on self-interest wasn’t likely to work with this group. After all, what do the Bubbas really have to gain by not littering? Throwing things away properly takes effort, for which there are no obvious rewards. The situation doesn’t lend itself to a greed or sex-based appeal, à la Caples. It might be possible to design a fear-based approach—highlighting hefty fines or other punishments—but the Bubbas’ antiauthority streak would likely render it useless (or even cause it to backfire).

Syrek knew that the best way to change Bubba’s behavior was to convince him that
people like him
did not litter. Based on his research, the Texas Department of Transportation approved a campaign built around the slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas.”

One of the earliest TV commercials featured two Dallas Cowboy players who were famous in Texas: defensive end Ed “Too-Tall” Jones and defensive tackle Randy White. In the spot, they’re picking up trash on the side of a highway:

This commercial is a far cry from cute owls and weepy Native Americans.

Another ad features Houston Astros pitcher Mike Scott, famous for his split-fingered fastball. Scott says that throwing stuff away is “the Texas thing to do.” He demonstrates his “split-fingered trashball,” hurling some litter into a roadside can, which explodes with a pillar of fire. Subtle stuff.

The campaign featured athletes and musicians, most of whom probably weren’t household names outside Texas but were all well-known to Texans as
Texans:
Houston Oiler quarterback Warren Moon, boxer George Foreman, blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, and country artist Jerry Jeff Walker. Willie Nelson contributed an ad with the line “Mamas, tell all your babies, ‘Don’t mess with Texas.’”

But isn’t this just a garden-variety celebrity endorsement? No, it’s
more subtle than that. Certainly, the spots are not driven by pure celebrity—Barbra Streisand wouldn’t pack much of a punch with Bubba. And even macho celebrities wouldn’t have worked the same way. Schwarzenegger is macho but does nothing to evoke Texanness.

What if the campaign used the same celebrities but adopted a more conventional PSA-type approach? “I’m pro boxer George Foreman. It’s uncool to litter.” That, too, would be unlikely to work: Foreman would be stepping into the authority role that Bubba hates.

The message of the campaign was
Texans don’t litter
. Notice that the celebrities are valuable only insofar as they can quickly establish the schema of “Texas”—or, more specifically, of “ideal, masculine Texans.” Even people who dislike Willie Nelson’s music can appreciate his quality of Texan-ness.

The campaign was an instant success. Within a few months of the launch, an astonishing 73 percent of Texans polled could recall the message and identify it as an antilitter message. Within one year, litter had declined 29 percent.

The Department of Transportation originally planned to accompany the “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign with a separate $1 million program to enforce litter laws more vigorously. This was a fear tactic: If you litter, you’re more likely to get caught and prosecuted. But the effect of “Don’t Mess with Texas” was so strong and immediate that the enforcement program was abandoned. By offering Bubba a compelling message about identity, the campaign made appeals to fear unnecessary.

During the first five years of the campaign, visible roadside litter in Texas decreased 72 percent and the number of cans along Texas roads dropped 81 percent. In 1988, Syrek found that Texas had less than half the trash he found along the roads of other states that had run antilitter programs for comparable periods.

“Don’t Mess with Texas,” as a phrase, is a great slogan. But we shouldn’t confuse the slogan with the idea. The idea was that Syrek
could make Bubba care about litter by showing him that real Texans didn’t litter. The idea was that Bubba would respond to an identity appeal better than he would to a rational self-interest appeal. Even if a second-rate copywriter had been hired, and the slogan had been “Don’t Disrespect Texas,” the campaign would still have decreased cans on Texas highways.

So far we’ve looked at three strategies for making people care: using associations (or avoiding associations, as the case may be), appealing to self-interest, and appealing to identity. All three strategies can be effective, but we’ve got to watch out for our old nemesis, the Curse of Knowledge, which can interfere with our ability to implement them.

In 2002, Chip helped a group of professors lead a seminar for nonprofit arts leaders in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. One of the exercises was intended to help the leaders articulate and refine the core mission of their organization. The questions put to the attendees were difficult ones: Why does your organization exist? Can other organizations do what you do—and if so, what is it you do that is unique?

One question asked participants to define the purpose of their organization in a way that would motivate other people to care about it. Volunteers must care enough to contribute their time, donors must care enough to donate their money, and employees must care enough to stick by the organization (even when they get lucrative job offers from other, for-profit organizations). One of the organizations attending the seminar was the Murray Dranoff Duo Piano Foundation. When it was their turn, Chip asked the representatives to read their emotion-evoking purpose statement:

One attendee admitted later that when he first heard the phrase “duo piano” he immediately thought of the “dueling pianos” that you find in touristy bars, with people drunkenly singing along to “Piano Man.” Some people in the room thought that perhaps the death of duo piano music should not be prevented but hastened.

The conversation went around in circles for a few minutes without much progress in making the people in the room care about duo piano as an art form. Finally, one of the other participants chimed in: I don’t want to be rude, but why would the world be a less rich place if duo piano music disappeared completely?

At that point, surprise brows went up around the room and there was an audible murmur of approval. This phrase—“the sound of the orchestra but the intimacy of chamber music”—was profound and evocative. Suddenly the people in the room
understood
, for the first time, why the Murray Dranoff team was, and should be, committed to the duo piano.

Why did it take ten minutes for the Murray Dranoff group to
come up with a message that made other people care? You’d think that a group devoted to the duo piano would be in the best position of anyone on earth to explain the value of the music.

The reality is that they
did
in fact know better than anyone on earth why the duo piano was worth preserving. But the Curse of Knowledge prevented them from expressing it well. The mission to “preserve duo piano music” was effective and meaningful inside Murray Dranoff, but outside the organization it was opaque. Several attendees later commented that they had sympathized with the question “Why would the world be a less rich place if duo piano music disappeared completely?” What’s so special about the duo piano? Who cares?

If you come to work every day for years, focused on duo piano issues, it’s easy to forget that a lot of the world has never heard of the duo piano. It’s easy to forget that you’re the tapper and the world is the listener. The duo piano group was rescued from the Curse of Knowledge by a roomful of people relentlessly asking them, “Why?” By asking “Why?” three times, the duo piano group moved from talking about
what
they were doing to
why
they were doing it. They moved from a set of associations that had no power (except to someone who already knew duo piano music) to a set of deeper, more concrete associations that connected emotionally with outsiders.

This tactic of the “Three Whys” can be useful in bypassing the Curse of Knowledge. (Toyota actually has a “Five Whys” process for getting to the bottom of problems on its production line. Feel free to use as many “Whys” as you like.) Asking “Why?” helps to remind us of the core values, the core principles, that underlie our ideas.

A
few years back, a group of hospital administrators asked the design firm IDEO to help improve the hospital’s workflow. The team at IDEO knew that they would probably face a lot of internal resistance to their recommendations. The first step in motivating the
hospital staff to change was to get them to realize that there was a problem and get them to care about it.

IDEO created a video, shot from the perspective of a patient who goes to the emergency room for a leg fracture. In the video, we see what the patient sees. We
are
the patient. We come in through the door to the ER—we hunt around for check-in instructions and interact with the admissions people, who are speaking in a foreign medical tongue. Eventually, we are laid on a gurney and wheeled through the hospital. We see long stretches of the hospital ceiling. We hear disembodied voices, because we can’t see the person addressing us. Every now and then, someone pokes his or her head into our field of view. Frequently, there are long pauses where we just sit idle, staring at the ceiling, unsure what’s coming next.

Jane Fulton Suri, a psychologist at IDEO, said that when the hospital staff was shown the video it had an immediate impact. “The first reaction was always something like ‘Oh, I never
realized …’”
Suri says she likes the word
realized
. Before the hospital workers saw the video, the problem wasn’t quite
real
. Afterward, she said, “There’s an immediate motivation to fix things. It’s no longer just some problem on a problem list.”

IDEO also created role-playing exercises, putting the staffers in the patients’ shoes. The exercises included such tasks as, “Imagine that you are French and you are trying to locate your father in the hospital, but you don’t speak any English.” IDEO has become known for this type of simulation—simulations that drive employees to empathize with their customers. Time seems to erode empathy in some contexts, and IDEO’s simulations manage to restore the natural empathy that we have for others. “The world of business tends to emphasize the pattern over the particular,” Suri said. “The intellectual aspects of the pattern prevent people from caring.”

• • •

T
his realization—that empathy emerges from the particular rather than the pattern—brings us back full circle to the Mother Teresa quote at the beginning of the chapter: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities—not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be