Made to Stick (9 page)

Naturally sticky ideas are frequently unexpected. If we can make our ideas more unexpected, they will be stickier. But can you generate “unexpectedness”? Isn’t “planned unexpectedness” an oxymoron?

GETTING PEOPLE’S ATTENTION

The television commercial for the new Enclave minivan opens with the Enclave sitting in front of a park. A boy holding a football helmet climbs into the minivan, followed by his two younger sisters. “Introducing the all-new Enclave,” begins a woman’s voice-over. Dad is behind the wheel and Mom is in the passenger seat. Cup holders are everywhere. Dad starts the car and pulls away from the curb. “It’s a minivan to the max.”

The minivan cruises slowly through suburban streets. “With features like remote-controlled sliding rear doors, 150 cable channels, a full sky-view roof, temperature-controlled cup holders, and the six-point navigation system … It’s the minivan for families on the go.”

The Enclave pulls to a stop at an intersection. The camera zooms in on the boy, gazing out a side window that reflects giant, leafy trees. Dad pulls into the intersection.

That’s when it happens.

A speeding car barrels into the intersection and broadsides the minivan. There is a terrifying collision, with metal buckling and an explosion of broken glass.

The screen fades to black, and a message appears: “Didn’t see that coming?”

The question fades and is replaced by a statement: “No one ever does.”

With the sound of a stuck horn blaring in the background, a few final words flash across the screen: “Buckle up … Always.”

There is no Enclave minivan. This ad was created by the Ad
Council. (The Enclave spot was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation.) The Ad Council, founded in 1942, has launched many successful campaigns, from the World War II—era “Loose Lips Sink Ships” to the more recent “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.” The Enclave ad, like many other Council ads, capitalizes on the second characteristic of sticky ideas: Unexpectedness.

The Enclave ad is unexpected because it violates our schema for car commercials. We know how car commercials are supposed to behave. Pickups climb mountains of boulders. Sports cars zip along vacant curvy roads. SUVs carry yuppies through forests to waterfalls. And minivans deliver kids to soccer practice. No one dies, ever.

The ad is unexpected in a second way: It violates our schema of real-life neighborhood trips. We take thousands of trips in our neighborhoods, and the vast majority of them end safely. The commercial reminds us that accidents are inherently unexpected—we ought to buckle up, just in case.

Our schemas are like guessing machines. Schemas help us predict what will happen and, consequently, how we should make decisions. The Enclave asks, “Didn’t see that coming?” No, we didn’t. Our guessing machines failed, which caused us to be surprised.

Emotions are elegantly tuned to help us deal with critical situations. They prepare us for different ways of acting and thinking. We’ve all heard that anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee. The linkages between emotion and behavior can be more subtle, though. For instance, a secondary effect of being angry, which was recently discovered by researchers, is that we become more certain of our judgments. When we’re angry, we
know
we’re right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.

So if emotions have biological purposes, then what is the biological purpose of surprise? Surprise jolts us to attention. Surprise is triggered when our schemas fail, and it prepares us to understand why the failure occurred. When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for the future.

Surprise is associated with a facial expression that is consistent across cultures. In a book called
Unmasking the Face
, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen coined a term, “the surprise brow,” to describe the distinctive facial expression of surprise: “The eyebrows appear curved and high…. The skin below the brow has been stretched by the lifting of the brow, and is more visible than usual.”

When our brows go up, it widens our eyes and gives us a broader field of vision—the surprise brow is our body’s way of forcing us to see more. We may also do a double take to make sure that we saw what we thought we saw. By way of contrast, when we’re angry our eyes narrow so that we can focus on a known problem. In addition to making our eyebrows rise, surprise causes our jaws to drop and our mouths to gape. We’re struck momentarily speechless. Our bodies temporarily stop moving and our muscles go slack. It’s as though our bodies want to ensure that we’re not talking or moving when we ought to be taking in new information.

So surprise acts as a kind of emergency override when we confront something unexpected and our guessing machines fail. Things come to a halt, ongoing activities are interrupted, our attention focuses involuntarily on the event that surprised us. When a minivan commercial ends in a bloodcurdling crash, we stop and wonder,
What is going on?

Unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention and think. That extra attention and thinking sears unexpected events into our memories. Surprise gets our attention. Sometimes the attention is fleeting, but in other cases surprise can lead to enduring attention. Surprise can prompt us to hunt for underlying causes, to imagine other possibilities, to figure out how to avoid surprises in the future.

Researchers who study conspiracy theories, for instance, have noted that many of them arise when people are grappling with unexpected
events, such as when the young and attractive die suddenly. There are conspiracy theories about the sudden deaths of JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and Kurt Cobain. There tends to be less conspiratorial interest in the sudden deaths of ninety-year-olds.

Surprise makes us want to find an answer—to resolve the question of why we were surprised—and big surprises call for big answers. If we want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the power of big surprises.

Going for a big surprise, though, can cause a big problem. It’s easy to step over the line into gimmickry.

The late 1990s was the heyday of the dot-com bubble. Venture-backed start-ups poured millions of dollars into advertising to establish their brands. With increasing amounts of money chasing a finite amount of consumer attention, ads had to work harder and harder to provoke surprise and interest.

During the Super Bowl of 2000, an ad ran that opened with a college marching band practicing on a football field. We’re shown close-ups of the band members as they execute their precision movements. Then we cut to the stadium tunnel, which leads out onto the field—and suddenly a dozen ravenous wolves rush onto the field. Band members scatter in terror as the wolves hunt them down and attack.

What was this advertisement for? We have no idea. There’s no question that this ad was surprising and memorable. To this day, we remember the tastelessly comic image of the wolves chasing the terrified band members. But because the surprise was utterly nongermane to the message that needed to be communicated, it was worthless. If the product being advertised had been “mauling-proof band uniforms,” on the other hand, the ad could have been an award winner.

In this sense, the wolves ad is the opposite of the Enclave ad. Both
ads contain powerful surprises, but only the Enclave ad uses that surprise to reinforce its core message. In Chapter 1 we discussed the importance of finding the core in your ideas. Using surprise in the service of a core message can be extremely powerful.

Below is a list of four words. Read each one and take a second to determine whether it’s a real English word.

According to Bruce Whittlesea and Lisa Williams, the researchers who developed this task, “PHRAUG and TAYBL often cause raised eyebrows, and an ‘Oh!’ reaction. HENSION and BARDLE often cause a frown.”

PHRAUG and TAYBL cause the surprise brow because they
look
unfamiliar but
sound
familiar. The “Oh!” reaction comes when we realize that PHRAUG is just a funny way to spell FROG.

HENSION and BARDLE are more troubling. They seem oddly familiar, because they borrow letter combinations from common words. They have the look of SAT words—fancy vocabulary that we should probably know but don’t. But HENSION and BARDLE are made-up words. When we realize that we’ve been struggling to find a nonexistent solution, we get frustrated.

HENSION and BARDLE provide an example of surprise without insight. So far, we’ve talked a lot about the power of surprise, and how surprise can make our ideas stickier. But although HENSION and BARDLE are surprising, they aren’t sticky; they’re just frustrating. What we see now is that surprise isn’t enough. We also need
insight
.

To be surprising, an event can’t be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “post-dictable.” The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it’s not something you would have seen coming. PHRAUG is post-dictable, but HENSION isn’t. Contrast the feeling you get from TV shows or films, such as
The Sixth Sense
, that have great surprise endings—endings that unite clues that you’ve been exposed to all along—with the feeling you get from gimmicky, unforeseeable endings (“It was all a dream”).

We started the chapter by pointing out that surprise happens when our guessing machines fail. The emotion of surprise is designed to focus our attention on the failure, so that we can improve our guessing machines for the future. Then we drew a distinction between gimmicky surprise, like dot-com ads, and meaningful post-dictable surprise.

Here is the bottom line for our everyday purposes: If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it. But in surprising people, in breaking their guessing machines, how do we avoid gimmicky surprise, like the wolves? The easiest way to avoid gimmicky surprise and ensure that your unexpected ideas produce insight is to make sure you target an aspect of your audience’s guessing machines that relates to your core message. We’ve already seen a few examples of this strategy.

In Chapter 1, we discussed Hoover Adams, the newspaper publisher whose mantra is “Names, names, and names.” To most local newspaper reporters, this mantra will seem like common sense. Certainly, their schemas of “good local news” involve community-focused stories.

But that wasn’t Adams’s point. He had something much more radical in mind. So he broke their schema by saying, essentially, “If I could, I’d publish pages from the phone book to get names. In fact, if I could gather up enough names I’d hire more typesetters to lay out more pages so they’d fit.” Suddenly the reporters realized that
“Names, names, and names” was
not
consistent with their schemas. Whereas their previous schema might have been “Try to emphasize local angles when you can,” Adams had replaced that with “Names come before everything else, even my own profitability.” That’s a message that draws power from its unexpectedness.

Another example we discussed in Chapter 1 was Southwest Airlines’ proverb “THE low-cost airline.” Again, most Southwest staffers and customers know that Southwest is a discount airline. In that context, the proverb seems intuitive. It was only when Kelleher put teeth in the proverb—refusing to offer chicken salad to customers even if they really wanted it—that its meaning sank in. Before Kelleher, an average staffer’s guessing machine might have predicted, “We want to please our customers in a low-cost way.” After Kelleher, the guessing machine was refined to “We will be THE low-cost airline, even if it means intentionally disregarding some of our customers’ preferences.”

So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message—i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.

Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other. And why shouldn’t they? If I already intuitively “get” what you’re trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it? The danger, of course, is that what
sounds
like common sense often
isn’t
, as with the Hoover Adams and Southwest examples. It’s your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.

Nordstrom is a department store known for outstanding customer service. That extra service comes at a price: Nordstrom can be an expensive place to shop. Yet many people are willing to pay higher prices precisely because Nordstrom makes shopping so much more pleasant.

For Nordstrom’s strategy to work, it must transform its frontline employees into customer-service zealots. And they do not walk in the door that way. Most people with service experience come from environments where managers spend much of their energy trying to minimize labor costs. The prevailing schema of customer service might be, roughly, “Get customers in and out the door as fast as possible, and try to smile.”

Job applicants at Nordstrom will likely have years of experience acting on this schema. But Nordstrom has a different philosophy: Make customers happy even at the expense of efficiency. How does Nordstrom break down one schema and replace it with another?

The company solves this problem, in part, through unexpected stories. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in their book
Built to Last
, describe stories told at Nordstrom about unexpected service by employees, who are known within the firm as “Nordies”: