Contagious: Why Things Catch On (18 page)

MacEachern developed two potential ideas.

The first idea was a bike ride across America. People would set a mileage goal for themselves and get friends or family members to sponsor their ride. It would get more people to exercise, boost interest in cycling, and raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Lance might even do part of the trip. The event would take weeks and likely garner significant media coverage both nationally and locally in all the cities the ride covered.

The second idea was a wristband. Nike had recently begun selling Baller Bands, silicone rubber bands with inspirational messages like “TEAM” or “RESPECT” on the inside. Basketball players wore them to stay focused and increase motivation. Why not make a wristband focused on Armstrong? Nike could make 5 million of the bands, sell them for a dollar each, and give all the proceeds to the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

MacEachern liked the wristband idea, but when he pitched it to Lance’s advisors they weren’t convinced. The foundation thought the bands would be a dud. Bill Stapleton, Armstrong’s agent, thought they had no chance of success and called them “
a stupid idea.”
Even Armstrong was incredulous, saying, “What are we going to do with the 4.9 million that we don’t sell?”

MacEachern was stuck. While he liked the wristband idea, he wasn’t sure it would fly. But then he made one seemingly innocuous decision that had a big impact on the product’s success. MacEachern made the wristbands yellow.

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Yellow was chosen because it is the color of the race leader’s jersey in the Tour de France. It’s also not strongly associated with either gender, making it easy for both men and women to wear.

But it was also a smart decision from an observability perspective. Yellow is a color people almost never see.

And it is striking. Yellow stands out against almost anything people wear, making it easy to see a Livestrong wristband from far away.

This public visibility helped make the product a huge success. Not only did Nike sell the first 5 million bands, but it did so within the first six months of release. Production couldn’t keep up with demand. The wristbands were such a hot item that people started bidding ten times the retail price to snag them on eBay. In the end, more than 85 million wristbands were sold. You might even know someone who wears one to this day. Not bad for a little piece of plastic.

It’s hard to know how well the ride across America would have done if Nike had implemented it. And it’s easy to Monday-morning-quarterback a successful strategy and say it was obviously
the better choice. But regardless, one thing is clear: the wristband creates more behavioral residue than the cross-country ride ever could have. As MacEachern keenly noted:

The nice thing about a wristband is that it lives on. The bike ride doesn’t. There’ll be pictures of the bike ride and people will talk about the bike ride, but unless it goes on every year—even if it does go on every year, it doesn’t live on as a reminder every day of this sort of stuff. But the wristband does.

Behavioral residue is the physical traces or remnants that most actions or behaviors leave in their wake. Mystery lovers have shelves full of mystery novels. Politicos frame photos of themselves shaking hands with famous politicians. Runners have trophies, T-shirts, or medals from participating in 5Ks.

As discussed in the chapter on Social Currency, items like the Livestrong wristband provide insight into who people are and what they like. Even things that would otherwise be difficult to observe, like whether a person donates to a particular cause or prefers mysteries to historical fiction.

But when publicly visible, these remnants facilitate imitation and provide chances for people to talk about related products or ideas.

Take voting. It’s hard to get people to turn out to vote. They have to figure out where their polling stations are located, take the morning off from work, and stand in line, sometimes for hours, until they get the chance to cast their ballots. But these hurdles are compounded by the fact that voting is a private act. Unless you actually happen to see all the people who go to the polls, you have no idea how many other people decided voting was worth the effort. So there is not much social proof.

But in the 1980s election officials came up with a nice way to make voting more observable: the “I Voted” sticker. Simple enough, but by creating behavioral residue, the sticker made the private act of voting much more public, even after people left the polling station. It provided a ready reminder that today is the day to vote, others are doing it, and you should too.

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Behavioral residue exists for all types of products and ideas. Tiffany, Victoria’s Secret, and a host of other retailers give customers disposable shopping bags to carry their purchases home. But because of the Social Currency associated with some of these retailers, many consumers reuse the bags rather than tossing them. They use the Victoria’s Secret bags to carry their gym clothes, toss their lunch into a Tiffany bag, or use Bloomingdale’s famous medium brown bag to carry papers around town. People even reuse bags from restaurants, discount stores, and other places that are not status symbols.

Clothing retailer Lululemon takes this idea one step further. Rather than make paper bags that are relatively durable, it makes shopping bags that are hard to throw away. Made of sturdy plastic like reusable grocery bags, these bags are clearly meant to be reused. So people use them to carry groceries or do other errands. But along the way this behavioral residue helps provide social proof for the brand.

Giveaways can also provide behavioral residue. Go to any conference, job fair, or large meeting where presenters have set up booths and you’ll be stunned by the amount of swag they give away. Mugs, pens, and T-shirts. Beverage cozies, stress balls, and ice scrapers. A couple of years ago the Wharton School even gave me a tie.

But some of these giveaways provide better behavioral residue than others. Giving away a makeup carrying case is fine, but women usually apply makeup in the privacy of their bathrooms, so it doesn’t make the brand that observable. Coffee mugs and gym bags might be used less frequently, but their use is more publicly visible.

People posting their opinions and behavior online also provide behavioral residue. Reviews, blogs, posts, or other sorts of content all leave evidence that others can find later. For this reason, many businesses and organizations encourage people to Like them—or their content—on Facebook. By simply clicking the Like button, people not only show their affinity with a product, idea, or organization, they also help spread the word that something is good or worth paying attention to. ABC News found that
installing these buttons boosted its Facebook traffic by 250 percent.

Other sites push, or automatically post, what people do to their social networking pages. Music has always been a somewhat social activity, but Spotify takes this a step further. The system allows you to listen to whatever songs you like but also posts what you’re listening to on your Facebook page, making it easier for your friends to see what you like (and letting them know about Spotify). Many other websites do the same.

But should we always try to make things public? Are there ever instances when making something public could be a bad idea?

ANTI-DRUG COMMERCIALS?

A sprightly, dark-haired teenager walks down the stairs of her apartment building. She’s wearing a pretty silver necklace and
carrying a sweater in her hand. She could be on her way to work or to meet up with a friend for coffee. Suddenly a neighbor’s door opens and a voice whispers, “I got some good pot for you.”

“No!” She scowls and hurries down the stairs.

A fresh-faced kid is sitting outside. He is wearing a blue sweatshirt and sports a bowl haircut that used to be popular among boys. He appears deeply engrossed in a video game when a voice interrupts him. “Cocaine?” the voice asks. “No thanks,” the kid replies.

A young man is standing against a wall chewing gum. “Yo, my man, want some ’ludes?” the voice inquires. “No way!” the man exclaims, glaring back.

“Just Say No” is one of the most famous anti-drug campaigns of all time. Created by First Lady Nancy Reagan during her husband’s presidency, the campaign ran public service announcements as part of a national effort to discourage teens from recreational drug use in the 1980s and 1990s.

The logic was simple. One way or another, kids are going to be asked if they want to use drugs. Whether by a friend, a stranger, or somebody else. And they needed to know how to say no. So the government spent millions of dollars on anti-drug public service announcements. It hoped that the messages would teach kids how to react in these situations and, as a result, decrease drug use.

More recent campaigns have relied on the same idea. Between 1998 and 2004, Congress appropriated almost $1 billion for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. The goal was to educate kids ages twelve to eighteen to enable them to reject drugs.

Communications professor Bob Hornik wanted to see
whether anti-drug ads were actually effective. So he collected data on the drug use of thousands of teens over the time the anti-drug
ads ran. Whether teens had seen the ads and whether they had ever smoked marijuana. Then he looked at whether the public service announcements seemed to decrease marijuana use.

They didn’t.

In fact, the messages actually seemed to
increase
drug use. Kids aged twelve and a half to eighteen who saw the ads were actually
more
likely to smoke marijuana. Why?

Because it made drug use more public.

Think about observability and social proof. Before seeing the message, some kids might never have thought about taking drugs. Others might have considered it but have been wary about doing the wrong thing.

But anti-drug ads often say two things simultaneously. They say that drugs are bad, but they also say that other people are doing them. And as we’ve discussed throughout this chapter, the more others seem to be doing something, the more likely people are to think that thing is right or normal and what they should be doing as well.

Imagine you’re a fifteen-year-old who has never considered using drugs. You’re sitting at home watching cartoons one afternoon when a public service announcement comes on telling you about the dangers of drug use. Someone’s going to ask you if you want to try drugs and you need to be ready to say no. Or even worse, the cool kids are going to be the ones asking. But you shouldn’t say yes.

You never see public service announcements for avoiding cutting off your hand with a saw or not getting hit by a bus, so if the government spent the time and money to tell you about drugs, a lot of your peers must be doing them, right? Some of them are apparently the coolest kids in school. And you had no idea!

As Hornik said,

Our basic hypothesis is that the more kids saw these ads, the more they came to believe that lots of other kids were using marijuana. And the more they came to believe that other kids were using marijuana, the more they became interested in using it themselves.

As with many powerful tools, making things more public can have unintended consequences when not applied carefully. If you want to get people
not
to do something, don’t tell them that lots of their peers are doing it.

Take the music industry. It thought it could stop illegal downloads by showing people how big the problem is. So the industry association’s website sternly warns people that “only 37 percent of music acquired by U.S. consumers . . . was paid for” and that in the past few years “approximately
30 billion songs were illegally downloaded.”

But I’m not sure that message has the desired effect. If anything, it may have the opposite effect. Less than half of people are paying for their music? Wow. Seems like you’d have to be an idiot to pay for it then, right?

Even in cases where most people are doing the right thing, talking about the minority who are doing the wrong thing can encourage people to give in to temptation.

Rather than making the private public, preventing a behavior requires the opposite: making the public private. Making others’ behavior
less
observable.

One way is to highlight what people
should
be doing instead. Psychologist Bob Cialdini and colleagues wanted to decrease the number of
people who stole petrified wood from Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. So they posted signs around the park that tried different strategies. One asked people not to take the wood because “many past visitors have removed petrified wood
from the Park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest.” But by providing social proof that others were stealing, the message had a perverse effect, almost doubling the number of people taking wood!

Highlighting what people should do was much more effective. Over a different set of trails they tried a different sign that stated, “Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the Park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest.” By focusing on the positive effects of
not
taking the wood, rather than on what others were doing, the park service was able to reduce theft.

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It’s been said that when people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate one another. We look to others for information about what is right or good to do in a given situation, and this social proof shapes everything from the products we buy to the candidates we vote for.

But as we discussed, the phrase “Monkey see, monkey do” captures more than just our tendency to follow others. If people can’t see what others are doing, they can’t imitate them. So to get our products and ideas to become popular we need to make them more publicly observable. For Apple this was as easy as flipping its logo. By cleverly leveraging moustaches, Movember drew huge attention and donations for men’s cancer research.

So we need to be like Hotmail and Apple and design products that advertise themselves. We need to be like Lululemon and Livestrong and create behavioral residue, discernible evidence that sticks around even after people have used our product or engaged with our ideas. We need to make the private public. If something is built to show, it’s built to grow.