Contagious: Why Things Catch On (22 page)

Today there are thousands of entertainment options, but our tendency to tell stories remains. We get together around our proverbial campfires—now water coolers or girls’/guys’ night out—and tell stories. About ourselves and the things that have happened to us lately. About our friends and other people we know.

People tell stories for the same reasons they share word of mouth. Some narratives are about Social Currency. People tell
the story of going through the phone booth to get into Please Don’t Tell because it makes them look cool and in the know. Other stories are driven by (high arousal) Emotion. People tell the story of
Will It Blend?
because they are amazed that a blender could shred marbles or an iPhone. Practical Value also plays a role. People share the story of how their neighbor’s dogs got sick after eating a certain type of chew toy because they want your dog to avoid the same fate.

People are so used to telling stories that they create narratives even when they don’t actually need to. Take online reviews. They’re supposed to be about product features. How well a new digital camera worked and whether the zoom is as good as the company suggests. But this mostly informational content often ends up being embedded in a background narrative.

My son just turned eight so we were planning our first trip to Disney World last July. We needed a digital camera to capture the experience so bought this one because my friend recommended it. The zoom was great. We could easily get sharp pictures of Cinderella’s Castle even from far away.

We’re so used to telling stories that we do it even when a simple rating or opinion would have sufficed.

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Just like the Trojan Horse itself, stories are more than they seem. Sure, the outward shell of a story—we could call this the surface plot—grabs your attention and engages your interest. But peel back that exterior, and you’ll usually find something hidden inside. Underneath the star-crossed lovers and thundering heroes there is usually something else being conveyed.

Stories carry things. A lesson or moral. Information or a take-home message. Take the famous story “The Three Little Pigs.” Three brothers leave home to head into the world to seek their fortune. The first little pig quickly builds his house out of straw. The second pig uses sticks. Both throw their houses together as quickly as possible so they can hang out and play the rest of the day. The third pig, however, is more disciplined. He takes the time and effort to carefully build his house out of bricks, even while his brothers have fun around him.

One night, a big bad wolf comes along looking for something to eat. He goes to the first pig’s house and says those words so beloved by small children: “Little pig, little pig, let me in.” But when the pig says no, the wolf blows the pig’s house down. He does the same to the house of sticks. But when the wolf tries the same thing at the third pig’s house, it doesn’t work. He huffs and he puffs but the wolf can’t destroy the third pig’s house because it’s made of bricks.

And that’s the moral of the story. Effort pays off. Take the time to do something right. You might not have as much fun right away, but you’ll find that it’s worth it in the end.

Lessons or morals are also embedded in thousands of other fairy tales, fables, and urban legends. “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” warns about the dangers of lying. “Cinderella” shows that being good to others pays off. Shakespeare’s plays carry valuable lessons about character and relationships, power and madness, love and war. These are complex lessons, but they are instructive nevertheless.

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The ordinary stories we tell one another every day also carry information.

Take the story of the coat my cousin bought from Lands’ End. He’d moved from California to the East Coast a couple of years ago, and in preparation for his first real winter he went to a fancy department store and bought a nice topcoat. The coat was one of those three-quarter-length wool varieties that men often wear over suits. It fitted well, the color was perfect, and my cousin felt like a dapper English gentleman.

There was only one problem. It wasn’t warm enough. It was great when the temperature outside was in the fifties and even the forties, but once the temperature got down to the thirties the cold seeped right through the coat into my cousin’s bones.

After one winter of looking great but freezing every day on his way to work, he decided it was time to get a real winter coat. He even decided to go whole hog and get one of those goose-down numbers that make you look as if you’re wearing a sleeping bag—the kind of coat that is ubiquitous in the East and Midwest but never seen in California. So he went online, found a great deal at Lands’ End, and bought a down commuter coat rated to minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Warm enough to withstand even the coldest East Coast winter.

My cousin really liked the coat, and indeed it was super warm. But halfway through the season he broke the zipper. Ripped it right off the lining. He was devastated. He had just bought the coat a few months before and it was broken already. How much would it cost to have it fixed? And how long would he have to wait to get it back from being repaired?

It was mid-January, not a very ideal time to be walking around without a winter coat.

So he called Lands’ End. How much will it cost to repair, he asked, and how long will it take to be fixed?

My cousin braced for the icy reply he was used to getting from
customer service people. It always seems to be the customer’s problem. So sorry to hear the product broke or the service isn’t working, customer service people usually say, but unfortunately it’s not our fault. It’s outside the warranty or you tried to do something beyond the normal use. But we’d be happy to repair it for twice the cost of the product or send someone out to check on it. Just as long as you can stay home from work for the three-hour window during which we may or may not show up. Oh, and by the way, the script the brand consultants wrote reminds us to tell you that we
really
appreciate your business.

But to his surprise, the Lands’ End customer service person said something entirely different. “Repair?” she asked. “We’ll just send you a new one in the mail.” “How much will that cost?” my cousin asked nervously. “It’s free,” she replied, “and we’ll send it out two-day mail so you don’t have to wait. It’s too cold this winter to go out with a broken coat.”

A free replacement sent right away if a product breaks? Wow! That’s almost unheard of in this day and age of “the customer is always wrong.” Remarkable customer service. Customer service the way it is supposed to be. My cousin was so impressed he just had to tell me what happened.

My cousin’s experience makes for a nice story, but when you look closer there is also a huge amount of useful information hidden in the narrative: (1) Topcoats look great but aren’t really warm enough for a bitter East Coast winter. (2) Down coats make you look like a mummy, but they’re worth getting if you want to stay warm. (3) Lands’ End makes a really warm winter coat. (4) It also has outstanding customer service. (5) If something goes wrong, Lands’ End will fix it. These are just a handful of the nuggets of knowledge woven into a deceptively simple story.

The same is true for most stories people tell us. How we
avoided the traffic jam or how the dry cleaner was able to take our oil-splattered white shirt and make it look like new. These stories contain helpful information: a good route to take if the highway is blocked; a great dry cleaner if you need to get out tough stains.

Stories, then, can act as vessels, carriers that help transmit information to others.

LEARNING THROUGH STORIES

Stories are an important source of cultural learning that help us make sense of the world. At a high level, this learning can be about the rules and standards of a group or society. How should a good employee behave? What does it mean to be a moral person? Or on a more basic level: who’s a good mechanic who won’t overcharge?

Beyond stories, think about other ways that people could acquire this information. Trial and error might work, but it would be extremely costly and time-consuming. Imagine if finding an honest mechanic required taking your car to two dozen different places around town and getting work done at each one. It would be exhausting (and expensive).

Alternatively, people could try direct observation, but that’s also tough. You’d have to cozy up to the mechanics in all the different shops and convince them to let you watch what they did and tell you how much they charged. Guess how well that would work.

Finally, people could get their information from advertisements. But ads aren’t always trustworthy, and people are generally skeptical of persuasion attempts. Most ads for mechanics will say they have great prices and do good work, but without really checking, it’s hard to know for sure.

Stories solve this problem. They provide a quick and easy way for people to acquire lots of knowledge in a vivid and engaging fashion. One good story about a mechanic who fixed the problem without charging is worth dozens of observations and years of trial and error. Stories save time and hassle and give people the information they need in a way that’s easy to remember.

You can think of stories as providing proof by analogy. There is no way to be sure that if I buy something from Lands’ End, I’ll get the same wonderful customer service my cousin received. But the mere fact that it happened to someone who is like me makes me feel that there is a pretty good chance it will happen to me too.

People are also less likely to argue against stories than against advertising claims. Lands’ End representatives could tell us that they have great customer service, but as we discussed earlier, the fact that they are trying to sell something makes it difficult to believe them. It’s harder to argue with personal stories.

First, it’s hard to disagree with a specific thing that happened to a specific person. What is someone going to tell my cousin, “No, I think you’re lying, there’s no way Lands’ End would be that nice”? Hardly.

Second, we’re so caught up in the drama of what happened to so-and-so that we don’t have the cognitive resources to disagree. We’re so engaged in following the narrative that we don’t have the energy to question what is being said. So in the end,
we’re much more likely to be persuaded.

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People don’t like to seem like walking advertisements. The Subway sandwich chain offers seven subs with less than six grams of fat. But no one is going to walk up to a friend and just spit out
that information. Not only would it be weird, it would be out of context. Sure, this information is practically valuable if someone is trying to lose weight, but unless weight loss is the topic of conversation, or the situation triggers people to think about ways to lose weight, they’re not going to bring it up. So the fact that Subway has a bunch of low-fat options may not be brought up that often.

Contrast that with the Jared story. Jared Fogle lost 245 pounds eating Subway sandwiches. Bad eating habits and lack of exercise led Jared to balloon to 425 pounds in college. He was so heavy that he picked his courses based on whether the classroom had large-enough seats for him to be comfortable rather than whether he liked the material.

But after his roommate pointed out that his health was getting worse, Jared decided to take action. So he started a “Subway diet”: almost every day he ate a foot-long veggie sub for lunch and a six-inch turkey sub for dinner. After three months of this self-imposed regimen he had lost almost 100 pounds.

But he didn’t stop there. Jared kept up his diet. Soon his pants size had dropped from an enormous sixty inches to a normal thirty-four-inch waist.
He lost all that weight and had Subway to thank.

The Jared story is so entertaining that people bring it up even when they’re not talking about weight loss. The amount of weight he lost is impressive, but even more astonishing is the fact that he lost it eating Subway sandwiches. A guy loses 245 pounds eating fast food? The summary alone is enough to draw people in.

The story gets shared for many of the reasons we talked about in prior chapters. It’s remarkable (Social Currency), evokes surprise and amazement (Emotion), and provides useful information about healthy fast food (Practical Value).

People don’t talk about Jared because they want to help Subway, but Subway still benefits because it is part of the narrative. Listeners learn about Jared, but they also learn about Subway along the way. They learn that (1) while Subway might seem like fast food, it actually offers a number of healthy options. (2) So healthy that someone could lose weight by eating them. (3) A lot of weight. Further, (4) someone could eat mostly Subway sandwiches for three months and still come back for more. So the food must be pretty tasty. Listeners learn all this about Subway, even though people tell the story because of Jared.

And that is the magic of stories.
Information travels under the guise of what seems like idle chatter.

BUILD A TROJAN HORSE

Stories thus give people an easy way to talk about products and ideas. Subway might have low-fat subs, and Lands’ End might have great customer service, but outside of triggers in a conversation, people need a reason to bring that information up. And good stories provide that reason. They provide a sort of psychological cover that allows people to talk about a product or idea without seeming like an advertisement.

So how can we use stories to get people talking?

We need to build our own Trojan Horse—a carrier narrative that people will share, while talking about our product or idea along the way.

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Tim Piper never had a sister. And he grew up going to an all-boys school. So he had always thought it was a little ridiculous
that so many of his girlfriends had beauty issues. They were always worried that their hair was too straight, their eyes were too light, or their complexion wasn’t clear enough. Piper didn’t get it. They seemed pretty enough to him.

But after interviewing dozens of girls, Piper started to realize that the media were to blame. Advertising, and the media in general, taught young women that something was wrong with them. That they needed fixing. And after years of being bombarded with those messages, women started to believe them.