Invisible Influence (18 page)

More generally, managing identity signals is key for making sure something not only catches on, but stays popular. If people are supporting a cause or buying a product because they like what it communicates about them, advocacy and sales can increase exponentially as people rush to jump on the bandwagon.

But things can come crashing down just as quickly. What was cool today may be passé tomorrow as people move on to the next hot issue or item.

British luxury brand Burberry faced just this issue. While the brand had upscale roots among greying executives who love to golf, by the early 2000s, the meaning had shifted. Burberry's distinctive camel check pattern had become the uniform de rigueur for “chavs,” or white working-class soccer hooligans with a penchant for the bottle. Taxi drivers would refuse to pick up men in Burberry baseball caps, and by the time a drug-abusing soap actress, her daughter, and the daughter's stroller appeared draped in the pattern, Burberry's original patrons had fled to other brands.

To restore Burberry's luster, new CEO Angela Ahrendts not only cracked down on counterfeiters, she toned down the check. Ahrendts removed the iconic plaid pattern from 90 percent of
the product line. When the checkered pattern did appear, it appeared on the inside of coats rather than splashed all over the outside.

And the strategy worked. Earnings soared and the company reclaimed their identity. By making the branding less prominent, Burberry maintained its high-quality status, but shook off any hangers-on who only wanted the brand for what it signaled.

Another solution is to offer multiple product lines. Lots of families own a Toyota Camry because it is a safe, reliable car. But families driving it may turn other consumers off. If you just got a big promotion at work and want to show people you've made it, buying a car that signals suburban dad isn't going to cut it.

So Toyota created Lexus. The Lexus brand has a more luxurious feel and offers higher-end cars at a higher price point. Part of this is about appealing to customers who want something fancier than a Camry. But part of it is also about identity. Lexus offers people who might have driven something like a Camry a way to distinguish themselves from the families in their Camrys. A way to move up, but not out of the Toyota brand.

Scion, another Toyota brand, does something similar for younger consumers who like to customize their rides. The cars themselves offer different features, but the symbolic offering is different as well. Driving a Scion signals something quite different from driving a Toyota, and the multiple sub-brands allows Toyota to retain these different segments by offering desired, albeit different, signals to each of them.

Meaning can also be managed by evoking broader identities. Republicans are wary of supporting a liberal cause and Democrats feel similarly about conservative ones. But framing something as a human rights issue helps it rise above partisan lines. This superordinate, or higher-level, identity is something more
people can buy into. And because it evokes a broader identity, it's less likely that people will avoid it.

So far we've talked about two ways social influence impacts behavior: imitation and differentiation. People can do the same thing as others or do something different. But there is a third route as well. Doing both at the same time.

I
. While some people may regard the term “guido” as an ethnic slur, given members of the cast used such terms to refer to themselves, I've retained them here. But sincere apologies to anyone who might find the terms offensive.

II
. The same phenomenon occurs in other product categories. T-shirts that said Armani Exchange or Abercrombie & Fitch on the front were easy for people to identify. Even shirts with more moderate branding (for example, a small “A|X” logo) were correctly identified around 75 percent of the time. But shirts without prominent branding were much harder to identify. Only 6 percent of observers correctly guessed the brand.

III
. Children may not realize that Wonder Woman gets her power from cauliflower, or that the sports star they emulate loves beets, but sharing the news will increase kids' consumption of vegetables and other healthy foods. One parent convinced their two young boys that broccoli looked like a dinosaur tree, and that by eating broccoli they could pretend they were long-necked dinosaurs. The dinosaur-loving kids thought that was pretty cool and told their friends, and soon their whole day care group loved broccoli. See Brian Wansink's great book,
Mindless Eating
:
Why We Eat More Than We Think
(New York: Bantam, 2007).

Twice a year, a secret meeting takes place somewhere in Europe. Representatives from various countries gather in a sparse room in an undisclosed location, debating for days until a decision is reached. Presentations are made, arguments volleyed, and sides taken.

It's not a nuclear security meeting, or a G8 summit, but an event that some might argue has a bigger impact on our everyday life. The meeting to decide the Color of the Year.

Since 1999, the prophets of color have met to anoint the shade that will rule runways and aisles for the next twelve months.

In 2014, it was color number 18-3224, otherwise known as Radiant Orchid. This vibrant shade of purple contains hints of pink, and was lauded for its ability to encourage “expanded creativity and originality.”

In 2013, the Color of the Year was Emerald, a lush green that signified well-being, balance, and harmony. These popular hues were preceded in prior years by colors such as Turquoise, Honeysuckle, and Tangerine Tango.

Pantone, a cross-industry color company that provides a reference guide for thousands of colors in a standardized format, convenes the meeting. Before the meeting, Pantone surveys manufacturers, retailers, and designers around the world to understand what colors they plan to use in the next year and what colors they see bubbling up around them. These insights are then organized, filtered, and debated by the attendees, with the results summarized in
Pantoneview
, a $750 publication purchased by everyone from Gap and Estée Lauder to package designers and the floral industry.
^I

These companies hope to decode what color will be hot next year. It's tough enough to figure out whether boot-cut or skinny jeans will be popular, or whether flower buyers will be drawn to tulips or roses. But color adds even more complexity. Will consumers want purple tulips or red ones? Will grey jeans sell well or is black a safer bet?

Given the long lead times for producing products, color decisions need to be made months in advance. Farmers have to plant
the right bulbs and factories have to order the right thread. And no one wants to be forced to discount stacks of unsold inventory at the end of the season.

But while betting on the right colors is vital, it's also hard for any one company or designer to guess what color will be popular. Each business gets only a tiny slice of the full information pie. They see what people are buying in a small set of product categories in a small set of countries.

So companies look to Pantone to help them make educated guesses. Pantone collects a wide range of data from across the globe and provides a centralized, (hopefully) unbiased perspective. They give companies a broad sense of what is going on now, and what might be happening next. Predictions about which colors will be popular in the future.

If you look at the Colors of the Year over time, though, you notice an intriguing pattern. The year 2012's color, Tangerine Tango, looks strikingly similar to Tigerlily, a previous Color of the Year winner. And unless you squint, 2010's color, Turquoise, is a dead ringer for Blue Turquoise, the Color of the Year from a few years before.

Might there be some structure to cultural evolution? Could what's popular now shape what becomes popular next?

Hits happen in all sorts of industries. There are blockbuster movies, unicorn start-ups, and platinum albums. The
Fifty Shades of Grey
trilogy has sold over 125 million copies. Greek yogurt came out of nowhere to become one of the hottest foods in the United States.

Not surprisingly, predicting cultural trends is of huge interest
to companies, consumers, and cultural critics alike. Will a new book be a hit or a flop? Will a particular public policy initiative catch on or fizzle fast? There are big rewards in being able to forecast success.

To get a leg up, companies build complex algorithms to try to predict whether a given product or song is catchy enough. So-called trend forecasters swirl the tea leaves and try to guess what will happen next.

But predicting the future is notoriously hard to do. As we know from the story of J. K. Rowling, even so-called “experts” have trouble identifying hits before they take off. For every “futurist” who prophesied the organic food movement, fifteen others predicted that “mechanized hugging booths” would be the wave of the future.

As the music research illustrated, people's tendency to follow others makes success volatile. Forecasting how popular a song, food, or even color will be seems almost impossible. Why some things succeed and others fail often seems random.

But might it be less random than it seems?

To find out, Wharton professor Eric Bradlow and statisticians Alex Braunstein and Yao Zhang and I decided to examine a domain that everyone knows at least something about.
¹
First names.

Cesar had been hoping for a boy. Praying, actually. Sometimes twice a day. He and his wife, Rebecca, already had twin four-year-old girls, and there was only so much pink he could take. Sure, the girls played soccer and piano in addition to taking ballet lessons, but it would be nice to have another guy in the house. Another Y chromosome to balance out all the Xs.

So he did everything he could to make it happen. He started
with the easy stuff. Picking out shades of blue for the baby's room and wearing boxers rather than briefs.

Soon he began following all sorts of pseudoscience recommendations. He drank more coffee and encouraged Rebecca to eat “boy” foods like red meat, fish, and pasta. He consulted a Chinese gender chart to help them decide when to conceive and asked Rebecca to drink cough syrup with guaifenesin to loosen mucus (don't even ask). He even tried consulting a psychic.

It was a harrowing first four and a half months.

Eventually, they went in for an ultrasound. They stared at the pictures, looking for any hint of the gender.

Then, the doctor uttered the words Cesar had been waiting for. It would be a boy.

Cesar and the girls were ecstatic. There would be another boy in the house. But then came the tougher decision. What to name him.

Rebecca came up with a long list of possibilities: Eli, Julian, and Michael. Jason, Daniel, and Liam. Gavan and James and Holden and Tucker.

She had been a teacher before becoming pregnant with the girls, so every name had an association. Gabriel sounded nice enough, but one of the worst kids she ever taught was a Gabriel, so that was out. Holden was fine but there were too many running around school the past few years.

The name also had to fit with the baby's sisters' names, Parker and Allie. Something that had a comparable feel. A similar number of syllables and a little more new sounding than traditional.

Each time they thought they had reached a solution, someone close to them would shoot it down. “ ‘Michael' sounds too old-fashioned,” Rebecca's mom complained. “ ‘Liam' sounds too
new-agey,” a relative grumbled. From then on, they kept all new ideas to themselves.

Finally, in early 2006, Keegan was born.

Names, like other words, can be broken up into a series of basic sound parts called phonemes. Each phoneme stands for a perceptually distinct unit of sound in a particular language. Take the name Jake. It starts with a /j/ (as in words like “joy” and “jam”). Next comes an /ā/ sound (“ay” as in “lay” and “make”) and it ends with a /k/ (as in “take” and “bake”).

Phonemes may seem like letters, but there are some important differences. There are only twenty-six letters in the English language, but over forty phonemes, in part because the same letter can make different sounds in different words.

Try saying words like “cat” and “laugh” a couple times. In both words, the letter
a
makes an “ahh” sound.

Now trying saying words like “Jake” and “maid.” Same letter
a
, but here it sounds more like “ay” than “ahh.”

Something similar happens with the letter
e
. In words like “end” and “friend” the letter
e
makes an “eh” sound, while in words like “be” and “key” it makes an “ee” sound. In the name Jake the
e
is silent.

Different letters can sometimes even make the same sounds. In words like “kit” and “rack” the letter
k
makes the “k” sound, while in words like “cat” and “car” the letter
c
is making that same sound. Try switching the
c
in “cat” to a
k
(i.e., “kat” as in Kit Kat) and the word still sounds pretty much identical.

The name Keegan is six letters long, but it is composed of only five phonemes. It starts with a hard /k/ (as in “kick” and “kaleidoscope”), then moves to an /ē/ sound (“ee” as in “feet” and “leech”),
followed by a /g/ (as in “gas” and “gill”), an /a/ sound (“ah” as in “fat” or “hat”), and ending with an /n/ (as in the name Nancy or “nice”).

For Rebecca and Cesar, Keegan was the perfect name. It hit all the requirements. Strong sounding but not too long. Modern enough but not obviously so. Close enough to Rebecca's maiden name to pass the family lineage along.

When Keegan got to kindergarten, though, his teacher noticed something unusual. There wasn't another Keegan in class, but there were an awful lot of kids whose names sounded similar. Going through the class list there was Keegan, Kevin, Kimberly, Keely, Carson, and Carmen. Out of twenty kids, six had names that either began with
K
or started with a hard-
K
sound. Why did so many children have similar-sounding names?