How a simple design can change the world

Love this little BBC article about how brilliant design can create an entirely new category. The example: the Bic ballpoint pen.

This is a device that most of us take for granted; however, when it appeared in the 1940s it changed fundamentally how people communicate. The author compares its impact to that of the smart phone. 

Fountain pens and dip pens were inconvenient and messy. You couldn’t really use them if you were on the go and it was easy to smudge the ink and ruin your document. The Bic Cristal pen, which boasts essentially the same design it had when it was introduced, changed all of that and essentially democratized writing.

As with any great design, we really take the individual elements for granted. The horizontal panels make it easy to hold, you can see the ink level in the pen so it won’t run out on you, there is a little hole in the side that equalizes the pressure and prevents explosions, gravity ensures a continuous flow of ink, and the ink dries practically instantaneously. (It’s actually a different kind of ink than was used in fountain pens.)

As one expert notes, “When people in the tech world talk about outdated tech, they are never arguing that pens are outdated. Even Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk will have a bunch of pens sitting around.”

A gentle nudge can make you budge

Behavioral Scientist has announced its most read articles of 2020. This one, entitled “Why Triggering Emotions Won’t Lead to Lasting Behavior Change” by Christina Gravert from the University of Copenhagen, caught my attention.

We don’t completely agree with the headline, which seems too broad, and doesn’t seem to fully reflect the author’s point. We can easily think of times when the triggering of an emotion sparked a change in behavior.  (The “Don’t Mess With Texas” anti-littering campaign is one example. Successful anti-addiction programs have an emotional component.)  There is no one-size-fits-all answer that works in all cases.

But as the author points out, sometimes those attempts at emotional triggering can be like a sugar-high – helpful in the short-term but not sustainable over time. (The piano staircase above is one famous example – a lot of fun for a little while and a great marketing idea, but the novelty can wear off quickly.)

Sometimes subtle nudges are the path of least resistance. They often work unconsciously and don’t necessarily spark an emotion.  For example, placing vegetarian options at the top of a menu or forcing people to opt-out of (rather than opt-into) retirement plans or organ-donor programs.

Dr. Gravert distinguishes “pure nudges” like these, which undermine our inherent laziness, from “moral nudges,” which can be effective but which also are risky.  As she argues, they are dangerous because nudges that provoke negative emotions like anxiety, behavior, or fear eventually invite rebellion.

How to tell a funny story about concrete in 10 seconds

Radio is a difficult medium for which to write ad copy.  You have no visuals to fall back on. All you have are words and sound to create a story in the theater of the listener’s mind.

Quikrete is known for its fast-setting concrete. Imagine trying to tell a fun story about that in a :10 radio ad.

Well, they did it. The brand’s “Long Story Short” campaign from Fitzgerald & CO  takes well-known stories and distills them to a few seconds in ways that are utterly ridiculous, and then caps it off with a tough-sounding guy with an East Coast accent barking, “Long story short. Quikrete. Fast setting concrete,” as a sack of Quikrete slams to the floor in the background.

The ads are hilarious (depending on your perspective) or borderline offensive (depending on your perspective). The Donner Party, Hitler, teen pregnancy, skin cancer, and the 2016 US Presidential election all make appearances.

Unfortunately, we can’t find the whole campaign in one place but here are some links where you can hear various spots.

• From the Radio Mercury Awards

• From the Communication Arts website

• A few more from the site of one of the creatives behind the campaign

• And a few more from another of the creatives behind the campaign

“Long Story Short” won Best Campaign at the Radio Mercury Awards and a Bronze Clio Award, among others. The ads work because they feature recurring production elements and also bring a differentiating product attribute to life in a compelling way. Plus, they’re memorable and funny. 

There isn’t much in the ads about the emotional payoff a consumer will experience as a result of using Quikrete – you have to co-create that – but there is certainly an emotional connection to the ads themselves, which broke through in a medium where breakthrough is not easy.

Content marketing — 1980’s style

In the late 1970s, the Pittsburgh-based aluminum manufacturer, Alcoa, had a problem. The energy crisis had hit the US and Alcoa was living in fear of Americans discovering that it used four percent (!) of America’s energy.

“Their fear,” according to the media director of Alcoa’s ad agency, “was that as America waited on gas lines, odd and even days, all that stuff, that people would turn on them. They worried people would say, ‘Wait a minute, let me get this straight: I’m on a gas line at 4 a.m. so you can drink soda out of a can?’”

So, Alcoa decided on a preemptive strike – to make sure people knew the importance of aluminum. The problem is Alcoa had never advertised before and its ad budget was fairly modest. The goal was to reach politicians and other community leaders who had a lot of local influence. It proved to be a difficult group to pinpoint with a media buy. As it turns out, the only place all these people could be reached simultaneously was on Sunday during football games.

Alcoa could have just run a bunch of ads about the glories of aluminum, but instead landed on a sponsorship with the National Football League (NFL)  called “Fantastic Finishes.” With two minutes left in every game, there was a timeout on the field and the broadcast cut to a very distinctive trumpet fanfare, followed by a video clip of some amazing finish of an NFL game from the past.

These vignettes ran through the mid 1980s.  They had absolutely nothing to do with aluminum, but Alcoa had attached its name to something cool that people found engaging, dramatic, and fun.  By the time the vignettes ended in 1986 they had been seen by 2.5 billion people.

The article linked above describes how these vignettes changed the face of television sponsorships and opened up a new world of sponsorship possibilities, and not just in sports marketing.  The success of the campaign is also a classic example of how sponsorships can work – the sponsor doesn’t say much, but bathes in the reflected glory of a compelling piece of relevant content.

The clock is ticking — the magic of the :06 ad

A new article in the Journal of Advertising Research (available behind the WARC paywall) discusses the most effective strategies for 6-second ads.

Obviously, you can’t tell much of a story in six seconds. The level of consumer co-creation has to be pretty high, and there is no time to waste with long discussions of claims and benefits. Consumers have to infer most of that on their own. 

Research suggests six-second ads are less effective than :15s or :30s, the caveat is that if your :15 or :30 is boring, no one is going pay attention all the way through.  A compelling :06 is probably more effective than a run-of-the-mill :15 or :30.

The authors offer a number of suggestions for managers and creatives, which include:

• Focus :06s on either the early stages in the consumer decision-making journey to build awareness, or late in the journey to inspire purchase or repurchase.

• A magnified sensory experience can help drive the point home in a :06 ad, like this for Under Armour or this from Eggo.

• :06s are more effective when they don’t look like typical ads – like this from Mercedes.

• Leave storylines open-ended to build intrigue and let people create their own story – assuming they know enough about the brand to do so. Like this Jason Bourne ad from Universal Pictures

• Create a series of ads with a similar structure so that with repeated exposures, consumers will quickly pick up on the theme. See this ad and this one, from Airbnb’s “Live There” campaign, which used short snippets to illustrate the larger experience of a family vacation.

What a hospital learned from a Formula One team

Metaphorical thinking at its finest – what a hospital learned from a Formula One pit crew.

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children identified a major pain point in its procedures – the moment when heart disease patients are transferred from the operating room to the intensive care unit.  That journey carried high risk, with a significant rate of mortality.

Two hospital physicians happened to be racing fans and noticed the parallels between that handoff and the procedure a race team goes through when a car pulls into the pits for routine maintenance – which is done safely but also at lightning speed.

The hospital collaborated with the pit crews of the McLaren and Ferrari F1 teams to get some ideas. They observed those pit crews in action, and also sent videos of the hospital transfer procedure to Ferrari’s head of technical operations for analysis. Although that guy knew nothing about cardiac surgery, what struck him is how chaotic everything was in comparison to the discipline exhibited by his pit crews.

Based on Ferrari’s feedback, the hospital created a role analogous to that of a pit crew’s lollipop man – the person who waves the driver in and coordinates the pitstop. Prior to that change, no single person had been in charge of the handoff. They also noticed that F1 pit crews operate in complete silence, quite different from the cacophony of voices that one hears during the transfer to the ICU.  People talking leads to chaos, which leads to mistakes. So, the new procedures required silence during that transfer.

As a result of these changes, the number of technical errors dropped by 42%.

Be kind…or else

MIT Technology Review discusses a new social network, Telepath, which is centered on the idea of “kindness.” 

Telepath has a number of features that are interesting but not exactly game-changing: it is an invite-only app, posts disappear after 30 days, you can follow certain people or topics. But what is unique is that moderators enforce “kindness.”  As one of the founders says, this is a higher bar than mere “civility.”

To enforce kindness, users must display their real names and Telepath verifies users’ identity using their phone number, which makes it harder to set up fake accounts.

All sounds wonderful, but some downsides and concerns also have emerged.  Although the belief is that real names will ensure better behavior, there is no solid evidence for that, and using a real name can make someone vulnerable to doxxing and other forms of online harassment, which is a particularly salient concern for those from marginalized communities.

Also, what does “kindness” mean? It is in the eye of the beholder, to a large extent. Where does honest disagreement cross into the land of incivility? 

And critics are also concerned about the development of an in-group culture. The initial user base seems to consist largely of white, male, Silicon Valley types. Can an invite-only app really attract and maintain a large, diverse user base? Or will it become a dull echo chamber with limited appeal?

Managing expectations

In the late 1960s, with his acting career adrift, Bruce Lee opened a martial arts training facility in Hollywood. He started by charging $30/lesson. Hardly anyone signed up.  

That was a lot of money in those days, but a Hollywood friend suggested that his problem was that he wasn’t charging enough.

Hollywood was filled with middle-aged guys with disposable income who wanted to pay more so they could boast they were paying huge amounts of money to train with the great Bruce Lee.  And they may have wondered why the great Bruce Lee was charging so little. So, he raised his rates to around $100/hour, and soon he found himself very busy.  Then he raised it to $200 and had more business than he could handle. 

This is tied to the psychology of expectations, which is discussed in an article that was posted in the OZ Twitter feed this week.

Paying $100/hr to train with Bruce Lee suggests a better experience than paying $30/hr to train with him.  We perceive the same smell differently depending on whether we’re told it’s high-end cheese or dirty socks. The color of a food affects whether we perceive the flavor as more intense or more mild. 

That pink savory mousse tastes great if you’re told in advance to expect a smoked salmon flavor, but it’s rated horribly if you are expecting it to taste like strawberries.

This article discusses how a key part of a marketer’s job is to accurately set expectations, whether that is through pricing, placement, packaging, or communications. If the experience is not aligned with expectations, then perceptions of the product may suffer.

Look the part, be the part

Pretty food = healthy food, at least in the minds of consumers.

New research in the Journal of Marketing by Linda Hagen, Assistant Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behavior at USC, explores whether the way in which food is displayed affects perceptions of health.

So-called classical aesthetics are characterized by patterns that occur in nature, and one of those classic features is symmetry.  Nature gravitates toward symmetry – think about spiderwebs, honeycombs, and fish scales, for example.  When people see  food that is symmetrical, they tend to believe it is more natural – and when they think a food is more natural, they perceive it to be healthier.

In Hagen’s study, two groups of consumers were provided with an identical set of information about the ingredients and price associated with a slice of avocado toast. One group saw a “pretty” piece of toast (shown above on the right), while the other group saw an “ugly” one (shown above on the left). 

Despite the identical descriptions, consumers who saw the “pretty” toast rated it as healthier and more natural than those presented with the “ugly” toast. Experiments with other foods revealed a similar pattern.

This only seems to apply to “classically pretty” food.  In contrast, so-called “expressive aesthetics” are more creative (e.g. foods cut into shapes to simulate a scene).  Those expressively pretty foods did not affect perceptions of whether that food was natural or healthy. The pattern only held with the symmetrical or classically pretty arrangements.

Hagen argues that her findings have implications for marketers who want their healthy foods to be perceived as such. It also has shadow implications -- when marketers may pedal a relatively unhealthy food as healthy, simply by depicting it in a classically pretty way.

Checkmate

We really like the latest chapter in Hennessey’s long-running “What’s Your Wild Rabbit?” campaign. It centers on the heroic journey of the world’s first Black chess grandmaster, Maurice Ashley, who learned the game at New York’s once-renowned Black Bear School chess club. 

“What’s Your Wild Rabbit?” is a metaphor for the endless pursuit of achievement and excellence. Hennessey has run this campaign for eight years.

These new ads track Ashley’s progress from a teenager who knows nothing about the game. He gets schooled by the veteran players at the Black Bear School, studies the game 24/7, eventually decides to branch out from that insular world and try to become a grandmaster, succeeds, and then returns to NYC to spread the gospel of the chess to the next generation.

Hennessey has produced a 5-minute documentary style video, along with a shorter two-minute video and a few :15s, that will run on TV, digital, and social. They are designed to reach young men, especially young men of color, ages 21-34.

The ads are extremely well-done and seem really right for this particular moment in our culture.

The Tom Sawyer Effect

My daughter is a LEGO enthusiast and I am a neat freak when it comes to my living space. As the image above suggests, that is a bad combination.

LEGO has partnered with IKEA on its new BYGGLEK collection, which promises to bring peace to my home.  As discussed at The Drum, this is an ideal innovation – one that addresses an unmet need, while also using behavioral “nudges” to make work seem like fun. Scientists call this “The Tom Sawyer Effect.”

Partnering with IKEA helped LEGO see solutions that it may not have seen otherwise. Designers from both firms tested out carious ideas at collaborative workshops and eventually emerged with a set of boxes with LEGO studs on them. So “cleaning up” becomes more like play as the boxes become part of kids’ builds. As the IKEA press release states, “[Kids] can store their stories inside them, and proudly display their creations on top of them.” 

A great solution that is on-brand for both firms, not just functionally but also in terms of the emotional experience they provide for their users.

Have Fun…It’s OK

What matters to marketers may not always be what matters to consumers.

This thought-provoking column by Ben Shaw of the creative agency BBH – “Marketing’s Unhealthy Obsession With Inspiration” -- illustrates that chasm with two examples from Nike. 

You have probably see the first example – Nike’s “You Can’t Stop Us” film, which is designed to inspire us during the gloom of COVID-19 while illustrating the importance of diversity. It’s a great video and had Twitter and LinkedIn abuzz for a couple of days, but following that initial wave of excitement it is down to 100,000 new views or fewer each day.

At the same time, Drake released a video for a new song, “Laugh Now, Cry Later,” set entirely at Nike World Headquarters in Portland. It has nothing to do with inspiration or COVID or, really, the importance of diversity.  It’s just fun. Drake rolls up to the Nike campus in an absurd Maybach, balls with athletes like Kevin Durant and Marshawn Lynch, goes on a shopping spree and buys about 200 pairs of new shoes, and just generally does Drake things.

The video came out two weeks after the Nike ad. It received little marketing industry buzz, but it’s on track to easily surpass “You Can’t Stop Us” in views. Moreover, the level of social media engagement is about 20x that of “You Can’t Stop Us.”

Shaw argues, “While there is a place for topical, inspirational marketing that deals with societal issues, the marketing profession tends to hugely overemphasize its importance.  Ordinary people don’t usually want or need brands to ‘inspire’ them.”   He goes on to discuss a 2019 paper that contends that marketers are much more driven and career-focused than the average consumer.

His point is compelling – that brands should remember that even in times like these that are difficult in so many ways, consumers still want to laugh, have fun, and be materialistic just like always.

“Fix It Again, Tony”

A recent episode of the CBC podcast, Under the Influence, a marketing-themed podcast, deals with brand nicknames – think about names like “Tar-zhay” and “Mickey D’s,” and the like.

 The theme is that once these nicknames take hold, you are stuck with them. If it’s a positive nickname, then go ahead and roll with it.  If it’s not, then spin it on its head and make it work in your favor. If you want to make up a nickname for yourself – e.g. Radio Shack’s ill-fated attempt to re-brand itself as “The Shack”  – please stop. Consumers won’t see it as authentic. 

Some examples:

• Coca-Cola fought against the nickname “Coke” for 30 years. In advertising, they explicitly asked consumers to ask for a “Coca-Cola” not a “Coke.” Eventually, in the 1940s, they gave in and embraced the nickname. A campaign featured an elf known as “Sprite Boy,” who explained to consumers that “Coke” and “Coca-Cola” meant the same thing and that “Coke” is a term of endearment.

• The name “Mickey D’s” originated in the African American community in the mid-1970s. Again, the brand debated for years whether to embrace the nickname or not. Eventually they did embrace it, and it became a central part of the brand’s identity. In fact, there are different nicknames for McDonald’s all over the world.

• In the late 1970s and ‘80s, Fiat was known for really poor-quality vehicles, so much so that the brand was forced to withdraw from the North American market. It was so bad that consumers made Fiat into an acronym – “Fix It Again, Tony.”  When Fiat returned to the market years later, the memory of that dubious acronym was still around, so the brand addressed it directly with this very clever ad.

 As the host of the episode stated, a brand is like a burr on a wool sweater. Once a consumer-imposed nickname there, it’s there, it’s a part of your brand, and resistance can be futile.

Josh Hild/Unsplash

Fake News, Schmake News

Thanks to OZ friend Nancy Cox for sharing this article about the malleability of memory – “The Pandemic is Messing With Your Memories.”

 The article links the research on memory to current events, discussing how things like the upcoming presidential election, COVID-19, and stress, in general, can affect the way in which we do (or do not) remember things.

Some of the highlights: 

• If you’re gloomy or stressed because of the pandemic, you’re at risk of misremembering. Stress and depression can increase our tendency to create false memories.

• Confirmation bias plays tricks on us. If you feel strongly about a political issue, you’re likely to misremember facts in a way that supports your beliefs, or fall for “fake news” that reinforces your beliefs.  

• Reading a fake news story about problems with a COVID-19 vaccine makes people a little less likely to want to be vaccinated – even if they know it’s fake news.

• We restructure the past based on the present.  Some people are hyper-disgusted right now by people sneezing. That may stick with us in the future – and we may forget that at one time some slob beside us on the bus could have been wiping his nose on his sleeve and we wouldn’t have thought anything of it.

 As one psychologist quoted in the article states, “We don’t get any memory 100% right. That’s actually a feature, not a bug.”  Nonetheless, it can be a problem at times, so being aware of these ways in which memory can trick us is important.

For the next generation — but more for this one

One of my favorite Twitter follows is behavioral scientist Richard Shotton, who recently tweeted his admiration for this classic tagline from the watchmaker Patek Philippe, “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.”

The campaign has run since 1996. Shotton explains, “It gives the buyer an alibi (I'm doing it for my kids) and it reframes the price (something to be mentally split across generations).”

Here is a powerful analysis of the psychology behind the campaign. This author argues that the campaign is not aimed at people like those in the ad. It’s aimed at people who want to be the people in the ad. The 1% doesn’t need an ad to tell them what quality is, the article posits, but the “Aspirational 14%” does.  

Those people may not literally care about passing their watch down to their children and grandchildren, but what this tagline says to them more broadly is, “This is a high quality watch that is worth spending thousands of dollars on. It will say something about you to the world.”

The article also presents a fascinating perspective on the gender implications of the ads – men and women never appear together – and also presents a compelling case why even those ads featuring mothers and daughters are really targeting men.

Photo credit: National Geographic

Games people play

COVID-19 has sparked a resurgence in classic board games.

Research across 14 developed nations shows that more and more people are playing board games and card games, not only as a way to pass the time but also to provide themselves with emotional comfort.

Indeed, the top selling games during this time are old games like Monopoly, rather than newer games. “What’s different is people have reverted to the original classic they knew, and they used to play when they were children themselves,” according to Frédérique Tutt, global toy market analyst at the NPD Group.

A couple of thoughts:

• The era of the 1930s-1950s seem to have an outsized influence over American culture. Popular board games like Risk, Clue, Scrabble, and Monopoly all come from that era. Also, 2/3 of the songs on ASCAP’s list of most popular holiday songs in the US are from the 1930s - ‘50s. Something about this era seems to evoke nostalgia, even for those of us who weren’t born until much later

• As the article asks, what does this mean for new games? How can they encourage people to explore and create new classics?

Image: Unsplash/Maks Styakhkin

Just do it…again….and again

In Marketing Week, Richard Shotton (author of the must-read book, The Choice Factory) and Will Hanmer-Lloyd discuss the science behind the formation of habits and how marketers can apply that learning.

Research suggests 43% of our behavior is habitual. Habits are hard to form, but also hard to break.

The authors present three keys to creating a habit.

• A cue. Telling people why they should exercise is insufficient. Forcing them to plan precisely when and where they will exercise is a cue that triggers the desired behavior. 100 years ago when Pepsodent was encouraging people to brush their teeth, they didn’t just say, “Brush your teeth twice daily.” They said, “Brush your teeth after breakfast and before bed.” 

• A reward. Pret a Manger doesn’t make people collect stamps or get a card punched to build up points toward a free coffee…but its employees are encouraged to randomly reward customers with a free drink once in a while. 

• The routine. It can makes months for a behavior to become a habit. So, interventions must be sustained.

Marketing Week also posted an article a couple of months ago about how shopping habits in the UK are changing due to COVID. One wonders how many other kinds of habits are being broken and formed this year thanks to the pandemic.

(This WARC article explores the topic of habit in even more depth.)

The Zoom of its day

A business lesson here from the humble Dixie cup.

At one time, the Dixie cup was not so humble. What Zoom is to the current pandemic, Dixie cups were to the flu pandemic of 1918. They were, in the words of Smithsonian Magazine, life-saving technology.

Before water fountains and water coolers, people drank water from communal barrels using giant ladles called tin dippers. Everyone used the same ladle. It was as gross as it sounds. But when Dixie cups were invented in 1908, people didn’t fully appreciate how disease was spread, so the cups didn’t do well in the B2C market, although they had a decent B2B business.

Then the flu hit. The company had been selling Dixie cups to businesses, so people were familiar with them. The flu provided the opportunity to rebrand the cups for home usage. (You can see some old ads here). That created a new habit – and we still use Dixie cups today.

Once the pandemic was over and competitors began making disposable drinking cups, Dixie shifted its brand emphasis from health to convenience, and also continued to innovate, staying one step ahead of the competition with, for example, special disposable cups that could be used to hold ice cream and a special portable watertank-cup dispenser that was used widely during World War II.

Brands such as Zoom and the video chat app House Party have thrived amid COVID. They are not new applications, but the pandemic has made them more important than they ever were before. As with Dixie, the post-pandemic world will provide these brands with fresh challenges and also opportunities for innovation.

A thing of beauty

Creative packaging can make a brand stand out both on shelf and in communication. Ben Van Leeuwen, founder of Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream, discusses his brand’s packaging and other business issues in ad Adweek interview.

The packaging stands out on shelf in a number of ways. First, it is very clean compared to other ice cream brands. The pastel colors pop on shelf. The logo, inspired by the Coca-Cola script, gives this relatively new brand an old-school, neighborly, premium feel. And the design creates a clear visual distinction between the brands two lines, regular and vegan (the regular line uses black font on pastel, vegan products employ pastel font on white, while special limited-time holiday flavors use white font on a darker-color background)

It looks great on Instagram, too.

Sales of the brand increased by 50% within six months of the package redesign. There were probably other factors involved but the packaging certainly played a role. As Ben Van Leeuwen says, the packaging tells a story about both the brand and the taste experience consumers will enjoy.

Express yourself

Many stores and eating establishments have plastic bins near the cash register, imploring you to give money for one reason or another. They are always for good causes – either tips for hard-working employees or donations to a charity. If you’re like me, though, you sometimes overlook them or maybe don’t chip in as much as you could.

Behavioral science suggests a better way.

Fascinating insights in this article and accompanying slides about how to effectively tie pro-social giving to personal expression. (The original research is discussed in more depth here.)

For instance, at a café, giving increased when, instead of a single tip jar, there were two jars so that giving was a choice between two options, and you could express yourself with your donation. For example, “Put money in this jar if you prefer cats…or put it in this other jar if you prefer dogs.”  Or “Put your money in this jar if you are a Pitt fan…and this other jar if you are a Penn State fan.”

The research showed this approach led to greater tips in a café, and also increased donations to a charitable cause when a similar choice was presented online.

For this to work, the two choices should be relevant to our identity.  People tend to feel strongly about their pets, their universities, and their sports teams, for example. Even something silly like, “Which actor would you like to have narrate your life?” could have personal relevance.

However, a choice between, “Which color do you prefer more, red or green?” may not have such a pronounced effect on behavior because most of us don’t derive a sense of identity from our favorite color.