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To Harry, Will, Cole, and Cooper
Welcome.
This is a story about our planet’s most fascinating subject: us. It’s about us
and what leads us to choose what we choose, without really thinking. You can
find the forces that influence our choices in several places. This book looks
into three—our childhoods, our culture, and our eyes—where we find dozens
of surprising stories. They range from the birth of the iPhone to the death of a
sex symbol; from the fall of The Mary Tyler Moore Show to the rise of the
Nintendo Wii; and from the heights of George Clooney and Regis Philbin to
the lengths of the titles of our current best sellers.
Throughout the book, we spotlight the masters of modern marketing and
how they tap these forces to influence our choices, ranging from the perfect
bleach for our cottons to the best person to check our teeth.
Which leads us first to one of the oddest cases of all: the very strange case
of Kobe Bryant.
DECIDING WITHOUT THINKING

The Very Strange Case of Kobe Bryant

In February 2009, the editors of Sports Illustrated asked the players in the
National Basketball Association a question to which the editors already knew
the answer: “With a game on the line—where one shot will win or lose it—
which player would you choose to take the last shot?”
Every basketball fan can guess the players’ answer: Kobe Bryant, the
handsome veteran All Star shooting guard of the world-champion Los
Angeles Lakers. The voting wasn’t close; 76 percent of the players chose
Bryant. In a tie for a remote second place, Denver’s Chauncey Billups,
Boston’s Paul Pierce, and Cleveland’s LeBron James each won just 3 percent
of the votes.
Like basketball fans, Kobe’s NBA colleagues had seen ESPN’s highlights
for years, which included over a dozen clips of Bryant making game-winning
shots. In “crunch time,” as fans call these final moments, Kobe’s chiseled face
conveys that any resistance to him will be futile. That’s why fans and players
often repeat, “Kobe is the Man.”
So Kobe was the expected choice, the logical choice, the overwhelming
choice; he received more than twenty-five times more votes than each of the
three runners-up. There was just one problem:
It was a horrible choice.
We know this because in the 2003–2004 season, 82games.com started
tracking these last-minute shots. Their computations showed that between the
start of the 2003–2004 season and the time of the Sports Illustrated poll,
Kobe had made fourteen last-minute shots. That’s a lot—more than two shots
per season—but three players had made more, most notably James, who had
made seventeen.
But the problem with the players’ choice wasn’t that Kobe doesn’t make
these shots. He does. But as skilled as he is at making them, at that point he’d
proven even more adept at missing them. He’d missed forty-two: 75 percent
of his shots!
For perspective, compare Bryant’s numbers with those of Carmelo
Anthony, the 6-foot-8-inch small forward for the Denver Nuggets. Kobe
Bryant looks like a stone killer at crunch time, but Anthony plays like one. In
“clutch” situations in the 2008–2009 season—with a game in the last five
minutes or in overtime, with neither team having more than a five-point lead
—Anthony made 56.5 percent of his shots. Bryant made 45.7 percent.
On three-point attempts, Anthony performed even better, making an
amazing 58.5 percent of these attempts, compared to Bryant’s 40 percent.
(The league’s season record for the three-point percentage is 52.4 percent.)
And on game-winning shot attempts with fewer than twenty-four seconds
remaining, how did Anthony fare? Again, “Melo” was mellow: 48.1 percent
—almost twice Kobe’s 25 percent.
Despite what most NBA players thought they’d seen and believed they
knew, Kobe Bryant is not a great last-minute shooter. He’s not even an
average player in these situations; the NBA last-minute shot average is 29.8
percent. Had Kobe been merely average, the Lakers would have won two
more games over that stretch. Had Kobe possessed Anthony’s gift in these
situations, the Lakers could have won as many as twenty-three additional
games—almost three more wins per year.
The players hardly could have made a worse choice. Several NBA players
had made at least half of their last-minute shots at the time of voting, and
Travis Outlaw of the Portland Trail Blazers had made six out of seven.
Which raises the question: Could the NBA players have made a worse
choice?
Yes. One.
The players could have chosen the player who, on thirty-seven last-minute
shots, had made just six, a woeful 16.2 percent, for the worst record in the
league. Now that guy is absolutely the last NBA player you would want to
take a last-minute shot. Whatever you do, do not choose him. Give the ball to
anyone else. If you can’t think of anyone else, shoot the ball yourself.
And that man’s name? It’s Chauncey Billups—the man who got the
second-most votes in this poll.
How could these players, with their night-to-night, eighty-two regular-
season games a year, and weeks and weeks of playoffs, and all the knowledge
that comes with that, make two such bad choices? And this is the best answer:
These players are just like us.
All of us quickly learn rules of thumb—shortcuts for making decisions
that psychologists call heuristics. We learn and use them because we must; we
don’t have the time to ponder every decision. And one of our favorite
heuristics is stereotyping: Older is wiser, accountants are analytical, and huge
animals aren’t agile. The NBA players were doing what we do every day:
They were shortcutting.
Let’s see how.
To understand the players’ unthinking, look at the phrase that describes
Kobe Bryant: “the world-champion Los Angeles Lakers’ handsome veteran
All Star shooting guard.”
Because of their years of title-winning success (only the Boston Celtics
have won more NBA championships) and their position in the nation’s
second-largest media market, the Lakers appear on television more often than
any other team. Television executives know there aren’t enough viewers in
Carmelo Anthony’s Denver—or in Outlaw’s then-home of Portland—to
justify covering those teams when there are so many more viewers in New
York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. So for every time that Anthony’s Nuggets
appear on national television, Bryant’s Lakers appear five times.
As a result, Kobe has the most often seen face in professional basketball;
he’s familiar. And as we will see throughout this book, we humans are
unusually biased toward choosing things that seem familiar.
To make Kobe even more familiar to fans and players, Kobe is a veteran.
At the time of the NBA poll, Kobe was midway through his thirteenth NBA
season, having skipped college and gone straight to the NBA in 1996.
Anthony and James were just in their sixth seasons, relative new kids. That
longevity made Kobe even more familiar.
In addition, when we hear “veteran,” we make other favorable
assumptions about a player; we stereotype. We call veterans “cool” and often
“wily.” We think veterans have acquired the emotional makeup to withstand
late-game pressure and the cleverness, based on their many years of play, to
find some way to get the ball into the basket. So we want a veteran shooting a
last-minute shot—a thirteen-year veteran like Kobe.
And lo and behold, if Kobe isn’t available, then the NBA players want
twelve-year veteran Chauncey Billups, the NBA’s worst last-minute shooter,
to take the shot instead.
Two other words gave the players a shortcut to deciding. Basketball is
played with five players on a team, each with specific roles with specific
names.
First, there are the centers. They usually stand about 7 feet tall and are
most skilled at retrieving missed shots and making shots near the basket.
Centers are rarely good long-distance shooters, in part because it’s foolish to
practice 20-foot shots when you can perfect slamming the ball through the
hoop from inches away.
So you don’t want a center taking a last-minute shot. He’s not prepared.
A basketball team also sports two forwards. One is bigger and stronger and
called the power forward. The other is smaller and faster and called the small
forward.
That leaves two more players: the guards. The first directs the offense,
which is why he’s called the point guard.
That’s four players, and it doesn’t sound like you want any of them
shooting a last-minute shot. Centers aren’t good shooters, big guys lack
finesse, small guys are small, and point guards direct the offense but aren’t
usually known for their shooting.
Fortunately, the final position sounds ideal for taking this last-minute shot.
This player’s primary role is to shoot, often from a distance, which forces
defensive players to come out to stop him. He’s called the shooting guard, and
—as you knew or just guessed—that’s Kobe Bryant’s position.
You do want the shooting guard shooting your last shot, don’t you?
Especially the twelve-time All Star shooting guard—wouldn’t he be the best
shooter in the league?
Another force that biased the players’ choice is one that biases all of our
choices: money. We consistently take price as a quality signal; the higher the
price, the higher the perceived quality. In 2009, Kobe’s salary from the Lakers
was $23,034,375, a total surpassed only by the $23,329,561 earned by the
Houston Rockets’ Tracy McGrady, who had been injured for three months
when the editors polled the players.
One final element may have influenced the players’ choice: Kobe’s face.
It’s beautiful; People magazine has featured Kobe twice in its annual “50
Most Beautiful People” issue. Looks tricks us, repeatedly, in ways we will
explore. We think attractive people are more intelligent, honest, and
emotionally sound—better than average at almost everything. Other things
being nearly equal, we want the beautiful person to make the presentation,
land our plane in Minneapolis, and take the last shot.
Now, many Americans react to this entire argument in a typical American
way, insisting, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” They see statistics
like Kobe Bryant’s ugly 25-percent performance on last-minute shots and
respond, “I don’t care what the numbers might say. You can prove anything
with statistics.”
That’s not true.
There are many things you cannot prove with statistics. You cannot prove
that it’s safer to drive 95 miles an hour than to drive 60; you cannot prove that
New York Decembers are warmer than New York Augusts; and you cannot
prove that Kobe Bryant is a good choice for making a last-minute shot
—unless your only other choice is Chauncey Billups.
But you can prove that every day, we make odd choices like the NBA
players did in this case. Why? Shortcutting is one answer, and the second
lurks deep in each of us. Within the last five years, I’ve been inside two
Fortune 100 companies that made critical decisions: choosing a provider for a
massive outsourcing contract in the first case and picking a new investment
bank in the second. In each case, the companies’ decision makers tried to
assemble all the facts but still couldn’t decide; something was missing. So
they made unannounced visits to their finalists’ headquarters, felt the pulse,
got a feeling, then flew home and chose their firms. How did all of them
explain their final choice?
“It just felt right.”
That’s the rule, not the exception. When our shortcuts don’t work, we
decide with our feelings, usually within seconds, then reassemble the facts to
support our decision. So what are these feelings that lead us to choose what
we choose?
An important force that explains the players’ choice is fear. We deeply fear
looking and feeling foolish. Like all those corporate purchasing agents in the
1980s who knew the axiom that “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM,” the
NBA players knew they’d never look foolish for choosing Kobe. Even if
Kobe missed, they and everyone else still would think they’d made the right
choice.
This book examines three major influences that drive our feelings—our
childhoods, our American culture, and our eyes—and it’s to those influences,
and some of the most remarkable stories I have ever heard, that we now turn.
THE FORCES AND THEIR SOURCES

1. OUR CHILDHOODS
 I. OUR LOVE OF PLAY

If you have not seen it, go now.

(A spoiler alert: Several of your days will be made if you go to
www.ted.com and enter “polar bear” and “Stuart Brown” in its search box. So
go there now and return, or continue, knowing that the spoiler follows.)
On the video, you see a photo of a polar bear approaching a Siberian
husky in Manitoba, Canada. The 1,200-pound bear’s predatory stare makes it
clear: The husky is lunch. Then you notice the husky’s body language, which
tells you he sees a different opportunity. The dog is bowing, with his tail
wagging, sending a message that every dog owner recognizes: Let’s play!
The bear rises up, its claws retracted, opening itself to the husky. The two
then come together and begin an unforgettable ballet. They nuzzle and wrestle
like mother and puppy; they play. In one particularly endearing photo, you see
in the barely open eyes of the bear its bliss and a reminder of why we play:
for the sheer delight.
Dr. Stuart Brown, who presented these photos at the May 2008 Art Center
Design Conference in Pasadena, California, is among the researchers who
have concluded that animals, including us, are programmed to play; we need
it to develop normally. Play-deprived adults often develop antisocial
personalities, and play-deprived rats die.
Puppies and dogs, bears and cubs, babies and adults—play is basic to us.
Years ago, this discovery led a historian named Johan Huizinga to offer
that we should not be called Homo sapiens, literally “wise men,” after all. We
should be called Homo ludens: man the player.
Our enterprises regularly overlook this. They treat us like their vision of
polar bears: serious, acquisitive, predatory. As we will see in what follows,
today’s shrewdest marketers see us as the bears and huskies that we really are:
animals enchanted by play.

All Play, Some Work

Just watch everyone and anyone, all day long.
Before work each day, most men read news about play: the sports page.
(Most younger men read it online the night before.) Well before lunch,
millions recheck the performance of their fantasy teams or post on Internet
fan boards about their Lions, Tigers, or Bears.
At breaks in office halls, they replay Saturday’s and Sunday’s games and
second-guess the coaches. Not long afterwards, they close their office doors
to search for tickets for the next weekend’s game. When they succeed, they
don’t say that they “got” tickets or “found” them. No, they “scored” some
tickets. They won.
Of course they did; in America, even getting tickets to the game is a game.
When we finally get down to work, we play. We don’t add a client; we
“win” the account. Or we won it while fishing for it, as our language suggests
again: We “landed” the account.
Asked about their apparent lust for business, the very successful insist that
it’s not about money. “Money,” they assure us and remind themselves, “is just
a way of keeping score.” Money is the trophy; work is the game.
On our way home, we stop at a store, decide we feel lucky, and buy lottery
tickets; we buy them in numbers beyond comprehension. In 2008, Target,
State Farm Insurance, and Microsoft each earned more than $60 billion in
revenue, but their successes paled in comparison to state lotteries, which
swallowed over $77 billion. If these lotteries merged tonight into a
corporation, tomorrow they’d be America’s twenty-second-largest company
and the world’s seventy-first-largest company.
Sex, another of our favorite activities, is all play. That thinking starts from
the day we start thinking about sex. Boys “get to second base,” then third.
Then, like the football player racing to the end zone, they “go all the way” or
“score.” How does all this fun begin? With play, of course: foreplay.
Later in life, we call the sexually active man, whom we once called a
playboy, a player. Sex is play.
The player marries and settles down. Too often, after kids and seven-year
itches come and counseling fails, the marriage implodes. If the man has
scored well in business, he goes trolling for his next wife and finds one. But
the new young blonde isn’t merely a new wife; she’s a medal. She’s a
“trophy” wife.
Of course, men don’t pursue sex constantly, but tens of millions still are in
their bedrooms right now, as parents know too well. When these young men
are not sleeping, often until well after lunch, they are entranced by their aptly
named closest friend: a PlayStation.
 Even renting hotel rooms and purchasing airplane tickets have become
games, as Priceline has cleverly recognized. We go on Priceline and enter an
auction to score the best price. Priceline lets us know we won; it even
announces our victory with exclamation points.
All work and no play? Does that person exist? We play all day. And the
best marketers recognize the depth of our desire and answer it, in everything
from cell phones to investment firms.

eBay and Our Other Toys

Consider the phone that changed the mobile device business, Apple’s
iPhone. Study its screen for five seconds, and then ask, “Where have I seen
those colors before?”
It’s hard to miss what those colors are telling us. They’re the bright
primary colors of our childhood toys.
The iPhone screen uses the same colors used by the Fisher-Price toys of
our childhoods: lime green, aqua, Trix cereal red, Cheerios box yellow, Kix
box orange. The symbols in the icons? Simple and playful.
Look at the iPhone icon for “Messages” as one example. What is that and
where did you first see it?
Of course: you saw it in the comic books you first read as a child. The
“Message” symbol is a word balloon, white on Trix cereal’s lime green.
Look at the color of the phone’s iPod symbol, then at the Fisher-Price
website, and you’ll see it: the cheery orange color for Fisher-Price Babygear.
The purple used for the iTunes symbol and the blue for its email symbol?
That’s the Fisher-Price “Shop” purple and “Games & Activities” blue.
“All that distinguishes men from boys,” we’ve heard, “is the price of their
toys.” The iPod shouts this, with the colors that call us back to our childhood:
I am a toy.
Apple promised that from its inception. It told us that it wasn’t a computer,
but an Apple, like the one we once tried to bribe our teachers with.
Ben & Jerry play with us, wrapping their ice cream cartons in cartoons and
their ice cream names in puns, like Cherry Garcia. The next time you pass by
a Jamba Juice, stop in and look at the signs: cartoon oranges, cartoon
typography, Fisher-Price toy colors. Jamba Juice gets us: We are kids who
love to play. The cartoon logo beckoning us in to the playfully named
Noodles & Company and T.G.I. Friday’s and its waitstaff wearing their “flair”
promise the same thing. We play with our food.
The Mini Cooper keeps alive the tradition started by the Volkswagen bug:
car as toy. The animation wizards at Pixar studios saw this, too: Their Luigi
character in their movie Cars looks like the Mini Cooper’s sillier brother. But
dozens of cars appeal to our love of play, as their category makes clear:
they’re sports cars.
Costco’s appeal is to our love of play; its strategy actually borrows the
name of a 1950’s children’s board game, Treasure Hunt. A trip to Costco is an
adult Where’s Waldo? adventure: Might we find fine French Bordeaux for $12
a bottle? Cashmere scarves for $10? Just what might be around the next
corner?
Costco is shopping as play.
Venture onto eBay, and you see a button that reads “Buy It Now.” A true
bargain seeker always would hit this button, because it guarantees the item’s
relatively low price. But in 2007, a University of California, Berkeley,
economist named Ulrike M. Malmendier started studying eBay customers and
found something unexpected: Most of them ignored the Buy It Now option.
They chose to enter the auction instead, where they ended up paying more.
They wanted more than the item; they wanted the game of the auction.
For a reverse auction, there’s BoltBus. Play its game right, and you can be
the first to book the March 1 trip from New York to Boston for their starting
price: $1. “Bolt for a Buck” works, backed by little conventional advertising.
eBay and Bolt are play.
The name Yahoo promises us play. It proclaims it is not a search engine or
directory but a toy so fun it will make us shout, “Yahoo!”
Google says that to us, too, partly by stealing Yahoo’s clever use of the
beloved-from-childhood double-o sound. Consider all these “oo” words and
their playfulness: kaboom, boob, kook, boonies, goofy, doofus, kazoo,
Goonies, Goofy, Kool-Aid, Froot Loops, Looney Tunes, Dr. Seuss and his
Cindy Lou Who, Yogi Bear’s sidekick Boo-Boo, Scooby-Doo, and, not
incidentally or accidentally, YouTube, a double-double “oo” sound meant to
suggest to us “really fun to watch videos.”
Then there’s Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor. In 1996, they
started a line of women’s clothes with a name that manages to rhyme the
playful “oo” sounds while playing on sex as play: Juicy Couture, most famous
for its velour sweatpants with “Juicy” scrawled across the butt.
In 2010, BMW called out to our playful inner child. “Joy seeks out the kid
in all of us,” the ad for its sporty 3 Series car assures us, below the photo of a
khakis-and-polo-clad, gray-haired man. You’re never too old to be young,
they assure us. “At BMW, we don’t make cars. We make joy.”
Our kitchens call out to the kids in us, too. Specialty shops like Williams-
Sonoma look more and more like toy shops. With Cuisinart and Le Creuset
leading the way, you can choose pots, spatulas, whisks, pastry brushes, ice
cream makers, immersion blenders, and hand mixers in an assortment of toy
colors, including Cuisinart’s Fisher-Price palette with iMac names:
Pomegranate, Parsley, Tangerine, Buttercup, and a playful purple called
Crush. Nearby, the playfully named Pop Ware offers cooking’s most mundane
items, strainers and colanders, in toy colors: Bright Red, Bright Blue, and
Lime Green. Today, we can feel playful while draining water off our spaghetti
noodles.
In 2010, a huge buzz and over $8 million in venture capital funding
surrounded the website Polyvore. The bright idea behind it was that women
would welcome the mix-and-match clothes and accessories from different
sites and create new looks from them. It’s easy to understand the site’s appeal.
Isn’t it simply an electronic version of a favorite girls’ play activity of decades
ago—paper dolls—and a grownup version of dressing Barbie?
Today’s great marketers ask the question: “Should we add an element of
play here—and if not, why not?” Several manufacturers are asking that right
now. They looked at their iPhones and asked, “What if our washing machine
looked and felt like that and made doing laundry more fun?”
Let’s play, we say, and generations of us make it into a cult a film about
never growing up, The Big Lebowski. The hero, known as “The Dude”—
naturally capturing that “oo” sound of play—refuses to grow up, and
audiences love him.
And he’s not alone, as we will see next.

Fridays at Maine South: Forever Young

Drive east from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to a remarkable monument to the

role of play in our culture: the home football field of the Maine South Hawks,
regularly among Illinois’ best high school teams and many times its state
champion. The school is also the alma mater of Hillary Clinton.
The playing field itself testifies to the central role of play in twenty-first-
century American culture: It cost $1.2 million to install in 2008 and looks
every penny of it, with an enormous red hawk artfully rendered in the middle
of the field and the school name and nickname rendered in massive red letters
in each end zone.
We live in a country so devoted to play—some might argue obsessed—
that our high school football fields cost over $1 million, and Park Ridge’s
elected officials worry very little that the outlay will cost them the next
election.
 But there’s more testament to our childlike love of play than the Maine
South field and the play on it. Look into the stands, and notice how the girls
are dressed. They sport the Park Ridge uniform: tight blue jeans, snug
sweaters, lots of eye makeup, and what appears to be a Maine South dress
code mandate: a pair of Uggs in any of many colors.
But look again.
Sometimes that was a Maine South student who walked by you. But if you
had looked closer, you would have noticed far more wrinkles than you see on
teenage girls, although the wrinkles are well concealed. That wasn’t a student
you noticed. It was a student’s mom.
At Maine South on a Friday night, as at other schools on other Friday
nights all across America, you cannot tell the mothers from the daughters by
their clothing. The adults copy the children, right down to dieting to maintain
the illusion of youth and the white blouses peeking out from bottoms of
sweaters. Obviously, the moms’ efforts sometimes work; they got at least one
author’s attention.
But it’s hard to escape another conclusion while watching boys play this
night in October just north of Chicago: We are still children, craving to be
children, buying the more expensive toys that allow us to play and even
remind us, as an iPhone does, of the colors of childhood while we sport the
clothes that make us feel—as expressed in the words of the Boomers’ poet
laureate, Bob Dylan—that we can stay forever young.
 II. OUR LOVE OF SURPRISE

“Chasing Pavements” Up “Solsbury Hill”: How Music Gets Us

When you heard Judy Garland sing the first word, “Some… where,” in
“Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz, it happened to you.
The first time most people hear “As Tears Go By” by the Rolling Stones,
“Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, “Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel, any song
by Joni Mitchell, Kim Carnes, or Adele, and the memorable long opening
twang of the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” it happens again.
Clever music students might be able to explain what caused each of those
reactions—except the last.
Garland’s first two notes, “Some… where,” leap a full octave. That’s rare,
especially from a twelve-year old girl.
In “As Tears Go By,” the surprise is hearing a guitar-driven hard rock
group like the Stones singing to the accompaniment of—of all possible
instruments—classical violins. (Similarly, there is the incongruity of the
Stones’ aggressive lyrics in “Under My Thumb,” heard over a signature
instrument of jazz, the gentle vibes.)
In “Superstition,” our surprise comes from the unusual collection of notes;
Wonder plays almost the entire song on the black keys. (Don’t try that at
home.)
In “Solsbury Hill,” what surprises us is hearing a rock song and bracing
for rock’s signature 4/4 beat, and hearing instead a song in 7/4 time, a beat
unusual in most music. (Notable exceptions would include Pink Floyd’s
“Money” and part of the chorus in the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.”)
Hearing Joni Mitchell surprises us because she tunes her guitar erratically,
creating notes different from any we’ve heard before.
And no musical training is required to realize the surprise of hearing Kim
Carnes and Adele. Their voices remind us less of humans and more of forces
of nature. Listening to Adele, we experience the added surprise of hearing, in
“Chasing Pavements,” the longest vowels in popular music.
Then there’s the opening twang of “Hard Day’s Night,” for over forty
years one of music’s great mysteries.
How did the Beatles do that?
For almost forty-six years, musicians tried to duplicate that opening chord
by combining a Rickenbacker twelve-string guitar like George Harrison’s
with John Lennon’s six-string and Paul McCartney’s bass. Everyone failed;
they couldn’t make the sound. Then in 2010 a mathematician, of all people,
took a shot. Instead of grabbing three guitars, he grabbed a yellow pad and
felt pen and performed a calculation called a Fourier transform. From it, he
deduced that a fourth instrument was involved, likely played by the Beatles’
composer, George Martin: a piano striking an F note.
But that opening note was so surprising and without precedent that it took
over forty-five years, and a formula that includes the sequence f(x)e−2ΠixΣ,
to explain it.
In classical music, the composer establishes the tone of the piece with
what’s called the tonic note. Then for the rest of the song, the composer
dances around the note without ever returning to it—variations of the note but
never the note itself—until the final resolution. Instinctively, our brain
wonders: How will this song return to its tonic note?
What we feel in the meantime is the delight of the journey, the surprise
notes and rhythms, and then our pleasure when, like a riddle, the music
resolves itself by returning to the tonic note.
The music we love depends on surprise. If a song falls into a predictable
pattern, we lose all interest. It’s the surprises—the notes or lyrics we do not
expect—that make a piece creep into the soul.
Our brains love surprises. We grew up wanting Cracker Jack for the
“surprise in every package.” As teenagers we started to crave horror films,
which leapt beyond surprise and into shocking. We crave surprise endings in
movies and exclaim about predictable ones. We complain whenever life
seems like just one thing after another; we want surprise.
We love joy, and joy depends entirely on surprise. If we know something
will happen, it barely pleases us. The moments that delight us—the
experiences that we love—take us by surprise.

Quentin Tarantino’s audacious 2009 movie Inglourious Basterds begins as

a classic heroic-Americans-versus-demonic-Nazis movie and never visits
there again.
To fit the mold, the Nazi colonel should look and behave brutishly. But in
an Oscar-winning performance, German actor Christoph Waltz plays him as
so dainty and polite that he gently asks a Frenchman whom he suspects of
harboring Jews, “Might we switch from French to English?”
When a Jewish woman flees the house, the Nazi colonel spots her, draws
out his pistol, takes aim, and—surprise—lets her escape down the grassy
field.
The Nazis in Basterds kill only at a distance, sniping in kill-or-be-killed
scenes. Our American heroes, by contrast to all film convention, scalp every
victim and carve deep swastika tattoos into the survivors’ foreheads.
We feel certain that the woman who escaped, Shosanna, will survive to
avenge the Nazis’ slaughter of her family. She does. But almost the instant she
does, she feels love toward the Nazi war hero whom she shoots, and she tries
to turn him over to save his life.
We love surprises and remember them—which is what gives them such
marketing force. Surprises stick in our minds, like the surprises in this film
that this author remembers more than six months after seeing it.

We see the force of surprise again in jokes. The effectiveness of a joke

depends entirely on surprise, too, as Aristotle, among others, said long ago.
There’s the setup, followed by a surprising twist. The conclusion has to
surprise us; if we can guess the punch line before we hear it, the joke fails.
Hence “I slept like a baby. I cried all night.”
The setup makes us expect a quiet night’s sleep. Then we hear the
opposite. That’s surprising, and that’s what makes it funny.
Many readers have heard about the grasshopper who walks into a bar, sits
down, and asks what drink the bartender would recommend. The bartender
says the grasshopper is in for a surprise: There’s a drink named for him! We
know, or expect, that there is a cocktail called a grasshopper.
The grasshopper responds, “There’s a drink called Mervin?” The surprise
of hearing “Mervin” instead of “grasshopper” makes us laugh.
Jokes are rooted in the power of surprise—something we crave from
childhood.

Riddles & Rhymes & Theming Lines

“She drives me crazy, oh yeah

Like no else.
She drives me crazy
And I can’t help myself.”

The name of the band flashes instantly in a million minds: Fine Young
Cannibals!
Why do we remember Fine Young Cannibals twenty years after their last
hit but forget the name of products just minutes after hearing and seeing those
names six times in a commercial?
It’s not because the Cannibals endured. They were two-hit wonders who
enjoyed fifteen weeks of fame in 1989, then disbanded less than three years
later.
Why do we remember that name?
Because just as Coldplay riddles us with “How can play be cold?” and 50
Cent makes us wonder “Shouldn’t it be cents?” the group’s name makes us
wonder: How can people who eat people possibly be fine? Our minds demand
a resolution of that riddle; we insist on closure and hate loose ends. (That’s
why collectibles thrive. Once we buy a couple items, the plea “Be sure to get
the whole set!” tantalizes us into doing just that.)
The word “Yahoo” sounds familiar; it’s just surprising when applied to a
tech service or product, just as Apple is a familiar term when describing a
fruit but surprising when describing a computer. “Buffalo” and “Springfield”
are familiar names when describing towns in New York and Illinois but
surprising when combined to describe a rock group. Their names are riddles.
Names like “Buffalo Springfield” sounded even more surprising in that
group’s heyday, because before them, music groups had always used plural
names: The Temptations and The Supremes, or The Four Tops and The Dave
Clark Five.
Then along came Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield, which
startled us. Four or five people singing but with a singular name?
To see riddles at work in marketing, consider the following:

Put a tiger in your tank. (Enco)

The future is bright. The future is Orange. (Orange Telecom)
So good, cats ask for it by name. (Meow Mix)
Say it with flowers. (FTD)

Each of these marketing slogans has won a spot in the Advertising Slogan
Hall of Fame. (Yes, we have halls of fame for everything.)
What do they share in common?
Each is a riddle, because each suggests something impossible. A tiger
cannot squeeze into a gas tank, the future isn’t a color, and neither cats nor
tulips can talk. Each slogan suggests one of the great riddles: How do you do
something that sounds impossible?
Now consider:
 Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. (Peter Paul
Mounds Bar)
When it rains, it pours. (Morton Salt)
The Citi never sleeps. (Citibank)
Nothing runs like a Deere. (John Deere)
Capitalist tool (Forbes)
Think small. (Volkswagen)
Heinz meanz beanz. (Heinz)

Each of these slogans takes a familiar phrase or image and adds a twist.
The familiar expression “I feel like a nut” means that you feel slightly crazy.
Hershey’s gave this surprise twist: Whether you feel like having a nut or you
don’t, buy a Mounds Bar, because they come with nuts or without.
When Morton Salt manufactured the first salt that wouldn’t clump in moist
air, they took a familiar phrase but cleverly put it in a new context: Morton
Salt still pours even when it’s wet outside.
New York was famous as “the city that never sleeps.” Citibank gave the
phrase new meaning as the bank that tried harder: “The Citi that never
sleeps.”
Deere twisted the phrase “He runs like deer” to tell us that nothing runs
like a John Deere; there’s also a wonderful element of play here in the puns
on “runs” and “deer.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, hippies labeled those who they considered sellouts
to American business as “capitalist tools.” In clever retaliation, Forbes
proudly embraced the phrase and twisted it, proclaiming itself as the
representative of that system and a vital tool for business.
“Think Small” flipped a classic American expression of optimism, “Think
big,” and told us it was time we considered an automobile so small they called
it “the bug,” the charming underdog of its era.
Heinz riffed on the familiar phrase “It doesn’t mean beans to me” to give
the company a foothold in the canned beans market.
Why do marketers spend so much time worrying about these little
phrases? It’s largely because a message needs to have an emotional peak and
because the brain’s processing power is limited, particularly when it involves
something that minimally engages us—things like beans, salt, and banks, to
name three of the above. We won’t remember thirty words; we will remember
six, however, if they resonate emotionally—and surprises do just that.
The second reason for the emphasis on themes relates to memory. Slogans
typically are designed to appear at the end of a commercial or the bottom of
an advertisement, and we tend to best remember the last thing we see or hear.
 And if marketers make those slogans surprising, of course, we remember
them even better.

Why do we love rhymes, too?

In part, it’s because rhymes work like riddles. Every first line makes us
wonder, “How will it be answered?” The second line gives us closure, the
closure that we have to hear, because our minds hate loose ends.
Rhymes also are play. That’s all but proven by the name we give to
exercises like rhyming: We call them wordplay. Play delights us, and what
delights us sticks in our minds. That’s why today, most of us read “I would
not eat green eggs and ham. I do not like them” and immediately remember
“Sam-I-am.”
Which brings us to another collection of slogans from the Advertising
Slogan Hall of Fame:

It takes a licking and keeps on ticking. (Timex)

Plop plop fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is. (Alka-Seltzer)
The quicker picker upper. (Bounty paper towels)
When you got it, flaunt it. (Braniff International Airways)
Please don’t squeeze the Charmin. (Charmin toilet paper)

Great persuaders know that rhymes trick us; when words rhyme easily, we
assume there is a genuine relationship between them. It’s the force behind
Jesse Jackson, a persuader so devoted to rhyme that Jay Leno once announced
that Osama bin Laden tried to hire Jackson because “they are having trouble
coming up with anything that rhymes with ‘Taliban’.”
So we are more prone to believe that haste must make waste, even though
we’ve also been told the opposite in a less memorable nonrhyme: “He who
hesitates is lost.” The rhyme “Haste makes waste” sticks and sounds truer to
us than the phrase that doesn’t.
If you doubt this, you’re not alone. The psychologist Matthew McGlorne
of the University of Texas doubted it, too. So he ran a test. He showed
subjects the expression “Woes unite foes” and a second expression with the
identical idea: “Woes unite enemies.”
What happened?
The subjects were far more apt to believe the rhyming version than the
nonrhyming one. Rhymes just sound like they must be right, or as someone
put it nicely, “There is reason in rhyme.”
And was his understanding of this what led Johnnie Cochran to create for
O. J. Simpson’s jury the memorable rhyme/closing argument “If it doesn’t fit,
you must acquit”?
Whatever the explanation, rhythms and rhymes get us and trick us. They
always have.

Issaquah’s Wizards of Surprise

In 2008, Costco began offering on its website a unique canary diamond ring.
The center stone weighed 10.61 carats, and the International Gemological
Institute, which certifies diamond values, certified that it was worth $264,765.
A $5,000 diamond ring being offered for sale in a store known for
enormous discounts surprises most people; a 10.61-carat ring that only Harry
Winston might carry—and lend to Nicole Kidman on Oscar night—startles
everyone.
Costco offered the ring for $180,000: $84,000 off!
We had to notice.
Costco’s canary diamond presents a surprise so big that it ventures into the
realm of jokes. Costco’s diamond is the equivalent of the lead item in the
Neiman Marcus annual Christmas catalog, which each year features startling
gifts such as his-and-her mummy cases and hot-air balloons.
Surprises like these draw crowds into Costco and make millions of people
eagerly open Neiman’s Christmas catalog. As the kids that we remain forever,
we love surprises.
But these two surprises also are tricks. They set what decision-making
experts and some readers know as anchors.
Our brains work around anchors. Studies show, for example, that if we
flashed the number 1,120 at the beginning of this paragraph, then asked a
paragraph later, “How many words are in the Gettysburg Address?” the
average answer from readers would hover around 1,120. If we flashed the
number 370 instead, however, the answer would hover around that number.
(No one knows the correct answer—there are at least five known versions of
the Gettysburg Address—but historians agree that 256 words is the best
estimate.)
So we walk into a Costco and see a $180,000 ring. At this point, what is
our idea of an expensive item? How cheap does a $145 espresso machine
suddenly sound? After we see his-and-hers robots for $225,000 each, how can
we not buy those little items priced only in four figures? (This also explains
why Ralph Lauren offers an alligator bag for a mere $16,995. It makes us
wonder how someone can possibly pass up the $1,695 leather bag.)
 A few readers, reflecting on this example and the example of Costco
exploiting our love of play, might find themselves thinking, “Yes, but I’ve
never noticed a Costco ad or commercial.”
No, you haven’t. There aren’t any.
Rather than try to leverage the force of conventional push marketing,
Costco appeals to our love of surprise and play, and to great effect. Founded
less than thirty years ago, the wizards of Issaquah have created America’s
third-largest retailer, its twenty-fourth-largest company, and one of the
strongest cases anywhere for the power of appealing to our love of surprise
and play.
 III. OUR FIRST LOVE: STORIES

The Story Behind 60 Minutes

On September 24, 1968, CBS Television introduced a new idea to

Americans: a “television newsmagazine” named 60 Minutes.
No black background and ticking stopwatch introduced the first show.
Because documentaries on American television had missed more often than
they’d hit, Alpo Dog Food was the only sponsor CBS could secure. The show
opened with Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace, and with stories about
presidential candidates Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, followed by
several “articles” related to politics.
Patterned on a Canadian program, 60 Minutes looked like a gamble, and
the overnight ratings showed it. The first show and those that followed rated
only a little higher than the average documentary, but they weren’t
documentaries. They were articles in a television newsmagazine. That was
unfamiliar.
The network tried to hold on, and the show slowly gained traction—very
slowly. It took eight years to finally crack the Nielsen Top 20, but as more
people watched, more people watched. Just three seasons later and eleven
years after that opening program, 60 Minutes reached number one for the first
time.
Today, we know that CBS’s gamble worked. 60 Minutes is the longest
continuously running prime-time television show in history. Its status as
America’s number-one program for five years is an achievement equaled only
by All in the Family and The Cosby Show; and for every year from 1977 to
2000, it finished in the top ten in the Nielsen ratings, also a record.
60 Minutes obviously tapped something deep within us. What was it?
Producer and mastermind Don Hewitt has said that the reason for the
program’s success is as old as the Bible.
The title of Hewitt’s autobiography hints at this: It’s called Tell Me a Story.
Interviewed about the program for the PBS program American Masters,
Hewitt explained: “Even the people who wrote the Bible were smart enough
to know: Tell them a story. The issue was evil; the story was Noah. I latched
on to that.”
Hewitt had learned that storytelling is universal. Our ancestors covered
their caves with the PowerPoint presentations of their time: the images they
painted to tell stories about the hunt. Then and now, we need stories; a story is
a single coherent whole that makes sense out of a lot of parts. Aesop, Jesus,
Muhammad, Moses, Confucius, and followers of the Buddha all knew it;
every religion has stories at its center.
For years before his death, journalists and journalism students would ask
Hewitt the secret of his success, and his message was for everyone in any
business. How do you get into our hearts and souls? Hewitt answered with a
message today’s best marketers heed: “At 60 Minutes, we do what everyone
should be doing: Tell me a story. Learn to do that, and you’ll be a success.”

The Great Communicator’s Secret

Just before noon, eastern time, on January 28, 1986, on a subfreezing day on
Merritt Island, Florida, the space shuttle Challenger exploded in a cloudless
sky seventy-three seconds after takeoff. None of the seven crew members
survived. That night, a visibly shaken President Ronald Reagan addressed the
nation with a speech now considered among the greatest in American history.
This is how he concluded:

There’s a coincidence today. On this day three hundred and ninety

years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off
the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the
oceans, and a historian later said, “He lived by the sea, died on it,
and was buried in it.” Well, today, we can say of the Challenger
crew: Their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete…. We will
never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as
they… waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to
“touch the face of God.”

Known as the Great Communicator, Reagan did what great

communicators do: He told stories. On August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King, Jr., did, too. King told
stories of a dream, one that included sons of former slaves and slave owners
“in the red hills of Georgia” sitting down together at tables, and those stories
moved people and made them remember King’s words decades later, when
American Rhetoric named it the greatest speech in our history.
On his night, Reagan told two stories—one of Drake and the other of the
Challenger crew repeating Drake’s heroics—because he knew the power
stories have over people. Undoubtedly, he learned that from his fifty-year film
career in Hollywood. Actors act out stories, and we flock to see them.
How much do we crave stories? Consider Netflix, which CEO Reed
Hastings started in 1997 after getting hit with a $40 late fee for Apollo 13.
Every day, Hastings’ company sends stories in the form of movies to
subscribers nationwide. In just the fifty-five seconds that passed while you
read this passage to this point, Netflix shipped eleven thousand of those
stories.
Because of our passion for stories as well as play, is it any wonder the
marketers at Pixar chose for the title of their blockbuster series of movies Toy
Story?
We love stories. Perhaps best of all from every marketer’s perspective, we
remember them, as the next childhood story illustrates.

George Eliot’s Grandfather’s Wild Ride

One of many Americans’ first lessons in the psychology of memory and the
power of stories came in fourth grade. That’s when we confronted the
daunting task of learning to spell the word “geography.”
Fortunately, many of our teachers gave us the mnemonic device that made
spelling that long word easy. They gave us a story: George Eliot’s old
grandfather rode a pig home yesterday.
Why do we remember that sentence, with its nine words and forty-seven
letters, more easily than we remember the nine letters in the word
“geography”?
There are two reasons. George Eliot’s old grandfather rode a pig home
yesterday is a story, and we remember a single story better than we remember
a sequence of letters, especially sequences longer than five letters. A famous
piece of research, the Rule of Seven, Plus or Minus Two, holds that we can
remember seven items, plus or minus two. (Perhaps the best example: You
can remember phone numbers without area codes [seven digits] but not those
with them [ten digits].) “Geography,” having nine letters, is right on the limit
of our capacity to remember, according to this theory.
Second, while stories are more memorable than simple narrative sentences
—which explains why we are able to remember entire jokes, because they are
a single story—certain stories are more easily remembered. As we learn from
jokes, we are more apt to remember a surprising story.
The pig-riding story surprises us. The image of an old man steering a pig,
especially all the way home, amuses us. And it puzzles us, too. How can an
old man ride a pig? Pigs hug the ground so closely; where does he put his feet
to get them out of ground’s way? And pigs move very slowly. So why would
he ever choose one to ride sixty feet, much less “all the way home”?
We remember George Eliot’s story because it doesn’t give us nine things
to remember, like the word “geography.” It gives us just five:

The boy’s name: George Eliot

His relative: old grandfather
His mode of transport: a pig
Where he went: home
When: yesterday

This gives us what memory experts call chunks, and we remember in

chunks. The George Eliot story has just five chunks, as opposed to the nine
chunks in the word “geography.” But then comes the final step, the one that
explains why storytelling is used in all cultures in all times. As with all
stories, after we repeat a story several times, it turns into a single chunk—and
nothing is easier to remember than a single chunk.

J. Peterman’s Fantasies

Time was we bought shirts, ties, blouses, jeans. It was simple.

Then the stuff piled up, and we had trouble telling it all apart. Jeans were
jeans were jeans. And then they weren’t.
Among the people who changed this was a Kentuckian with a catalog. He
dreamed of owning a Duesenberg, it seems. Or so one of his tiny odes in his
famous catalog suggests.
He was, and is, J. Peterman. His distinctive catalog of things—a Marie
Antoinette nightshirt and a Gatsby shirt—might have earned him a few
million dollars. But his style of storytelling transformed him from a success in
business into a frequent character on Seinfeld.
Peterman’s notoriety rested on sentences that rarely exceeded twelve
words. Sometimes he used five words. Other times, three. His simplicity drew
people in. Simplicity always does.
But the real seduction in Peterman’s words came from how he assembled
them: He made them into stories. So a Peterman shirt was never just a shirt; it
was Jay Gatsby’s shirt, just as a black dress was Audrey Hepburn’s, with the
only extra being a string of pearls. (Aware of the appeal of detail, from
Peterman’s keyboard this would have come out “a string of pearls, from a
favorite shop just off the Rue du Montaigne.”)
Peterman knew that like child, like adult: We are captivated by stories,
eager from their suspense to know what comes next. So thousands of us,
including Oprah Winfrey and Frank Sinatra, bought Peterman’s stories, and
then his items.
A typical Peterman entry:

Versailles Hoof-Pick Belt (No. 2580). Made in the heart of

Kentucky horse country by Claire Painter.
Who’s she?
A gifted artisan, right in my backyard.
Claire worked as a master saddle maker in Perthshire, Scotland.
Then, thankfully, she moved here.
The leather is from Wicket and Craig, which has been producing
the finest leather goods in North America for the past century and a
half.
The buckle, solid brass, is an actual working hoof pick, not a
replica.
One of the finest pieces I’ve ever seen.
There’s just one problem: People will never stop asking you about
it.
Can you live with that?

Peterman doesn’t sell just a belt; he sells the story behind it, which gives
the belt meaning. It’s no longer a belt with a solid brass buckle, but the
creation of a former master saddle maker from Scotland who somehow ended
up in Lexington, Kentucky. Plus that brass buckle isn’t a buckle at all; it’s a
working hoof pick, which sounds like a one-of-a-kind touch, not to mention
something we might use one day to pick a horse hoof.
Peterman’s fame reminds us how much we love stories.
But wait, you say. Didn’t Peterman’s company end up struggling? It has. It
once declared bankruptcy. Does this mean we are less susceptible to stories
than it appears?
No. Peterman’s problem stemmed from what followed.
We ordered one of his remarkable items—a black dress that Audrey
Hepburn might have worn, say. Days later, our coveted box arrived from
Kentucky. We breathlessly opened the parcel.
 But what?
Our Hepburn dress arrived encased in cheap clear plastic wrap and had
taken a pounding in transit, producing wrinkles that Audrey never would have
tolerated. Nothing in the package reminds us of Audrey or her story. Seeing
her dress sprawling on the bed, we see just a wrinkled cotton dress—not
Egyptian cotton, or cotton from Sea Island, but perhaps a decent strain grown
in Kentucky—with no obvious detail that helps us understand why an iconic
actress ever would have chosen that dress.
The story was over, the romance was gone.
The problem with J. Peterman stories was that they were fictional, and we
buy the real stories behind products—or at least, what we believe are the real
stories. When we learn that Häagen-Dazs isn’t from Scandinavia but from the
Bronx, for example, and that the founder made up the name because it
sounded Scandinavian to him, that story devolves into mere fantasy and we
lose interest—and perhaps some faith.
J. Peterman created interesting stories, but we don’t buy interesting stories;
we buy the interesting true stories that today’s best marketers tell.

The Storytellers of Stumptown

In its March 9, 2010, issue, Time magazine announced that Starbucks might
have met its David. A rival coffee from nearby Portland, Oregon, had
emerged. America’s foremost coffee expert, Oliver Strand of the New York
Times, went a step further in the article: “Stumptown is the new leader.”
To Stumptown’s charismatic founder, Duane Sorenson, coffee is like wine,
with an elevation, a quality of land (the terroir), a varietal, and tasting notes
printed on every bag. (We learn that Sumatra Lake Tawar’s notes, for
example, are blackberry cobbler, star anise, and cannabis.)
Here is Stumptown’s website description of one of its nineteen varietals:

Geisha is an extremely rare coffee varietal that has made waves in

the past 5+ years for having what many coffee connoisseurs
consider to be the most brilliantly complex and intense flavor
profile of all. Originally brought to Costa Rica from the small town
of Gesha in southwestern Ethiopia, the Geisha made its way south
to Panama, thanks to Don Pachi (Francisco Serracin), before
becoming internationally acclaimed. These trees grow to be very
tall and have beautiful, elongated leaves….
 Sorenson is drawing us into the deeper meaning of each Stumptown cup.
In Geisha’s case, she’s a little bean from a small town that found her way to a
bigger city thanks to a man named Francisco, and then to international
acclaim: She’s the little bean that could.
Eventually, this draws us into Sorenson’s story. The bearded son of a
sausage maker from Puyallup, Washington, he dropped out of Seattle
University, wears hoodies and black Adidas high-tops, adores AC/DC, and
lives in an apartment crammed with a dozen French presses. He’s a little guy,
too, on a mission: He Jeeps his way into outbacks all over the world to find
world’s great varietals.
The nearby Abercrombie & Fitch stores are built around stories, too. We
hear it from CEO Michael Jeffries, who compares his stores to movies: “I
want people walking in and wondering, “What’s at the box office today?” His
clothing reveals this, too, portraying itself as the well-worn sweatshirts from a
New York State championship winning team and from a summer camp at
“Camp Beaver Tail,” membership in “The Growlers,” and nights spent with
buddies at “Warrior’s Tap.”
Without some story to give it meaning, products are just stuff. Sorenson
and Jeffries and the astute modern merchandisers realize this and turn to
something universal that we love: a story.

The Moral of Two Stories: Nike and Scion

One overcast Monday morning in February 1973, two third-year students at

the University of Oregon School of Law approached a second-year student
with a memorable request. Two fellow Oregonians had started a company and
were raising additional capital. The two students insisted the company would
succeed. How would you like to invest $2,000? They were sure that student—
me—could triple my money.
Oh sure, I thought, running shoes will be big.
Their optimistic prediction turned out to be off by millions. Their friend
was Phil Knight, the company was Nike, and Nike’s success is often viewed
as a testament to brilliant marketing and lucky timing.
There was much more to it. We can dispose of luck, which always matters,
and of which Nike had plenty. The first came from a disaster: the 1972
Munich Olympics. Everything about that Olympics foretold doom for
Americans: suspicious disqualifications of American gold-medal hopefuls in
swimming and the pole vault and unexpected failures by Americans in other
events.
 All of this became trivial when at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, September 5,
Palestinian terrorists broke into the Olympic Village and forced their way into
the rooms of members of the Israeli Olympics team. During that entry, they
killed two of the members, then took nine more hostage, eventually to a
Boeing 727 waiting at a nearby airport.
Less than twenty-four hours after those terrorists entered the athletes’
rooms came an unforgettable announcement from sleepless and teary NBC
sportscaster Jim McKay, for years the voice of the Games: “They’re all
gone.”
Against this hideous background, and after days during which the Games
were suspended, the marathon was run. For the Americans watching, the
prevailing feeling was “What possibly could happen next?”
And what happened next changed the face of America for decades.
A gaunt and relatively unknown Yale Law School student named Frank
Shorter took the early lead, and for miles ran alone toward the finish. Fearing
the worst in this worst of all Olympics, America watched, but the worst never
came. What came instead was Shorter’s win. That night, Americans watched
the highlights of the race set to McKay’s riveting prose, including his
unforgettable words about the marathon itself, repeated like the hook of a
song: “You must run the race by yourself.”
What happened the next day in America was reminiscent of February 10,
1964, the Monday after American teenage boys first saw the Beatles and
showed up at school with their short hair combed forward, Beatle-like. After
Shorter’s win, Americans copied him. They started jogging, then running. But
they quickly learned that their old white Converse low-cut basketball shoes or
Keds didn’t work. They needed running shoes instead. And Phil Knight
noticed.
Knight was a former above-average miler at the University of Oregon, a
school in a town, Eugene, that is hallowed among distance runners. It
suggests that small town’s stature in the world of running that it once held not
just one marathon but two—one marathon for every 42,000 residents. The
first was called the Nike OTC (Oregon Track Club) Marathon, and it attracted
most of America’s best marathoners. The second was called the Track Capital
Marathon, a title the town had held for years.
Beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing for decades after, many of
America’s best young distance runners chose the University of Oregon for the
opportunity to train under the school’s famous coach, Bill Bowerman.
In the fall of 1970, Bowerman attracted one more person who would
figure prominently in Nike’s story. He was a 5-foot-9-inch, 145-pound
package of sheer will from the small Oregon coastal town of Coos Bay. He
was Steve Prefontaine, and he became iconic, too, breaking eight NCAA
records and winning seven NCAA titles in his career. Today, you see people
in “Pre Lives” T-shirts from Tampa to Kuala Lumpur, and every serious
runner knows what those words mean.
Through his decades of work with runners including Pre, Bowerman had
become dissatisfied with the Adidas and Tiger shoes made for distance
runners. Those shoes tended to be barely modified versions of the shoes worn
by sprinters, who run almost exclusively on their forefeet and do not need
arch support or heel cushioning. But distance runners train and race on paved
roads and concrete. They don’t need speed or spikes; they need cushioning
from the pounding.
Famously puzzling over this problem in his kitchen one morning,
Bowerman took a waffle iron, injected it with a rubberized compound, and
made a sole for a running shoe. The sole naturally looked like an inverted
waffle; square studs protruded from where the waffle holes normally would
be. The waffle sole was a welcome and needed innovation, and runners
quickly embraced it.
So Nike’s story now included Eugene, the nation’s track capital; the
University of Oregon, distance running’s Mecca; Bowerman, running’s
distinguished elder statesman; Pre, America’s premier distance runner and
most charismatic figure; and the most innovative shoe in the sport.
This was the Nike story, and its truth resonated in a way no other athletic
shoe company’s story could.
By contrast, what was the Adidas story?
Adidas’s story was created by a German unknown to Americans. He was
and still is so unknown that few Americans know that the name “Adidas”
comes from the name of the company’s founder, Adi Dasler.
And what was the Puma story?
A family feud: Adi and his Adidas partner and brother started fighting one
day. In a huff, the brother left Adidas and started Puma as an act of revenge
against Adi.
Adidas and Puma are German companies, which gives them weak running
backstories. When Nike emerged, world and European distance running had
been dominated by the Kenyans, the Finnish, and some Eastern Europeans—
but not the Germans. The only German runner of brief note was Waldemar
Cierpinski, but he hailed from East Germany and was tainted by stories of the
East German athletic machine and its use of steroids. So the German running
story, such as it was, had few chapters.
What was Tiger’s story?
Tiger was based in Japan, a country without a significant distance-running
tradition other than its well-known marathon in Fukuoka, which owed what
little fame it had in America to the fact that Shorter won it the year before his
Olympic win and in each of the three years after.
Nike won its race, in part, because no competitors could match its story.
Nike was more than a manufacturer; it was a collection of running purists
who wanted to help people run and train for long distances in something more
than a thin, flat sole glued to a synthetic upper and tied together with string.
Nike’s founders realized the power of its story and the influence it would
have. Its first ads didn’t even feature its shoes but told the stories of the
renegades behind them. An early single-page ad focused on Bowerman
himself, under the headline “The Spirit That Moves Us.” Nike’s very
noncorporate-looking “top executives” were featured in another early ad.
They were shown sitting in an airport gate waiting area, clad in clothes
several degrees short of business casual, with the headline: “Our first
employees are still with us. We think.” Nike told us they were traveling the
world, trying to help runners run better.
Nike told its story well, in a voice more like a conversation than a
corporate ad, trumpeting the standard “We listen, we’re with you all the way.”
Runners knew Nike cared about them, for an obvious and compelling reason:
Nike was them, and runners wanted to be a part of them.
When Nike expanded into other sports, it routinely brought on the best
athletes in those sports—Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods most vividly—not
just for the endorsement value but the meaning behind it: We are the shoes for
the truly serious athletes, the shoes that help you Just Do It—whatever your
“It” is.
We don’t buy things; we buy what they mean, and a company’s stories
provide that meaning. We need narratives from birth to comprehend our world
and everything in it.
Nike knew that, because Nike knew—intensely—precisely what runners
love. But of course they did; they were the very runners they were trying to
appeal to. Nike wasn’t tapping a market; it was the market.

Compare Nike’s success selling to runners to Toyota’s efforts to capture

the attention of America’s youth and sell its entry-level Scion by identifying
itself with hip-hop. Hip-hop’s signal characteristics are graffiti, break dancing,
MCing and DJing, rebellion, and slang; Toyota’s are making and selling well-
made, low-defect, affordable cars. Nike’s connection to runners was and is
real and undeniable; Toyota’s hip-hop connection, like its cars, has been
totally manufactured.
 This may help explain the Scion’s twin fates: Scions prospered at first, but
largely because the wrong people kept buying them: older drivers looking for
affordable vehicles that were easy to get into and out of, and parents who
finally found an inexpensive car with lots of space for maneuvering children
into and out of car seats. Perhaps because too many hip-hoppers noticed all
these retirees and parents behind “their” wheels, Scion sales started dropping
drastically in 2009.
Nike didn’t try to target the running culture; it was the running culture. It
didn’t have to concoct stories about its role in running; they were everywhere
you looked. Scion, by contrast, took the conventional aim strategy: Let’s
target a segment and ingratiate ourselves with the people in it, even to the
point of making it appear that Scion is not really a Toyota. On its website, the
only references to Toyota are those required by law, and they appear in the
smallest typeface allowed by law.
The Scion lacks a story; no story links it to hip-hop. And today, it’s stories
—authentic stories, told well—that win, just as stories have captured us from
those nights with Mom and Dad reading at our bedsides.
 IV. LITTLE VERSUS BIG

The Moral of a Hundred Childhood Stories

In our childhoods, we heard about David slaying Goliath and about the bad
giant who fee-fi-foe-fummed about the blood of an Englishman. Had we
grown up in New Delhi or Oslo, one hundred years ago or even a thousand,
we would have heard similar giant stories; they are universal.
The giants in these myths are the same: They are scary and—fortunately
for the hero—stupid. Giants also are unholy; they war with the gods. In
different story versions, Goliath was a pagan, a representative of Satan, or
both.
From childhood, we equate big with evil.
We do it instantly with the wolf. He is not just big but bad: the big bad
wolf. Oafs are not small, either; they are big oafs. Slovenly people are never
small but always fat and big: they are big fat slobs.
Godzilla, the T. rex, the great white whale of Moby Dick, the great white
shark of Jaws: the huge offends and terrifies us.
Hearing these stories, we identify with the small characters: Little Bo
Peep, Little Jack Horner, Little Boy Blue, or Little Miss Muffet, one of the
girls from Little Women or the boy in The Little Prince. Later, we root for
Little Orphan Annie and the Little Mermaid, and later still for Little Miss
Sunshine. We adopt as our symbol of American persistence a small
locomotive: The Little Engine That Could.
In George Orwell’s harrowing view in 1984, Big Brother controls us.
Politicians promise us that they “look out for the little guy,” arouse us by
deploring Big Government, and often help wage the battle against Big Oil.
Big businesses suffer bad press. They are staffed with The Man in the
Gray Flannel Suit, the cube dwellers, the clueless bosses in Dilbert. We view
Big Business as business but equate small business with art; we call it
entrepreneurship. The suffix of that word, -ship, connotes goodness and skill,
as we see in the words “sportsmanship,” “craftsmanship,” “leadership,” and
“scholarship.”
 The word “entrepreneur” also sounds artistic, and it should. The word
comes from the French, who first used the word to denote a leader in the arts:
specifically, the director of a musical institution.
The leader of a business engages in the act of being busy—literally, busy
ness—and makes things. An entrepreneur, by contrast, engages in artistry; she
makes music or something closely akin to it.
It goes further. We call large companies businesses but refer to small ones
as enterprises, and to be enterprising, as the Random House Dictionary
reminds us, is to be “characterized by a bold daring energetic spirit.”
Businesses are characterized by profit and loss, but enterprises are bold and
daring; they are the starship Enterprises of our day, boldly going “where no
man has gone before.”
We revere the Thomas Edisons who started these great enterprises, even
though many, including Edison, proved totally incapable of running them. We
regularly nod at the old saw “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.”
That’s what our ancestors said of the men who founded America’s first huge
industries, oil and the railroads; they dubbed them Robber Barons. In that
tradition, a generation of American journalists called the muckrakers became
famous by exposing the alleged misdeeds of Standard Oil and other large
businesses.
In 1973, a British economist named E. F. Schumacher printed a series of
essays in a book whose title became part of our American business
vernacular: Small Is Beautiful. The title derives from Schumacher’s quotation,
straight from the pages of David and Goliath: “Man is small. Therefore, small
is beautiful.”
In 1995, Alan Webber and Bill Taylor followed Schumacher’s lead and
launched the magazine Fast Company, focusing on the smaller technology
companies they saw transforming our culture. Their choice of title reflects a
popular view: Small companies are fast, not the plodding Goliaths that
dominate the pages of Forbes and Fortune.
Fortune noticed Fast Company’s success and began morphing into a
magazine that now insists on staying current on Twitter, Facebook, and
Skype, and that each year devotes relatively more columns to the Davids than
the Goliaths on which it once focused totally. On its website, Fortune
constantly updates a section devoted to computing’s David, Apple.
The David language also reflects a popular American view of Big
Business: Giants are evil. Apple’s employees and fans call their enemy,
Microsoft, the Evil Empire, a title that tech hackers once attached to IBM.
Five minutes away in Mountain View, Sergey Brin and Larry Page rally their
masses at Google behind a telling battle cry: Don’t be evil.
 Watch where we congregate in cities on weekends: Greenwich Village in
New York, Ybor City in Tampa, Twenty-Third Street in Portland, Gaslamp
Quarter in San Diego, and Capitol Hill in Seattle. They are skyscraper-free.
The Yuma Building looms as a towering monument in Gaslamp at just three
stories. Many of the restaurants on Twenty-Third Street are in old homes.
Others flee even those small places to small towns like Chatham, Cannon
Beach, and Carmel, where a three-story building would look alien.
Given our choice, we flee big and head to small. We’ve been doing it
almost from the moment our cities’ buildings started scraping their skies.
Headlines bemoan the flight from our inner cities, but do the editors realize
what we are doing? We are acting out Little vs. Big.
You can see it in our choice of these urban areas and weekend favorites
and in our choice of words. How do we describe an inviting, small restaurant?
We call it “intimate,” which suggests that small is personal and big is not; and
we call it “cozy,” a reminder that small makes us comfortable and big makes
us uneasy.
It’s this realization that drove the creation of Disneyland and Disney
World. A visitor there easily misses the trick its designers have played. The
buildings aren’t normal. They are two-thirds scale by design; the wizards of
Disney knew about Little vs. Big, as you might expect of a company that is
built around children and the stories from our childhood, like Swiss Family
Robinson and Sleeping Beauty. The parks are big yet feel little and accessible,
and we feel bigger when we walk their paths.
Look at the ascendancy of the dollar stores. Their prices are appealing, but
their scale is made to be, too: a Family Dollar and Dollar General Store takes
up just 6,500 square feet, while a Dollar Tree isn’t much bigger than many
homes, at just 3,900 square feet. Abercrombie & Fitch stores work Little vs.
Big, too, squeezing into intimate spaces and highlighting them with dark,
intimate lighting, leather couches, rugs, and foliage, a feeling accentuated by
the low ceilings. Welcome to our little home.

Which bring us to the trials of Ford and General Motors. Do they struggle
not just because health-care costs add almost $2,000 to the cost of each
American car, or because other American labor costs are high, or because GM
created too many brands that no one could tell apart? Or do they struggle
because they succeeded?
Did Ford and GM succeed and from that grow too big for us? They
became giants, and we do not believe in “Too big to fail.” We believe that
becoming big dooms one to failure.
 So our government had to rescue Ford and GM because few of us would.
We don’t trust giants; we never have.

On the night of April 8, 2009, a short, stout, and unemployed lady appears
on the stage of Britain’s Got Talent, the U.K.’s version of our American Idol.
She tells the judges she is forty-seven and has never been kissed; we believe
her, as the wicked big judge Simon Cowell rolls his eyes. Just as she is about
to sing, the camera focuses on the handsome judge with the kinder face. Even
that nice fellow is chuckling.
A pause.
Susan Boyle sings the first line, and when she hits the fifth note, the
camera pans across the three judges’ faces; their eyes are open wide. The
crowd is clapping, soon to be shouting. At twenty seconds, they are standing
and shouting. The pretty judge Amanda raises her hands to her face, and we
sense her tears coming. And ours, too.
It is the great American story enacted on a British stage, and it reaches
America in minutes. Watching on YouTube, covered with goose bumps, we
watch that mean Simon Cowell beam, and others watch by the multimillions.
Over the next thirty days, a single clip of Boyle’s performance attracts 78
million hits on YouTube—exactly one hit every second.
Americans are famous for our love of underdogs like Susan Boyle.
Underdogs demonstrate a truth we hold self-evident: that because we all are
created equal, we all are capable of extraordinary things—becoming
president, starting a billion-dollar company, writing the Great American
Novel from a house in foreclosure. Underdogs confirm our very American
faith in the Little Man, the Little Prince, the Little Engine That Could.
So when Susan Boyle serenaded the world, the people in our country
cheered the loudest. We cried, too, not least of all because she and the
producers chose the perfect American underdog song for her, as clever a piece
of scripting as you will ever see: They had her sing “I Dreamed a Dream.”

Apple understands Susan Boyle’s appeal to us. In Apple’s Mac vs. PC

commercials, the Mac character is played by actor Justin Long. A stray brown
hair over 5 feet 8 inches and a Red Bull over 145 pounds, Long looks like a
chill kid who in high school might have been named “Most Likely Not to
Appear in Class,” which he was.
The PC character is played by actor John Hodgman. Seven years older and
many pounds heavier than Long, Hodgman looks like a guy who played viola
in his high school orchestra, which he did.
 Apple’s ads work Little vs. Big, the likable little underdog, as Apple
always has. Justin Longish and defying upperdog convention, skinny Steve
Jobs made all his major appearances wearing nondesigner jeans and white
New Balance running shoes. Microsoft’s John Hodgmanish CEO Steve
Ballmer makes his major appearances in button-down shirts, slacks, and
polished leather shoes. The mostly young tech-business press covers Ballmer,
whom Business Week once described as being “built like a linebacker,”
respectfully; they treated skinny Steve Jobs with wonder. Jobs knew they love
an underdog, and like Ben & Jerry and the folks at Mini Cooper, he and his
company constantly play that role and earn our special affection.

Underdogs in the Mist

You walk into Irvine Spectrum mall in Irvine, California, and quickly notice
an odd store. What gets your attention is the name: There isn’t one. Instead,
the store sports three logos on the front: 6.0, Hurley, and Converse.
You walk into No Name, notice the snowboarding and skateboarding
merchandise, and eventually ask, “Who is behind this?”
The answer is Nike. Nike makes 6.0 products and acquired Hurley in 2002
and Converse a year later. Then why isn’t the Nike name on the store?
The answer is Goliath. Nike knows that younger customers, particularly
skateboarders and snowboarders, see themselves as renegades and underdogs
and are at that age where big looks particularly odious. To them, as Nike’s
Jeanne Jackson reaffirms, “It’s not cool to have a big hairy name over the
door.”
David and Goliath thinking also prompted the creation in late 2008 of a
new bus service aimed at the urban young and newly shrewd: BoltBus. By
offering leather seats, ample leg room, and the perk of the decade, free WiFi,
Bolt boldly distances itself from that old bus line that even sounds like our
granddad, Greyhound. There’s just one catch: With the deft help of the
Sausalito, California, ad agency Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, it was
Greyhound that created, and now owns, BoltBus.

It’s a misty March afternoon in Seattle, and you’ve made your way to the
center of the city’s counterculture, the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
The Hill offers a remarkable mix. It’s the neighborhood that gave the
world grunge and Seattle’s first millionaires the perfect site for their homes.
You come onto the 600 block of Fourteenth Avenue and see one right after
another the three-story brick and Tudor mansions of Seattle’s Millionaires’
Row.
Once off Fourteenth, everywhere else you look is a coffeehouse: Caffe
Ladro, Caffé Vita, Café Dharwin, Fuel Coffee, Insomniax, Stumptown,
People’s Republic of Koffee, B&O Espresso (where Pearl Jam came up with
its name), Online Coffee. You notice one Victrola Coffee and Art, then a
second, and on Broadway, a Starbucks, but of course, this is Starbucks’
hometown.
On Fifteenth Avenue you notice a particularly intriguing looking spot:
15th Ave Coffee and Tea. Inside, your eyes go immediately to its massive
stainless steel espresso machine. You strain to read the barely legible logo on
its burnished surface. It reads La Marzocco. You imagine that 15th Ave’s
owner spotted this machine in a Rome coffeehouse and bought it from the
Italian owner who was about to retire.
You are close. The owners purchased the machine new from Florence,
Italy, where La Marzocco has made these machines since 1929, famous for
brewing every cup within a half-degree Celsius of every other.
The owners seem to have worked the nearby antique stores: a set of 1930s-
era wooden theater seats flank the aged blonde oak chairs around the tables.
It’s the hip classic coffeehouse you might find if the hipster owners had huge
trust funds.
You’re impressed. You decide this place might give Starbucks a run.
But this store isn’t a threat to Starbucks, even at a time when Starbucks
has closed 961 stores in one year and laid off 6,700 employees over two
years; it’s Starbucks’ counterattack. Howard Schultz and his team decided it
needed to innovate, and this test shop was one response. There’s a subtle clue
of this on the 15th Ave sign. It reads “Inspired by Starbucks.”
There’s no question what you are seeing: a Little strategy. 15th Ave makes
that explicit in its promotions, saying it promotes small local music groups to
perform in the evenings and uses products from selected small farmers. (The
Caribou Coffee chain executes its Little strategy with similar words,
promising that its teas and oatmeals are “handcrafted,” for example.)
This strategy is Starbucks’ approach to what many call “The Big Coffee
problem” and for which the owner of the rival Victrola Coffee chose the
perfect words to conclude this section: “The Goliath is coming at me under a
new name.”
THE FORCES AND THEIR SOURCES

2. OUR CULTURE
 I. ME: THE GREAT INDIVIDUALISTS

As the primary drafter of our Declaration of Independence, thirty-three-year-

old Thomas Jefferson could have set as America’s goal “liberty, equality, and
fraternity,” the words the French chose for their declaration thirteen years
later, but he chose “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” instead. The
French seemed to declare, “We’re all in this together”; Jefferson seemed to
declare, “We’re all in this for ourselves.”
Have Jefferson’s famous seven words told generations of us to look out for
ourselves?
It certainly seems that way in 2011. Scan a bookshelf today, and you will
see that our pursuit of happiness has become a daylong sprint. In 2000,
publishers issued forty books on the subject. Eight years later, they released
an average of fifteen new books on happiness every day.

What Howard Hughes and 50 Cent Showed Us

Curtis James Jackson III began pursuing wealth when he was twelve years
old by selling cocaine in his home neighborhood of Queens, New York. He’s
succeeded. One of his homes recently was valued at $24 million, thanks in
major part to the popularity of his CD Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Now famous
under the name 50 Cent, Curtis might seem the embodiment of American
materialism and the perfect person to answer the question, “What is the
meaning of money?”
We might expect him to answer, “Bling, Benzes, and booty.” But we hear
from him something truly American instead. “Money,” he says, “is freedom.”

True materialists crave things. Americans don’t; we merely stockpile

them. The Midwest auto dealer Denny Hecker declared bankruptcy and was
found to own nine Rolex watches. If Hecker valued a Rolex watch, he would
own one, but he doesn’t. He owns nine. It’s not his Rolexes; they satisfy no
Hecker urge.
 Buying things is only sometimes about owning the things. Buying often is
simply about what 50 Cent observed: being able to buy. Having less means
hearing, “No, you cannot have that,” and we loathe being told what we can
and cannot do.
Being able to buy is an expression of our deepest value, the one we would
die for: our freedom.
There’s a perfect subject for testing this hypothesis, the icon who once
personified the accumulation of wealth in America: Howard Hughes. Hughes
tried to acquire everything; he even acquired a barber.
For seventeen years, Hughes paid Eddie Alexander generously—$7,000 in
today’s dollars for a single hair cut—to do nothing except be on permanent
call for Hughes, day and night. At 2 a.m. one night, Hughes decided to test
Alexander’s devotion. He dialed his number and heard only one ring.
“That you, Howard?” Eddie answered, his clipper and shears nearby him.
“Just checking, Eddie, just checking.”
The best words anyone could write about Hughes’s apparent materialism
have been written, crafted by Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
in an entry titled “7700 Romaine”:

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something

interesting about ourselves… that the secret point of money and
power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor
power for power’s sake… but absolute personal freedom, mobility,
privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all
through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a
restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent,
live by one’s own rules.

Our ancestors’ passions to be utterly free brought them here, and our
Statue of Liberty beckoned to them, the masses “yearning to breathe free.”
Patrick Henry repeated the passion in famous form, “Give me liberty or give
me death,” and in 1971, the state of New Hampshire took up this cause and
inscribed on every state license plate four famous words: Live Free or Die.
Like 50 Cent and Hughes and Henry, we crave the idea of freedom.
Harley-Davidson knows this; its core message forever has been freedom: It’s
the American motorcycle that lets you feel free. Motorcyclists themselves
vividly illustrate this when they rebel against helmet laws. We should be able
to kill ourselves, they argue, a risk worth bearing so that we can feel the rush
of air on our faces as we ride.
Our seemingly ludicrous proliferation of choices—eighty-five kinds of
snack crackers and entire racks full only of toothpaste—is our marketers’
answer to the plea that we have freedom of choice. The more choices we
have, the more American we feel.

In comparative political science, we learn about deferential cultures.

Citizens in these cultures are inclined to follow rules and obey authority. Ours
isn’t one of them; we loathe being told what to do, and we are quick to justify
our actions with a favorite American expression: “Hey, it’s a free country.”
This makes a particular form of behavior, which you can find in all
cultures, particularly common in ours. Psychologists call it reactance, one of
our cognitive biases that leads us to make bad decisions. It’s our tendency to
resist not just orders but also suggestions, because we dislike giving up our
freedom.
Reactance explains why Valentine’s retailers get disappointing results
when they post banners like “Don’t forget her flowers for Valentine’s Day.”
Millions of men who see that message react by going to buy candy instead—
unless the local candy retailer has a similar banner, “Don’t forget her candy
this Valentine’s Day.” In that case, they just take her out for an expensive
dinner.
Can you find more reactant people than Americans? Rather than obey
laws, we for decades have celebrated the men and women who break them.
We cheered John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, celebrating them in movies
and literature. We love a good criminal.
(To those who suggest Americans liked those three people because they
robbed banks, and bankers were often the scapegoats for the Great
Depression, it’s worth noting that Americans also celebrated Billy the Kid,
Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid—and those three men robbed anything
that jingled.)
Americans love what producers call heist movies—Reservoir Dogs, Heat,
Mission: Impossible, The Heist, The Italian Job, and, as perhaps the most
vivid reminder, the parade of Ocean’s films of the past decade: Ocean’s 11,
12, and now 13. ABC television, for years the most conservative purveyor of
television shows, created a hit in 1968 by portraying Robert Wagner as a
lovable thief, burglar, and pickpocket in the show It Takes a Thief, inspired by
the 1955 hit Cary Grant movie To Catch a Thief.
In 2002, Steven Spielberg’s casting left little doubt for whom we should
root in Catch Me If You Can. So we cheered the handsome Leonardo
DiCaprio playing the gifted con man Frank Abagnale as he eluded the cop
played by the dogged and doughty Tom Hanks.
 Everyone reading this must admit: We root for the thieves, not the cops.
The mafia titans portrayed in the Godfather series acted murderously, but as
Don Corleone said, “It’s just business.” American audiences laughed at
Corleone’s remark, then booed the two biggest villains of the saga: the brutal
Irish cop whom Al Pacino dispatches in The Godfather and the oily U.S.
senator in The Godfather: Part II. In each case, we rooted for the crooks and
against a character who enforced the laws and another character who made
them.
We’re outlaws at heart, are we not?

Getting Bonnies and Clydes to Buckle Up

For years, state governments, legitimately concerned about the losses of life
attributable to drivers not wearing seat belts, waged earnest campaigns to get
people to change. Nothing seemed to work. An extreme example of
Americans’ apparent indifference was a test performed on moviegoers.
Researchers put cameras in the parking lot of a theater to record how many
people attending the movie had their seat belts fastened when they arrived.
Once inside, the audience members were shown a film that graphically
portrayed what had happened to several auto-crash victims who had not
fastened their seat belts.
When the audience members left the theater and entered their cars, the
same cameras ran. Like everyone reading this, the researchers assumed that
many people who had arrived with their seat belts detached would attach
them when they left, having seen the gory consequences of not buckling up.
But they didn’t.
Not only did the nonbucklers stick to their apparent death wishes, but
several bucklers did, too; several who arrived wearing their seat belts left
without buckling up. “Try to trick me into fastening my belt—the hell with
them!” they appeared to say with their acts of defiance.
These failed efforts led several state departments of public safety to try a
new strategy. Instead of using the threat of death, they would remind drivers
that the law requires them to wear their seat belts. Thus was born a series of
campaigns with the simple theme “Buckle Up. It’s the Law.”
This didn’t work, either. We want to be free.
What to do to get us to buckle up? Because we all pay dearly for traffic
fatalities just in our added insurance premiums, the states could not afford to
give up, and from their persistence emerged what seems an identical
campaign, which the state of North Carolina initiated in 1993.
 Their new message was “Click it or ticket,” and at long last, it worked.
Ten years later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which
adopted the North Carolina plan, reported a greater than 10 percent increase
in seat belt use by adults ages eighteen to twenty-four.
Why did that work when everything else failed?
Some of that increase can be traced to the memorableness of the theme
itself. The two words “click it” give the theme three of the elements of
memorable messages: brevity, rhyme, and surprise; few of us had heard the
expression “click it” before.
But North Carolina’s history-making message also delivers another
implicit message that resonates in a nation of outlaws. It gives us a choice. We
can buckle up or not. If we don’t, we get a ticket. Our choice.
It’s a free country. The message worked spectacularly where so many
other messages failed. The others told us what do or tried to make us afraid.
The state of North Carolina, however, gave us what we love most: freedom, in
this case the freedom of choice.
And like Patrick Henry and 50 Cent, we responded.

The Solved Mystery of the $70 Watch

We are so obsessed with fairness that we will sacrifice for it in at least one
unusual way.
It requires little effort to go online today and download free music.
Sources such as Gnutella and Kazaa flourish, safe havens for music pirates.
None of us needs to pay for music today.
But we do. Despite the music industry’s desire to shut down these services
that would seem to threaten the industry’s survival, no one in that industry has
proved that these pirate sites have resulted in fewer CDs being sold, and there
is some evidence that these pirate sites have boosted interest in music and
performers by letting fans sample the work. We keep paying for music.
There’s probably something else at work here. We willingly pay 99 cents
for “Sex on Fire,” for example, because that price seems fair at least, perhaps
even a steal, and because to pay Kings of Leon nothing might feel to us, quite
reasonably, like theft. We are obsessed with fairness—for everyone. For
years, we heard “Do unto others.” In the case of music, at least, we willingly
do just that.
This brings us nicely to a puzzle that for years has puzzled some scholars.
Here it is. You go to Target to buy a Casio watch and find one you want.
It’s listed at $70. Just as you pull out your credit card, a friend spots you and
taps your shoulder. “They have that exact watch—the exact same—just three
blocks away. And it’s $40!”
Do you walk the three blocks to save the $30 on the Casio?
Now, part two: You go to Target to buy a Samsung DVD player, receiver,
and set of speakers. It’s $800. Just as you pull out your credit card, a friend
notices you and taps your shoulder. “They have that same system—the exact
same—just three blocks away. And it’s $770!”
Do you walk the three blocks to save the $30—the same amount you’d
save by walking three blocks for the watch?
To many people, these two questions seem similar, so our answer should
be, too. If we’d walk three blocks to save $30, we should do it, whether it’s
for a $40 watch or a $770 stereo. And perhaps we would.
But millions of our fellow Americans wouldn’t.
In these tests, great numbers of people who say they’d walk three blocks
for the cheaper watch say they wouldn’t walk three blocks for the cheaper
stereo.
To many people, this behavior sounds inconsistent and foolish. To many
students of American behavior, it seems utterly American.
Consider our origins. When the Pilgrims alit on Plymouth Rock, they were
fleeing a country where they felt unfree, particularly to practice the religion of
their choice. England was, then and now, a class system. If you were born
right, life was good; if not, life seemed unfair.
Once in America, we drafted a constitution, then a bill of rights that later
included the Equal Protection Clause, a provision unique to American law.
When the Senate passed the amendment, the intent was to prevent
discrimination against African Americans. But a nation obsessed with fairness
for everyone soon saw the clause extended, among other things, to white
applicants to law schools and, at one famous extreme, to small-town liquor-
store owners in New Jersey who are treated differently than other New Jersey
liquor-store owners.
We say life is unfair but then rebel against it; we think unfairness should
be illegal. Often, our courts agree.
But what does this have to do with $30? To answer that, consider what
goes through the heads of the shoppers in each of these hypotheticals.
If a watch costs $70 in Target and $40 three blocks away, we conceive of
two possible explanations: The store just blocks away is offering an incredible
deal, or Target is gouging us. It’s charging 75 percent more for that watch.
We don’t apply this same thinking to the Samsung stereo. We decide that
$800 is a fair price, just a couple percentage points higher than the other
store’s price. That marginally higher price may reflect Target’s added
overhead costs of more lighting, wider aisles, and sixteen checkout lanes and
clerks. It’s a fair price.
Something else works on our minds here: our sense of self. We’d feel
foolish to avoid saving 75 percent on a single item; we’d be wasting money
and cheating ourselves and our families not to take it. On top of that, a 75-
percent savings represents treasure in the game of treasure hunt; we have to
win that game.
But by contrast, is it imprudent for us to resist the 3.7-percent savings on
the stereo? Is 3.7 percent off a treasure? Over the course of a year, if we spent
$5,000 on discretionary purchases like the stereo, a 3.7-percent savings would
equal $185—for which we’d have to walk several miles. If we spent $5,000 in
discretionary purchases like the watch, however, over a year we’d save
$3,750—2,000 percent more.
We have to take the watch deal—just like we have to give Kings of Leon a
dollar for that song.

Our Wish to Stand Apart

When Burger King, which opened in 1954, begat McDonald’s in 1955, we

might have assumed there was little room left in the American drive-up
burger business. But a company started even before them, in 1948, maintains
a fanatical following in the West, partly by making each of its patrons feel
like part of a special club.
The restaurants, In-N-Out Burger, claim distinction with their famous
secret menu. Naturally, it’s not printed but passed on by word of mouth from
patron to devoted patron: the Flying Dutchman, the X times Y, the Fries
American Style, for example. The founders of this quirky chain—the cups
and burger wrappers are inscribed with citations to Bible passages—never
discussed creating a secret menu. Their simple idea was to list on the menu
only three burgers—the Double-Double, Hamburger, and Cheeseburger—but
allow guests to have their burgers prepared any way they wished. It was the
guests who coined the “secret menu” term, for the obvious reason that it made
those who knew the details of it feel special.
Or perhaps we should say fanatical. When a new In-N-Out opened in
Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2002, local news helicopters hovered over the parking
lot and captured a remarkable image: the lines. At one point, the wait for food
was four hours.

Tattoos, Nightsters, and Design-Us-Ourselves

Starting after the Second World War, tattoos were regarded as the signal of a
former Navy man who one night had been mightily overserved in a bar next
to a tattoo parlor. Soon thereafter, tattoos also became identified with the
Hells Angels and other rebel gangs, and later with gangstas and NBA
basketball players, who without them would all be uniformly attired, literally;
their tattoos alone set them apart.
Today, you see tattoos everywhere. (This writer’s four-leaf clover, with his
children’s initials, HWCC, is on the inside of his left bicep, nearest his heart.)
Thirty-six percent of Americans between ages eighteen and twenty-nine—
more than one in three—wears at least one. A typical Barnes & Noble
displays more tattoo publications (eleven) than parenting magazines. Two
networks currently feature tattoo programs: A&E’s Inked and The Learning
Channel’s Miami Ink and LA Ink.
Tattoos are us.
What does a tattoo say? A tattoo is a logo, except that the logo we wear—
Polos or Abercrombies—tells us what group we belong to and perhaps signals
our disposable income.
A tattoo is a logo for a person. It brands us unlike any other person, and
yet, being relatively common, also conveys that we are a part, too, of the huge
community of fellow wearers. Perhaps more important, it tells the wearer
something every day, too: In this incredibly crowded world, it assures the
wearer, “You are special.”
Today, we can set ourselves apart by designing what we own.

At NikeiD, a vivid example of one shrewd marketer’s recognition of

Apart, we can click on a basic Nike shoe style and then make it our own.
Take, for one entertaining example, the $102 Nike Zoom T-5 iD Boot. (For
added entertainment, enter “harryb” in the search box, check “Catsup, meet
mustard,” then redesign that red and yellow iD Boot so it looks much better to
your eye—and sets you apart.)
We can choose either a flat-bottomed sole or a rubber-studded sole for
more traction; we can choose five colors for the outside base, five for the
inside base, and five others for the inside eye stay; we can choose three colors
for the tip, nine for the collar around the ankle, and nine others for the heel.
When we’re done, we can add words, say, our name, in any of eleven colors,
one word on the tongue, and a different one at the top of each of the arches.
Doing the math, we learn we can make 6,743,250 versions of the iD Boot
even before we inscribe it with any words we choose. Nike gets it: We want to
set ourselves apart.
 Harley-Davidson understands our desire to feel apart, too. For years, a
motorcycle was a motorcycle, to which you could later add accessories, such
as leather saddlebags.
But the people at Harley soon realized that most Harley owners wanted
unique motorcycles, and the way to provide them was not with options but
accessories: not just one or two saddlebags but perhaps a hundred, and not
just saddlebags but different bars and grips, foot pegs and floorboards,
exhausts, seats, sissy bars, luggage racks, windshields, body parts, wheels and
tires.
Buy a Harley, then design the Harley: Set yourself apart.
In 2007, Harley-Davidson introduced a new version of its Nightster. Fans
immediately sensed something different about it, but few of them could figure
it out. What was it?
The license plate was hung to the left of the rear fender, not in the center.
Why? “I wanted people to wonder if it was legal,” says designer Rich
Christoph. He wanted Nightster drivers to have that feeling of pushing the
limits, of Easy Riding with Fonda and Hopper to Mardi Gras, or of being
Brando in The Wild One. Rich Christoph knows we rooted for Bonnie and
Clyde. And that we want to stand apart.

Public and private companies weren’t the first marketers to recognize that
vehicle owners could use license plates to set themselves apart. Almost
seventy years ago, the state of Pennsylvania introduced America’s first vanity
plates, on which drivers could inscribe whatever inoffensive combination of
seven letters and numbers they wished.
Today we see vanity plates everywhere, sometimes an unusual one that
merely repeats what we already know: the brand of the car. A few others
might be considered unsafe, however, because our spasms of laughter might
cause us to veer off the road. These include the white Ford Bronco plate that
reads “Not OJ,” the Hummer with the plate “1 MPG,” and the Acura NSX—a
car that can reach 165 miles per hour—with the plate “NVR L8.”
And there’s the one that stops traffic daily. Imagine yourself in downtown
Lexington, Kentucky, pulling up behind a black hearse, looking down to its
license plate, and reading this: “U R NXT.”

The Rise and Fall of Krispy Kreme

On June 10, 2002, The New York Times reported that Krispy Kreme
doughnuts had earned “a fan following to make any corporate branding agent
proud.” That following and the brand looked so strong that a year later, on
April 11, 2003, the stock ended the day trading for almost $489 a share. A
person who had bought Krispy Kreme stock exactly three years earlier had
watched it soar almost 480 percent.
Krispy Kreme was rocketing.
But let’s say you decided on that same day, April 11, 2003, that Krispy
Kreme was rocketing, that its fans were so loyal and its brand so compelling
that you had to buy the stock. What if on that rollicking day you had bought
$10,000 in Krispy Kreme stock?
Be glad you didn’t.
Today as this is being written, your $10,000 investment in Krispy Kreme
stock would be worth $620. Six hundred and twenty dollars.
We might assume Krispy Kreme merely fell with the market. That’s not
the explanation. The Dow Jones Industrial Average since the day you made
your hypothetical $10,000 investment has risen 8 percent.
What happened here? Any steep fall takes several pushes. Most analysts
agree the company got too ambitious, perhaps even greedy, as CFO magazine
suggested in 2005. They agree that the company managed its franchisees
poorly, as one might expect from a company with no experience in
franchising.
We may also speculate that Americans had become more health and
calorie conscious, and that low-carb diets like the Atkins Diet helped kill
Krispy Kreme. But that cannot be the explanation, even though Krispy Kreme
executives offered that excuse when the nosedive began. The Atkins Diet was
introduced thirty years earlier, and in the year Krispy Kreme’s stock started
free-falling, Dr. Atkins died, which set off rumors that his low-carb diet had
contributed to his death.
So where should we look for the fall of these yeast-raised doughnuts?
Let’s start with that New York Times article and that “fan following.”
Krispy Kreme’s executives made a critical error. They assumed that what
people loved about Krispy Kreme was its “sweet and impossibly fluffy”
doughnuts, as the company proudly describes them. There was much more to
its appeal.
Consider this common street scene in 2003, near Central Park in New
York City.

Man spots two twentysomethings munching doughnuts ecstatically.

The girl is holding a white, red, and green Krispy Kreme bag.
 “Hey, sorry, but where’d you get those Krispy Kremes?”
“Over near Penn Station, around Thirty-Second.”
“Hey, are they as delicious as everybody says?”
“Oh man, yes, it was so worth the walk! Head down there!”
In the man’s position, you would have done what he did: Hike twenty-five
blocks, stand in line, and buy six doughnuts that were gone by the next
morning.
That was 2003. Then Krispy Kreme decided to make doughnut lovers’
lives easier by distributing their treats everywhere. Soon, we could find
Krispy Kremes at Target and at convenience stores like SuperAmerica. At
long last, we could get Krispy Kremes in the same places we could score a
99-cent shrink-wrapped ham-and-cheese sandwich!
Krispy Kreme’s appeal when it was small and hard to find was just that:
the doughnuts were hard to get, which made them a cult item. A search for
Krispy Kremes was a treasure hunt, like finding the super deals at Costco and
knowing where to find them was like knowing the secret menu at In-N-Out
Burger.
We value things that are hard to find; they strike us as special and seem
more valuable. As Tom Vanderbilt points out in Traffic, we leave great
parking spots slowly for that reason; the spot was hard to find, so we are
slower to give it up. We coveted James Bond’s girls for the same reason; they
always played hard to get.
And Krispy Kreme’s game had been hard to get.
The company thought we loved Krispy Kreme doughnuts, but we didn’t.
We loved the idea of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. We weren’t buying a snack;
we were buying a find, a cult item, a treasure hunt, the pleasure of appearing
to be in-the-know. Hard-to-get Krispy Kremes tasted great; Krispy Kremes
from a store where we could get shrink-wrapped ham-and-cheese sandwiches
represented another idea entirely.
And we didn’t buy that idea.

The Age of Me: Talking to Us

Seeing our self-absorption has led American marketers to an obvious tactic

right out of Brian Epstein’s playbook: Enough about our products! Let’s talk
about you.
Try this: Visit Nike.com. Scan down to the first row of images. At this
writing, they are for NikeStore, and what words immediately follow that?
“Gear Up for Your Sport.” Scan over to the third item in the top row, and you
see “Nike+.” And what appears next in that box? “Run for Your Sport.”
Nike captured its essence by not talking about itself at all, nor even its
products. Instead, it merely talked to us and our desires. It encouraged us to
“Just do it.” It was talking to each of us.
Very soon, the You wave turned into a tsunami.
In August 2003, several Californians captured the You spirit with a social
networking site aptly called MySpace. By 2006 it had become the world’s
most popular networking site. In February 2005, three former employees of
PayPal launched a site to host videos online: YouTube.
Always alert to trends, the editors of Time magazine were then considering
naming their Person of the Year. Months later, the magazine, which in past
years had given that honor three times to Franklin D. Roosevelt and twice to
Winston Churchill, made a fitting choice for the Me Century.
They named each of us the 2006 Person of the Year. They chose “You.”
As with most things, if some is good, lots is better. Now everyone talks
just to us, as if we’re the only people in the room. It’s typified in the best-
selling success of You: The Owner’s Manual, a book just about each of us.
The winter of the year that You first appeared, fans of then Green Bay Packer
quarterback Brett Favre received a treat when ABC’s Monday Night Football
aired a short tribute film. It concluded with his wife’s memorable words: “My
Brett. Our Favre.”
Brett Favre was ours, too.
In 2009, motorists in Minnesota were treated to the Me Century’s most
extreme manifestation, a billboard fourteen steps east of the entrance to the
Minikahda Club. It captured the Me Century perfectly, showing a woman
apparently uttering the words: MY CANCER. MY WORKOUTS. MY FAIRVIEW.
In the first weeks of February of the very next year, Minnesotans driving
west on that road experienced profound déjà vu when they sensed that the
billboard had been replaced, as they read this new one: MY POP CULTURE. MY
MUSIC. MY RADIO STATION. MY TALK 107.1.
Today, what do we have? We have My FootJoys, My Excite, My Flickr,
My T-Mobile, My Yahoo!, My Coke Rewards, My Starbucks Idea, My MSN,
MyTV (anticipated by MTV’s perceptive slogan, “I Want My MTV”). We
have My after My after My. Everyone is talking just to us and making
everything just for each of us alone.

The wonderfully popular American writer Malcolm Gladwell understands

our self-preoccupation, too. Check out these excerpts from his fine book
Outliers and see what you see.
 “Over the course of the chapters ahead, I’m going to introduce you
to one kind of outlier….”
“What is the question we always ask about the successful?”
“Look back at the Medicine Hat roster. Do you see it now?”

As Gladwell himself would now write: What did you just notice?
He is writing to each of us, even asking us questions not just like a good
writer but like something we treasure far more: a good listener. (The wit Fran
Lebowitz once captured our preoccupation with talking by noting, “The
opposite of talking isn’t listening. It’s waiting.”)
Gladwell talks to us and seems to listen to us. He knows this is the Me
Century, when everyone who passes by a television camera waves in the hope
of being noticed. Gladwell crafts his books with that knowledge, and we buy
them by the millions.
We want everything—our golf shoes, our running shoes, our coffee shops,
our TV shows—to be about us. The best marketers, including many of our
most popular authors, make sure that it is.
 II. WE: THE GREAT TOGETHERISTS

American Gothic, Chris Isaak, and Cast Away

One sunny afternoon in 1930, a painter driving through Eldon, Iowa, spotted
a house that appealed to him. He pictured who might live in the house and,
after imagining them, sought out two models to portray them.
He knew the perfect woman. His thirty-year-old sister, Nan, looked just
like the woman the painter had imagined. To pose as her husband, the painter
made the unusual choice of a man more than twice Nan’s age: Byron
McKeeby, a sixty-three-year-old from Cedar Rapids who for years had been
the painter’s dentist.
The painting that resulted, showing a somber, bald farmer holding a
pitchfork while the farmer’s wife stares vacantly to her left, became Grant
Wood’s iconic American painting American Gothic.
Almost sixty years before, James Whistler had painted what became our
country’s first iconic painting. It portrays a white-haired mother staring
grimly to our left as we view it, a vision so cold and spare that its original
title, Study in Black and White, seems apt. We know this classic painting well,
however, by its other title: Whistler’s Mother.
Eighteen years after American Gothic was created, Andrew Wyeth painted
what became our country’s third iconic work. It depicts a woman lying in a
vast field of wispy golden grass, staring toward a weathered farmhouse in the
distant background. Her slumped body suggests that she may be too weak to
walk to the farmhouse and whatever comfort it might offer. This painting,
Christina’s World, is the second-most reproduced American painting of all
time and helped make Wyeth among our richest painters. In 2006, another
austere Wyeth painting, this of the interior of a farmhouse living room,
fetched $4.4 million at an auction.
Is it the artistry that makes these three paintings iconic? It doesn’t appear
that way. In a recent New York Times poll of the twentieth century’s greatest
artists, two hundred men and women, including twenty-five Americans,
earned votes, but neither Wood nor Wyeth was among them.
 So if it’s not the artistry of these three works, why have we embraced them
as our icons? Look long at the three—of Christina, of the couple in American
Gothic, and of Whistler’s mother—and you will feel it: These four people
look utterly alone.
The bald farmer stands by his wife but looks miles away emotionally; she
cannot look at the person painting her. Christina sits far from the farmhouse,
seemingly unable to rise to walk to the house, and it appears the house would
offer her no comfort once she got there: It looks deserted. Whistler’s mother
looks frozen in her chair, deserted and solemn.
What might these paintings say about us? Researchers of phobias have
learned that Americans do not list snakes, spiders, or the dark as their fears.
They say one thing scares us most: the thought of being alone.

In the weeks following Michael Jackson’s death in June 2009, few

commentators mentioned, and few fans remembered, that Jackson’s most
phenomenal success was a song that expressed his view: We are all in this
together.
“We Are the World,” which Jackson cowrote with Quincy Jones to raise
money for African famine relief, was the fastest-selling pop single in
American history, the country’s first multiplatinum single, and a winner of
three Grammy Awards. (It’s possible that so many forget the song because so
few singers liked it. At one point in rehearsals, Cyndi Lauper leaned forward
and whispered to Bruce Springsteen, “It sounds like a Pepsi commercial.” The
Boss whispered back, “I can’t disagree.”)
We hear it in our music: We want to be a part and dread being alone.
In 2004, the editors of Rolling Stone polled Slash, k.d. lang, members of
the Ramones and No Doubt, and more than one hundred other insiders for
their year-end issue on the five hundred greatest songs of all time. The voters’
top choice was Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” about a character called
Miss Lonely and with a title derived from the Hank Williams verse. “I’m a
rolling stone, I’m lost and alone”:

How does it feel

To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown?

Rolling Stone’s voters had dozens of classic lonely songs to choose from:
Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”; Roy Orbison’s “Only the
Lonely”; Jackie Wilson’s “Lonely Teardrops”; Elvis Presley’s “Are You
Lonesome Tonight?”; the Beatles’ “Help!” (the number-one song when
Dylan’s song reached its peak at number two) and “all the lonely people” in
“Eleanor Rigby”; Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” on “Lonesome Street,”
covered later by Lynyrd Skynyrd and Guns N’ Roses; and the Righteous
Brothers’ “Unchained Melody,” covered by U2 and LeAnn Rimes.
The singer Chris Isaak actually made a career obsessing on this subject:
“Seven Lonely Nights,” “Only the Lonely,” “Lonely with a Broken Heart,”
and “The Lonely Ones,” plus “The Blue Hotel” and “Nothing to Say.”
Our three iconic paintings and numerous popular songs seem to express
our greatest dread and strongest need: We dread loneliness and want to be a
part.

We see this in our movies, too. In 2007’s Lars and the Real Girl, Lars
lives in a garage and emerges from his loneliness only for work and the rare
nights when his brother succeeds in persuading Lars to come for dinner.
On one of those days, Lars accepts the invitation and adds that he will be
bringing a friend. His brother looks thrilled.
That night, Lars appears and introduces the friend, Bianca. She is confined
to a wheelchair but has a more conspicuous handicap: She’s a plastic sex doll.
The two fall in love, and others come to love the couple, too. This story
sounds silly at best, revolting at worst, and impossible to turn into a movie
that people could tolerate, much less enjoy. But among other enthusiastic
critics, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called it “the sweetest, most
innocent, most completely enjoyable movie around,” as it traces Lars’s escape
from loneliness.
The romance of Lars and Bianca resembles another memorable screen
friendship. In Cast Away, a FedEx plane crashes and strands a Wilson
volleyball and a character played by Tom Hanks on an island. The two
become friends; Hanks calls him Wilson.
In their weeks together, Hanks’s affection for Wilson deepens so much that
at a climactic point, he risks his life swimming through rough surf to rescue
his round friend. Again, what happened to the audiences? They were touched.
We dread being alone; we want to be a part.
We started out that way, it appears. Check briefly this observation by one
of America’s best-known early authors, James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote
Leatherstocking Tales:

In England a man dines by himself in a room filled with other

 hermits, he eats at his leisure, drinks his wine in silence, reads the
paper by the hour; the American is compelled to submit to a
common rule; he eats when others eat, sleeps when others sleep,
and he is lucky, indeed, if he can read a paper in a tavern without
having a stranger looking over each shoulder.

We Are the World

Less than 59 minutes after midnight on Christmas 2004, the longest-lasting

and second-largest earthquake ever recorded occurred off the west coast of
Sumatra, Indonesia. Its most memorable and devastating effect was to
produce a series of tsunamis, some with waves that reached 100 feet high.
When these waves touched land, they shredded it. Nearly 230,000 people in
fourteen countries died as a result.
The impact was felt in America; the entire planet actually shook. And in
the days and months that followed, we watched for hours on television,
grieved the losses, sent money, and even flew to countries affected to help
them rebuild.
The actor George Clooney immediately went to work, too. Inspired by the
many aid events, beginning with the famous 1985 Live Aid concert that raised
$284 million for famine relief in Ethiopia, Clooney in just two weeks
arranged Tsunami Aid: A Concert of Hope, which aired on NBC and its
affiliated networks and raised $5 million for the relief effort. Americans gave
an estimated $13 million more, and the U.S. government gave countries in the
region over $350 million, plus military and logistical help with rebuilding.
When outsiders criticize Americans, they regularly note that we seem self-
centered, which we are. But few contend we are selfish, and with good
reason; we are not. Every international need organization knows that to
market its cause—cleft palates, tsunamis in Indonesia, or needy Romanian
orphans, to name three—they need to go to America first.
One could argue that there was little need to call on many Americans after
the tsunami, because many of us would not answer; we already had booked
our tickets to Indonesia.
We are compassionate, and it ties strongly to this theme: our striving for
community and our need of others. You see this in the words “compassion”
and “community.” They share the root com, which comes from the Latin word
for “together.” When you think about the word “passion,” you may
immediately think of a favorite image of romantic passion, but surprise:
“passion” comes from the Latin pati and means “to suffer.” “Compassion”
literally means “suffering with.” And as exemplified by our Marshall Plan to
restore Europe after World War II and our Peace Corps to restore much of the
world during the Kennedy administration, no one “suffers with” others like
Americans.
This helps explain the effectiveness of cause-based marketing in America,
reflected in the decades-long cause advertising of Kenneth Cole, the Red
promotion by the Gap and others in the mid-2000s, the “share good fortune”
cause promoted by Tazo on all its tea packages, and the bandwagon that is the
green movement today.
At its root, might our wanting to be a part be the force at work? To take
part in a cause is to be a part of something bigger, and fortunately for
unfortunate people here and everywhere else in the world, no people suffer
with others as passionately as we do.

Tall, Dark, and Handsome? The Lesson of American Actors

Scan this list of the ten highest-earning actors of 2008. Then ask, “What do
these men have in common?”

1. Harrison Ford
2. Adam Sandler
3. Will Smith
4. Eddie Murphy
5. Nicholas Cage
6. Tom Hanks
7. Tom Cruise
8. Jim Carrey
9. Brad Pitt
10. George Clooney

To make the list comprise all the leading actors of our decade, let’s add the
2008 Academy Award winner for best actor, Sean Penn; plus Matt Damon,
Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and America’s two hottest actors,
Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp.
Now, let’s step back briefly.
Whenever we hear the expression “leading man,” we probably think of
that classic description: “tall, dark, and handsome.”
But who among those actors fits that description? Sandler, Murphy, and
Carrey perform in comedies and not as standard dramatic leading men.
Harrison Ford comes closest to TD&H, but he’s not dark. While undeniably
dark and handsome, Clooney stands barely 5 feet 10 inches, eye level with
Depp and Richard Gere—and with Sandler and Murphy.
The only actor on our seventeen-man list over 6 feet tall is Cage, who few
would call dark or handsome, even during the years when he sported more
hair. Pitt barely hits 6 feet, above average but only arguably tall—and
definitely not dark.
America’s leading men are not tall. They’re short. DeNiro stands 5 feet 9
inches, Pacino 5 feet 8 inches, and the great American actor of his generation,
Marlon Brando, topped out at 5 feet 9 inches. Yet that’s a full inch taller than
Mel Gibson and two inches taller than the 5-feet-7-inch Sylvester Stallone.
Michael Douglas, Paul Newman, James Dean? 5 feet 9 inches. Damon?
An eyebrow taller. Penn? 5 feet 8 inches. The undeniably dark and handsome
Tom Cruise? He’s 5 feet 8 inches, too.
What might account for this “fairly short, often dark, mostly handsome”
trend? Does it suggest that we prefer our movie stars to be like us and that we
don’t want to be looked down on, literally or figuratively?
Consider how television shows have been cast. The classic popular quiz
shows hosts Bill Cullen, Garry Moore, and Allen Ludden worked constantly.
Moore and Cullen sported goofy crew cuts, Ludden and Cullen wore thick
glasses, and Moore wore bow ties at a time when the cooler guys didn’t.
Move on to John Goodman, Jerry Seinfeld and Kramer and George, Larry
David, Drew Carey, and on and on. The classic TV show of our decade may
be Survivor, now in its twenty-second season, each hosted by the dark and
undeniably handsome Jeff Probst—all 5 feet 9 inches of him. He’s the same
height as Howie Mandel, host of the once-popular quiz show Deal or No
Deal, and an inch taller than Alex Trebek of the classic quiz show Jeopardy!
now in its forty-seventh year.
What television star has been on camera more than any other? At 16,400
hours and counting—the Guinness Book of World Records did the counting—
it’s Regis Philbin, host of Live with Regis and Kelly and former host of the hit
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, who has the record. He’s 5 feet 7 inches.
Look again at the Apple computer ads and the likable but not tall, dark, or
handsome chill kid played by Justin Long.
The often-repeated old compliment “You look like a movie star” seems
bizarre today. If you want to be in movies, the person you really should look
like is the friendly Joe next door. Just ask superstar actor next door Tom
Hanks, who admits to being the nerd of his Oakland, California, high school
class.
Contrast our popular actors with England’s: Laurence Olivier, John
Gielgud, and Alec Guinness. Each projected a quality that doesn’t work on
American audiences, who believe all of us are equal. These Brits oozed self-
regard—conceit, really. Gielgud was so skilled at condescension that director
Steve Gordon cast him as Dudley Moore’s snooty butler in Arthur, and
Guinness projected the needed air of superiority required for the role of Obi-
Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. The very un-American air of these Brits is
suggested by their titles: Each is a sir, a title bestowed by the British Crown.
Could the contrast between us and the English be greater? British actors
belong to royalty; our actors belong to us. They make us feel a part of them.
Americans love celebrity gossip. Gossip brings hot shots down to our
level, even tosses them below it. We hear that these mortals abuse drugs
(Robert Downey, Jr.), stalk other stars (Sean Young), punch out photographers
(Sean Penn), punch out everyone (model Naomi Campbell), or do all of this
(Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan). We read that they cheat on lovers and
spouses with pathological frequency. The famous act just like us, only worse.
America’s agents work overtime bringing their clients down to us. That’s
almost certainly why Pitt dresses down, affecting goofy porkpie hats and a
wardrobe that suggests his total unawareness of the merits of color draping.
Cage and Kevin Spacey seem to lose more hair with every film. Jack
Nicholson goes bald and fat and does nothing to hide it.
Our stars are just like us.
Which raises the question: Whatever happened to toupees? Sean Connery
sported one for years, faded from view, then resurrected his post–James Bond
career after he ditched his hairpiece. You could argue he did this for a simple
reason: he had to. At 6 feet 2 inches, Connery was the last truly tall, dark, and
handsome popular actor of the last thirty years. He had to knock himself
down a few notches, down here with us. So he did.
Yes, we like tall, dark, and handsome presidents. But our presidents are,
among other things, the commanders in chief of our armed forces. So we want
people who fit that description: commanding. That means big, forceful,
someone who could stare down Nikita Khrushchev, Saddam Hussein, or
Osama bin Laden. That’s why Michael Dukakis’s operatives stuck him in a
tank for a famous photo-op and George Bush’s showed him off in fighter-pilot
garb for yet another one. We want our actors to make us feel good; we want
our presidents to make us feel safe.
“I’m one of you,” our actors assure us. “I may look handsome, but I’m
short. I am not Will Ferrell but a guy who removes his shirt to show off my
40-inch paunch hanging over badly fitting shorts.” Ferrell and Vince Vaughn
win huge audiences by making fun of themselves, a solution to their acting
handicaps: Ferrell is 6 feet 3 inches, and Vaughn is 6 feet 5 inches. If they
didn’t put themselves down, we’d feel dwarfed by them. Hence the
expression “put oneself down,” back here with us.
“Don’t take us seriously,” our tallest actors tell us. “We may be bigger, but
we’re just like you—and all those not-tall actors you love so much.”
We’re one of you.

The American Way: Trust None of Us But All of Us

A visitor to America today could not be here long without recognizing an

American obsession: best-seller lists.
Every week, USA Today and other publications alert Americans to which
movies attracted the most viewers, all the way down to movie number ten.
Each week, it lists not just the ten best-selling books but the top one hundred.
Meanwhile, newspapers each week inform us of the most popular television
shows, CDs, country music songs. Amazon provides constantly updated lists
of its best-selling books, right down to number 3,500,000.
But of course we care about this. We badly want to know what everyone
else is doing and to feel a part of it.
Perhaps we are wise to think this way, to watch what others are doing and
thinking. As James Surowiecki pointed out in his 2003 book The Wisdom of
Crowds, the masses often act intelligently.
When contestants on the television program Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire asked for help from the “smartest person” they knew, those smart
people provided the right answer almost 65 percent of the time. That was a
strong performance, but far less impressive than the people in the audience;
they picked the right answer 91 percent of the time; the consensus of the
audience proved almost 40-percent smarter than the smartest person each
contestant knew.
Standing by itself, the Millionaire example doesn’t prove Surowiecki’s
theory, well expressed in his book’s subtitle, Why the Many Are Smarter Than
the Few. But he assembles several other examples to suggest how often
experts are wrong—we will see many examples in the pages ahead—and
crowds are right.
Which raises the possibility: Do we follow the crowd because we have
learned that crowds know something? Is there simply something about that
number-one movie, book, or television show that truly recommends it?
We trust the common view; no, we are obsessed with it. USA Today
constantly publicizes its surveys, under headlines like “We Love Country
Music” and “We’re Watching More Television.” We poll and poll and poll.
One of our country’s most popular sets of business books, Marcus
Buckingham’s, claims to be the product of Gallup polls of more than 1.7
million people. Implicitly, this assures us that his books offer the “wisdom of
crowds.”
We want to know what people are reading and watching because we want
to participate in the dialogue about those shows and books. Just as significant,
we do not want to feel left out of those conversations. We want to be a part.
Great marketers tap into this tendency, too. Consider Roger Horchow, who
for years has engineered one of the world’s most successful catalog
businesses, the Horchow Catalog. A reader browsing his catalog would soon
be attracted to a teak desk set and a Danish brass kitchen clock. Very often,
the reason for her interest is that she’s discovered that other people like those
two items, too. How does she know? Roger told her. He used his three magic
words, which appear throughout his catalog: “Our most popular.”
“This is what others are buying,” Horchow tells a reader with those three
words, and the reader reacts like Americans so often do: “I’d better buy it,
too.”

Following the Crowds over the Cliffs to the Malls: 2008–2010

Beginning just after Thanksgiving Day in 1995, when it first surpassed the
5,000 mark, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which tracks the stock
performance of thirty blue-chip companies, more than doubled in just over
three years. In March 1999, it reached 11,000. By 2000, the market’s
performance had been gasp-inducing: a 315-percent increase in just ten years,
almost triple its average increase.
After some notable drops, including a 1,360-point drop in the week
following September 11, stocks broke the 11,000 level again on January 9,
2006, then started rising almost vertically. In less than seven months, the Dow
hit 14,164.
Everyone recognized this was extraordinary, but too few people
recognized it could not last. American stocks had increased an average of just
over 10 percent per year for the previous one hundred years. A 125-percent
increase in a decade would fit that norm; this 315-percent burst did not.
Each day, CNN and others offered reasons for the surge: strong
performance from the tech sector, continued good news on inflation, and
investor confidence in Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. They never
offered another explanation, which seems far more plausible now: People
were buying stocks because people were buying stocks.
 Jon and Dawn bought stocks because Kim and Cliff and Kevin and Julie
and everyone else seemed to be buying stocks, and they wanted to be a part.
Consider what Jon and Dawn had been enduring. For weeks, they’d indulged
several friends who raved about their brokers and their own investing
acumen, which had helped steer their portfolio up 40 percent. Like most of us,
Jon and Dawn can endure one of these conversations, but few among us can
endure three—and at various times between 1996 and 2001, most investors
had.
America’s financial advisors constantly heard this. “My friend David has
made a real killing in Pfizer,” Jon would tell them. “The Browns made so
much last year that Eva quit her job,” Dawn would chime in. And on and on.
Everyone was looking at everyone.
This was their problem. David, Eva, and everyone else seemed to be
making huge sums of money. Jon and Dawn didn’t want to get further ahead;
they simply did not want to fall behind. They did not want to lose their place.
When the market and economy reversed, they still showed the passion;
they just moved to another venue. In the middle of June 2009 and a hideous
recession, we could head for the nearest mall and detect a pleasant feeling.
We knew we would get a great parking spot, right near the entrance, because
surely people weren’t shopping.
We drove in. Not an empty slot. We decided it was an odd day, perhaps a
huge sale.
But it wasn’t. Mall traffic throughout the summer of 2009 was virtually
unchanged from traffic levels of the peak years.
We really were still shopping.
If we weren’t at the mall, we were communing with crowds at another
venue. Despite the bleak economy in 2009, four teams—Michigan, Penn
State, Tennessee, and Texas—once again attracted more than 100,000 fans to
each of its home games, and the average Division I team attracted over
42,000.
We can see the communal nature of these sports when we watch how they
are televised. Watch when one team makes a big play; the camera almost
instantly goes to the crowd to watch its joyous reaction, en masse. The camera
watches the game; but like us, it watches the crowd to see if it’s cheering,
shopping, or buying stock.
We want to be a part.

The Hog’s Wonderful Tale: CAAS

In 1973, Harley-Davidson claimed near-monopoly status in the United States,
a phenomenal 77.5 percent of the motorcycle market. The brand was iconic
and was made even more so by the classic 1969 movie Easy Rider, which
launched the celebrated careers of Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper,
showcasing Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Bill (Hopper) on two Harley choppers,
going from Los Angeles to Mardi Gras in search of America.
But in 1973, from its stronghold in Milwaukee, Harley came under attack
from Japan: from Yamaha, Honda, Suzuki, and the other manufacturers of
much lighter, hyperpowered motorcycles. Owners of aptly named Hogs—a
Harley weighed far more than a comparable Yamaha—stayed famously true
to their enormous bikes, but young American men gravitated to these
Japanese crotch rockets, partly because they were bikes young men could
afford.
The lower-cost Japanese bikes dramatically altered the market by
dramatically expanding it. As a result, Harley started bleeding. Ten years
later, its market share had plummeted to just one bike in four on America’s
roads. Almost half of the bikes on the road, an amazing 44 percent, were
Hondas.
Honda did it, some might argue, through sheer bitchiness manifested in
shrewd marketing. Honda decided to make Harley look bad, and it had plenty
of ammunition, thanks to a series of unfortunate events.
Early in 1969, seeing the enormous success of the famous Woodstock
concert, the group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young decided they wanted to
create a West Coast version to celebrate the end of the year. They quickly
signed two of the era’s most famous rock groups: Santana and Jefferson
Airplane. They then guaranteed a massive crowd. They signed the Rolling
Stones.
But the Rolling Stones could not appear in the proposed setting without
first enlisting heavy security. In what seemed a fortunate coincidence, they
learned that the concert site was near the birthplace of a perfect security
organization: the Hells Angels. The Stones’ leader, Mick Jagger, had earlier
hired some London-based Angels to provide security for a concert in London
and was happy with their performance.
But the English Angels, he would later learn, were a more angelic band
than the Americans he approached.
A small group of motorcycle-riding outlaws that officially started in 1948
near Oakland, California, the Angels had a violent image in America that
dated to the previous summer and a famous event: the Fourth of July riot in
Hollister, California. The riot immediately became known for the headline it
inspired in the San Francisco Chronicle the following morning: “70
Motorcyclists Take Over Town.”
Always eager for sensational stories that photographed well, Life
magazine photographers got to the scene, gathered dozens of beer bottles, and
asked one of the riders still in Hollister to pose on his motorcycle in the midst
of bottles while holding another bottle to his mouth. To take full advantage of
readers’ interest, Life’s story ran over 1,500 words.
That vivid photo and lengthy coverage branded in Americans’ minds the
image of motorcyclists as deviant, drunken outlaws. Less than four years
later, Harper’s ran a story called “Cyclists Raid” based on the Life story.
Reading the story and immediately seeing its cinematic potential, Harper’s
subscriber and movie director Stanley Kramer set into motion the steps that
two years later produced the classic movie The Wild One, starring Marlon
Brando.
Kramer’s movie started a cult of motorcycle gang films. Life’s editors
years later admitted they had created the image of outlaw motorcyclists that
motorcyclists had been trying to live down ever since. And the group most
associated with that outlaw image was the Hells Angels.
Mick Jagger, however, did not subscribe to Life or Harper’s. He knew
nothing about Hollister; when the riot occurred, he was three weeks shy of
five years old and living in London. Jagger simply assumed—once again, a
triumph of assuming over thinking—that America’s Angels were like the
English Angels he’d liked and trusted. They weren’t. The British Angels
looked remarkably like Jagger: thin, long-haired, often androgynous, and
nonviolent.
So a deal was struck to have the Angels provide security: They’d do it for
$500 worth of beer.
Everything now seemed in place to make Altamont the next Woodstock, a
festival salute to peace, love, and rock and roll.
But from the beginning, it wasn’t. The day, December 6, 1969, started
ominously. Two people died after being struck by a hit-and-run driver, and a
third person drowned in a puddle of water, which caused some audience
members to challenge the fitness of the Angels as guards.
In midafternoon, a helicopter hovered dramatically over the Altamont
Speedway before fluttering down. The Stones broke out the helicopter’s door
and rushed to the stage. By that point, everyone could feel the tension
between the Angels and the crowd. To make matters worse, someone knocked
over one of the Angels’ bikes. Soon after, one of the Angels knocked out
Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin with a punch, the last straw for Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young. The group that created the concert left the speedway.
 Unfortunately, bad got worse. The Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman had missed
the helicopter ride, so the Stones had to wait to perform. It was dark before
they finally started, and Jagger’s justifiable edginess is vivid in the footage in
the documentary Gimme Shelter. It is hard not to notice something else that
was contributing to the tension: The Angels were well through their $500
cache of beer.
About twenty minutes later, as the Stones performed their classic “Under
My Thumb,” an eighteen-year-old man near the front of the stage pulled out a
gun and what some thought was a knife. He approached the stage, wild-eyed
and barely able to walk.
Spotting the man and his gun, several Angels surged into the crowd. One
Angel, Alan Passaro, fended off the gunman with his left hand and stabbed
him with a knife he held in his right. Jagger stopped singing and watched
anxiously, a moment powerfully captured in Gimme Shelter, which was
released just months later.
The Stones continued and finished the set, unaware of the news: Meredith
Hunter had died from the wounds inflicted by the Angels. Passaro later would
be charged with murder but then acquitted after lawyers successfully argued
that he had acted in self-defense.
But after that December and the release of the documentary, the Angels’
devotion to Harley made them the most vivid image of the Harley brand,
which at that point was equated with Altamont and its horror. To make the
connection even worse was something viewers realize when they see Gimme
Shelter: All of the performers and the Angels were white. Meredith Hunter
was black.
Honda’s marketing executives spotted this monumental event—it is
popular to call Woodstock the high point of “the culture of love” and
Altamont its violent end—as an opportunity. They could turn Harley’s new
problem into Harley’s new catastrophe and a launchpad for Honda. Honda’s
advertising agency, Daly and Associates, went to work and soon made a
weapon.
They crafted a velvet hammer.
Their weapon was eight words, of such apparent innocence that they might
have been used in a Pepsi commercial. The message sounded so sweet, so like
“I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” that most people who saw the commercial
completely missed its intended meaning. What Honda and its agency wanted
Americans to hear beneath these words’ veneer was, “Don’t buy a Harley,
because a Harley rider might invade your hometown, pee on your jacket, and
beat you to death with a pool cue.”
That was what Honda’s executives and ad agency hoped Americans would
hear. What they said, however, was, “You meet the nicest people on a
Honda.”
And, by implication, you meet the biggest, scariest, pool-cue-wielding
dudes on a Harley.
The message and Honda’s dramatic rise forced the already-wounded
Harley folks in Milwaukee to go on the defensive. Harley could not pretend
there were no Hells Angels, in part because too many men found Harley’s
outlaw image attractive, in part because so many women did. Outlaws we
like; cold-blooded, pool-cue-wielding killers we don’t.
Realizing its motorcycles weren’t as fast, agile, or affordable as the
Japanese bikes, afraid to kill the Hog by making it into something smaller and
less masculine, and forced into what seemed a brand hole, Harley had to
respond. Rather than escape the tattooed Angels image, Harley embraced it,
cleaned it up, and turned it—and Harley’s uniquely passionate brand loyalty
—into an asset.
Harley owners so loved their Harleys that tens of thousands had the Harley
logo tattooed on their arms. That image became an inspiration, but one the
company took years to recognize. Once it did, however, the effect was
memorable.
In 1985, Harley’s top creative team at Carmichael Lynch in Minneapolis,
copywriter Ron Sackett and art director Dan Krumwiede, met and began to
think about all those tattooed biceps.
Krumwiede envisioned the photo: a gorgeous close-up of a thick, bronzed
bicep, popping out from below a spotless new white shirt, emblazoned with
the Harley logo. Sackett thought about just what that meant, to love a brand
so much you branded yourself with it, and crafted his “think about this, all
you guys on those Japanese crotch rockets” headline: “When is the last time
you felt this passionately about anything?”
But Harley’s strongest rejoinder actually started two years before, when
the Harley marketing teams recognized that great American trait: We want to
be a part. This spurred the Milwaukee-Minneapolis team to come up with an
audacious idea: What if we start a new motorcycle gang?
What if we created an even bigger gang and became more than just a
motorcycle company but a collection of companions?
From that insight was born one of the most successful marketing tactics in
the history of wheeled products: the 1983 creation of the brilliantly named
H.O.G., the Harley Owner’s Group. Within four years, 73,000 members were
registered. Today, the number is almost half a million.
Today, if you buy a Harley, you receive a free one-year membership to
H.O.G. with access to any of over nine hundred local chapters—the world’s
largest company-sponsored motorcycle enthusiast group. They conduct
several national rallies and rallies in almost every state.
The group both reinforces each member’s devotion to Harley and serves as
Harley’s most effective promotional vehicle. It also allows Harley executives
to practice what the Japanese call genchi genbutsu: Go to the scene and learn
what is happening, what you might call “marketing by walking around.”
Harley’s executives and employees do this by attending H.O.G. events almost
every weekend between Easter and Halloween, where they learn what bike
owners love.
The authors of the H.O.G. website could have written a paragraph of this
section, as you see in this excerpt:

There’s a basic human longing to be a part of something greater

than yourself. We like to think of Harley-Davidson—from the top
corporate officer to the newest Harley owner and rider—as one big,
happy family…. Does that sound like something you want to be a
part of? Then join H.O.G. today.

H.O.G. illustrates a key trend: community as a service (CAAS). Good

marketers always ask, “How can we bind our users together?” Nike does it by
forming Nike running clubs at Nike stores nationwide.
Sony did it right inside its PlayStation, which uses the Internet to allow
players all over the world to play together while they converse with each
other over microphones and headsets.
Tazo promotes its teas as more than refreshments; they’re a way to meet
others. Tazo makes this clear with the printed messages on its store shelves:
“Brew some tea. Enjoy good conversation. That’s how friends are made.”
American Express leverages CAAS, too. For years, it sold the security of
its card—“Don’t leave home without it”—and the card’s prestige. Then the
company decided it needed to sell a club instead and started calling its users
“members,” not “cardholders”; every American Express card says that.
In case we missed this point, American Express in 2007 decided to ensure
that we wouldn’t. No longer did it deliver messages like “Do you know me?”
and “My life. My card,” as it did in two very effective campaigns. It made
sure people knew it was a club, not a card, by asking, “Are you a card
member?”
But we save the biggest for last. In July 2010, when over 200 million
people were playing online social games each month, Disney signaled its faith
in an even bigger future by unloading $563 million to buy Playdom, a social
game developer. The most popular of these online games are not one-on-one,
but collaborative. It takes a village on phones and computers to play
FarmVille, for example, where teams work together to raise barns and plow
wheat fields. FarmVille’s developer and the overwhelming leader in social
game development, Zygna, signals its CAAS purpose in its motto: What
could be clearer than its five words, “Connecting the world through games”?

Panera’s Invisible Secret

“Why don’t you eat at Ruggeri’s anymore?”

That was a reasonable question to ask the former Ruggeri’s waiter,
because it often seemed that everyone in St. Louis was there, in the classic
Italian restaurant in the heart of the city’s Italian neighborhood, the Hill. The
former waiter was Yogi Berra, who less than ten years later became famous as
the catcher for the New York Yankees, and he responded to that question with
an answer that became almost as famous as Yogi: “No one goes there
anymore. It’s too crowded.”
To restaurateurs today, Yogi’s days look like the good old ones. Tonight,
you can walk into a restaurant where you once waited forty-five minutes to be
seated and hear your request for a table echo off the walls.
But there’s been one notable exception.
Despite a declining economy, Panera Bread’s same-store sales increased
10.3 percent in the first quarter of 2010, after 3 percent increases in 2008 and
2009. Investors noticed; from 1999 to 2009, Panera was America’s hottest
restaurant stock, soaring 315 percent.
Panera builds off a strong concept—fast, healthy food—but few
restaurants triumph from their food alone. McDonald’s, for example, took
over the world not because of its burgers but because in a world of
“hamburger joints” and all that phrase implies—greasy spoons, old gum stuck
under the tables, and restrooms few dared to enter—McDonald’s burger
restaurants were scrubbed spotless.
Panera’s success rests on something beyond its speedy food, too.
If at almost any hour you peek through the intentionally large windows of
your nearest Panera, you will notice lots of people. You assume they came for
the food, and your confidence in the crowd draws you in. To enhance that
feeling of welcome homeyness, every Panera is filled with a fragrance that
has enchanted most of us since childhood: the smell of fresh-baked bread.
That aroma is one trick in cofounder Ron Shaich’s bag of them that has
made Panera thrive. But there’s one more: a truly invisible example of
understanding our wish to be a part that almost everyone advised Shaich
against.
In January 2005, Shaich began installing in Panera what is now the largest
free WiFi network in the world. He was convinced that offering free WiFi
would accomplish just what it has: turn his restaurants into gathering places.
And how many people might Panera hope to gather there, at least now and
then? Start with 22 million; that’s the current number of officeless workers in
America. For those 22 million, every Panera represents a possible office,
complete with fresh coffee, warm smells, and the company of others.
Yes, Starbucks had the idea of being “America’s third place,” the place
you went when you weren’t in your other two places: your home and your
office. But Starbucks, until it realized its mistake in June 2010, required you
to buy a loyalty card and limited you to two hours of WiFi service. By
charging nothing for unlimited service, Panera looks more like home; your
mom and dad wouldn’t charge you for Internet access, would they?
So Panera—coincidentally headquartered in Berra’s and Ruggeri’s
hometown—seems to reverse Berra’s famous quotation. People go to Panera
because people go there, drawn partly by the daylong crowds they notice
inside—and by the clever network they do not.
 III. LOVERS OF THE FAMILIAR
At least once each year, a major American magazine decides to update its
design to appear more current. Every time this happens, the magazine’s
editors brace themselves for what they know will follow: a flood of emails
and letters from upset readers.
“Why fix what wasn’t broken?” several subscribers will write. Whatever
words they choose, these critics repeat one theme: We preferred the old look.
We keep seeing this; we strongly prefer the familiar, as the remarkable
cases that follow suggest.

What Was in the Marshall Field’s Name?

Within days after September 9, 2006, thousands of Chicagoans simply

stopped going to the iconic Marshall Field’s department store on State Street.
For years, that idea sounded unthinkable to native Chicagoans, because for
most of its 125 years, Marshall Field’s had served as Chicago’s town square.
Whenever two people visiting downtown wanted to meet, they usually
followed the great Chicago tradition: “Let’s meet under the clock at Marshall
Field’s.”
In the fall of 2006, many stopped.
They weren’t responding to a weak economy. That fall, America’s
economy reached fifth gear. It wasn’t the store, either; it was the same store
with the same merchandise—except one thing: the name.
Marshall Field’s was now Macy’s.
This was not the first time that Marshall Field’s had stopped being the
original Marshall Field’s. Twenty-four years earlier, a British-based company,
British and American Tobacco, had acquired it. Years later, Dayton Hudson of
Minneapolis acquired it, which eventually led to Marshall Field’s being
owned and operated by Target. That changed yet again just years later, when
Target sold Marshall Field’s to the May Company.
Marshall Field’s had not really been the classic Marshall Field’s for
decades. But until that fall and despite all those changes in ownership,
Marshall Field’s had continued to use the Marshall Field’s name.
In changing the name to Macy’s, it appeared to be swapping one iconic
retailing name for an even bigger one. Macy’s stores are immortalized in the
movie Miracle on 34th Street, the site of midtown Manhattan’s Macy’s, and
have been spectacularly branded into our American brains by Macy’s famous
annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, watched by an estimated 44 million
viewers each year.
But when the change to the Macy’s name was announced, crowds of
protesters assembled—under the clock, of course—and gathered again to
protest exactly one year later.
They wanted their Marshall Field’s; they wanted that name and all that it
evoked: shopping trips with best friends, Christmas displays and Christmas
carols, Dad returning home with a Marshall Field’s bag and a surprise inside.
That the store was the same meant nothing; the name meant something.
Without the name, the store was not the same—even though it was.
They wanted the familiar, and they wanted what Marshall Field’s meant to
them and had meant all their Chicagoland lives. They craved Marshall Field’s
the idea, and when the name was gone, that idea went with it.
We love the familiar, particularly one rich with meaning, and Marshall
Field’s meant presents, shopping, Christmas, and meeting best friends under
the clock. We can tire of the familiar, but we never tire of great memories and
the great brands that created them—as Macy’s learned that day in September
2006.

The Fall, Rise, and Fall of The Mary Tyler Moore Show

From the beginning of television and for over twenty years after, the
situation portrayed in every American situation comedy was the same, from
Father Knows Best and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis to My Three Sons and
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Dads did not work, it appeared, but
merely came home from work. When they opened the front door, they cried
out, “Honey, I’m home!”
The adoring family rushed to meet the dad, and he tossed down his
homburg hat, grabbed Mom around the waist of her just-pressed cotton dress,
and said, “Hi, Little Rickie/Beaver/kids!”
Women were moms, usually in aprons, just coming from or returning to
the kitchen. Moms and dads doted, never yelled, and offered wisdom. Sex had
not been invented.
Fred MacMurray, the classic sitcom dad from My Three Sons, so
illustrated this virginal perfection of parents that seeing Double Indemnity for
the first time can be shocking. How could America’s nicest dad possibly turn
into Walter Neff? How could he smoke cigarettes and sneer, “Hey,
baby”—and to a married woman? How could he covet that married barracuda
Barbara Stanwyck and help murder her husband so that he and Black Widow
could live happily ever after off the insurance settlement? That was television
for over two decades: seventy different versions of Father Knows Best But
Doesn’t Yell at, or Sleep with, Mom.
Then came 1970.
Through most of 1969, James L. Brooks had been working on a pilot
television show built around Rob Petrie’s wife from The Dick Van Dyke Show,
the actress Mary Tyler Moore. Because these were the years right after
Woodstock, and of the pill, bra burning, Ms. magazine, and Playboy, Brooks
envisioned a different sort of sitcom. The central woman wouldn’t be a dutiful
wife cooking all day but a single woman who pursued both a career and men.
Brooks also did not want to surround Mary with Ozzies, Beavers, and
Wallys. Instead, he wanted people with edges and neuroses. So he created Ted
Baxter, a pompous dimwit who believes himself the world’s best broadcaster
and a lady’s man; Rhoda, Mary’s loud, whiny, and promiscuous neighbor; and
Lou, the gruff boss who yells.
Brooks’s characters were people we could dislike, and test audiences did.
Intensely.
The test audiences hated the show. We love smooth, and Rhoda wasn’t.
The audience members called her the opposite of smooth: “abrasive.” Ted
Baxter behaved too much like the employees too many of the testers knew
from work: the inept narcissist and braggart.
They also loathed Phyllis, Mary’s self-centered and self-important
landlord, played perfectly by Cloris Leachman. Americans hate snobs, those
who pretend not to know that all of us are created equal.
The audiences also struggled with Mary. She’d been married to that
wonderful Rob Petrie for years, and now she was single and dating. How
could she? Where was Rob?
The test audiences hated the show because it seemed so new and different.
Like the songs on the CD we hate the first time, barely endure the second, and
end up loving, our first exposure to something unfamiliar makes us uneasy,
and we interpret unease like disease: something to be avoided.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show felt unfamiliar, and we love the familiar.
The tests nearly produced what now seems like a ridiculous result; The
Mary Tyler Moore Show might never have aired. But by the time Brooks had
finished this testing, it was too late for CBS to cancel the first airing. So
episode one, “Love Is in the Air,” ran.
Fortunately, people at home liked the show more than the testers had, but
Brooks was still millions of watchers short of a hit. By season’s end, the show
gained some traction but still ranked only twenty-second of all shows on
television.
The show rolled into year two, and roll it did. It shot up to tenth in the
1971–1972 season, then up again to seventh in 1972–1973. It was a hit, en
route to becoming a legend, the program often called the best comedy in
television history.
What happened? Why did Mary fail in testing and thrive on television?
It’s because the unfamiliar became familiar.
Like the song on the CD that finally gets us singing along on the fourth
listening, people finally got comfortable with Ted, Phyllis, Rhoda, and Mary.
Americans liked that these people were like each of us: flawed. Lou raged,
Ted connived, Phyllis preened, Rhoda pouted. It was a show where fathers
didn’t know best; Ted Baxter didn’t know anything. That seemed familiar.
Then what happened?
Over the next two years, Mary’s show slipped slightly, ranking ninth and
then eleventh. And then came 1975–1976.
In that season, the show dropped to number nineteen: a warning flare. In
1976–1977, it plummeted to thirty-ninth, and on March 19, 1977, in perhaps
one of the most memorable endings to any TV show ever, Mary walked out of
the WJM newsroom and turned out the lights. Screens across America went
black for several seconds.
Then that door creaked open. Mary peeked back into the room, then closed
the door again for the last time.
Why did Mary’s star burn so bright yet fall so fast? It’s because the
familiar always becomes too familiar. Mary’s writers ran out of new twists
and characters. The addition of Betty White as Sue Ann Nivens, the “Happy
Homemaker” and television’s first cougar, helped in 1974, and adding sweet
but clueless Georgette two years earlier may have, too. Ultimately, however,
new always gets old.
To complicate Mary’s problem, what had made the show so unfamiliar at
first—its abrasive characters—worked so well that every network started
casting abrasives. A season after Mary appeared, NBC gave us perhaps the
most abrasive character in television history: Archie Bunker of All in the
Family, which became America’s most-watched program in Mary’s second
season.
Wow! Producers decided, if this gruff, homophobic, racist, flag-waving
and hippie-hating Archie could work, why not an abrasive black man who
seemed to hate everyone and every thing, a man who in the spirit of the Me
Century was a classic narcissist? Thus was born George Jefferson of The
Jeffersons, which reached number four in Mary’s fifth season. George and his
family might have climbed even higher in the ratings had it not been for a
competing abrasive black man: Sanford, played by Redd Foxx on Sanford and
Son. That show ranked second that year.
Two producers in Los Angeles then made an obvious choice. If two
insufferable black men and an insufferable right-wing male bigot could work,
what about creating a program featuring an insufferable and abrasive liberal
woman?
Voilà! The world flocked to watch Bea Arthur in Maude, the ninth-most-
watched show of that same year.
What about Mary’s “abrasive” friend Rhoda and her egomaniacal landlady
Phyllis, whom The Mary Tyler Moore Show testers hated? Well, of course:
They got their own shows. The next year, Phyllis ranked sixth, Rhoda
finished ninth.
You can guess what happened next.
The familiar became tedious. A year later, Phyllis and Rhoda dove out of
the top twenty. The networks canceled Phyllis at the end of the season and
Rhoda at the end of the next.
If anyone wonders why car makers change cars every year and software
companies introduce new versions within what seems like eight weeks of the
previous release; if people wonder why Madonna keeps morphing into new
versions that barely resemble her previous one, just as Christina Aguilera
does; or why Monday Night Football introduces new stars, new music, new
promos every season, despite their enormous cost; if anyone wonders about
any of these phenomena and many others, the history of the 1970s sitcom
provides the answer:
We want the familiar. Until it becomes too familiar.

How the Mop Tops Cleaned Up

On February 9, 1964, minutes after 8 p.m. eastern time, America’s crime rate
dropped dramatically for twenty minutes, and the American barbering
industry fell into a recession that would last almost twenty years.
That was the night the Beatles first appeared on American television, on
CBS’s The Ed Sullivan Show, and launched America into Beatlemania. Over
73 million Americans watched, an astonishing one of every three American
men, women, and children. Our streets were empty.
Now, more than forty years later, we assume that the four fellows’ talent
made it inevitable that Rolling Stone one day would name them the number-
one singing group of all time and that Time magazine would name them
among the 100 Most Influential People of the Century. But the four Brits’
triumph, it turns out, involved something more. It involved a fifth Brit, one
with a clever insight into Americans and a pioneer in the art of what today is a
marketing mantra, “engaging the customer.”
We begin with a fact that will shock many people: The Beatles initially
appeared doomed in America. Just months after they emerged as a
phenomenon in their native England, EMI offered Capitol Records the rights
to release the group’s single “Please Please Me” in the United States; Capitol
refused. EMI then turned to Atlantic Records and offered it the same
opportunity.
Atlantic refused, too.
Finally, EMI convinced a small label called Vee-Jay to take on the single,
which it eventually released on February 7, 1963—what turned out to be a
year to the day before the Beatles landed in America for the first time. But
their single didn’t please Americans at all; it sold only 7,310 copies.
The failure of “Please Please Me” seemed to prove that the executives at
Capitol and Atlantic had been right for passing on the Beatles and for
recognizing a pattern in American music. On the date of the single’s release,
only one British act had ever reached the American top ten: Frankie Ifield’s “I
Remember You,” which turned out to be Ifield’s only American hit. American
record executives decided there was a law at work: British acts don’t work
here.
On September 28, these executives looked astute. That was the night that
the era’s most famous disc jockey, Murray the K, played the Beatles’ “She
Loves You” on New York’s monster rock and roll station, 1010 WINS. If any
DJ could make a record move in those days, it was Murray the K. But no one
seemed to be listening that night; Murray’s phones went silent.
A month later, those executives looked even more astute. That was the
October afternoon that Dick Clark debuted “She Loves You” on the Rate-A-
Record segment of his popular Saturday-afternoon rock and roll show,
American Bandstand.
Clark’s teenage panelists gave the song a barely passing grade: 71 of a
possible 98 points. That wasn’t the worst news for the boys, however. When
Clark showed a photo of the foursome to some audience members, they
laughed. They giggled over the Beatles’ haircuts, which quickly earned the
name “mop tops” because they looked like mops on the fellows’ heads. And it
didn’t help that the four Brits wore collarless jackets and high-heeled Italian
leather boots with long pointed toes, wardrobe choices that in 1963 would
have gotten them rolled in half of America’s bars.
Clark had aired the song only as a favor. His friend Bernie Binnick had
acquired the song’s American rights earlier that summer and, knowing the
impact of a Bandstand appearance, approached Clark. Binnick insisted that
the Beatles’ mix of the familiar—an American sound that was part Buddy
Holly, part Chuck Berry—and the new—their “mod” look—could combine to
produce a hit.
Clark’s reply would be historic: “You’re absolutely insane. It’ll never fly.”
“Please Please Me” had failed; Capital and Atlantic had passed. “She
Loves You” had failed; Clark’s audience had laughed, and Clark was
recommending therapy for anyone who thought the Beatles could succeed.
The song never reached the Billboard charts.
Worried but undeterred, a fifth man went to work: Brian Epstein, the
band’s manager. On November 5, the day after the group’s command
performance before the British royal family, he flew to New York on a trip he
had planned to promote another British singer, Billy J. Kramer. Just days
before, Epstein’s friend and Ed Sullivan’s European talent coordinator, Peter
Prichard, called Epstein. Having recently seen the Beatles perform, Prichard
encouraged Epstein to coax Sullivan to host the Beatles on his show. While
Epstein was en route to New York, Prichard called Sullivan and told him of
the group’s command performance, impressing Sullivan with the fact that the
Beatles were the first “long-haired boys” ever invited to appear before the
queen of England.
Here, too, luck intervened.
Just twelve days earlier, Sullivan and his wife Sylvia had been delayed at
London’s Heathrow Airport. Looking through a pouring rain outside, Sullivan
and Sylvia could not miss the spectacle: over 1,500 anxious and sopping-wet
young Brits lining the rooftop of the Queen’s Building and the grounds. For
what? Sullivan asked a passerby, and learned they were there to see the
Beatles.
“Who the hell are they?” he asked.
“A huge pop group here. Returning from a tour of Sweden.”
Sullivan’s immediate thought: Elvis Presley. Only Elvis had ever inspired
a mania like the one that he and Sylvia were seeing outside that Heathrow
Airport window. So when Epstein approached him about the Beatles twelve
days later, Sullivan was primed.
Ultimately the two agreed to a contract that few people can hear about
today without gasping. For three performances, the foursome and Epstein
would divide up $10,000, just over $650 per person per appearance. Perhaps
sensing he’d done too well in the negotiations, Sullivan agreed to throw in the
group’s transportation and lodging.
The Sullivan deal opened the American pipeline from England. When
Capitol Records executives learned about it, they recognized that the exposure
on Sullivan’s show would produce record sales that at least covered their
costs and finally signed a deal with Epstein.
But Epstein still agonized.
The Dick Clark and Murray the K experiences troubled him. He had
difficulty disregarding the views of Clark, who was America’s leading
tastemaker and talent spotter in rock and roll. Epstein reasonably feared that
the Beatles would not be accepted; they were too unfamiliar, too odd-looking,
too feminine.
So Epstein set to work.
Fearing that the Beatles would look too unfamiliar to American audiences,
he decided he had to make us feel comfortable with them and to welcome to
America what soon would be called “The British Invasion.” To complicate his
task, however, these working lads from Liverpool had spent their formative
years playing in Hamburg’s red-light district, and they did not always wear
well.
John was prickly and abrasive; Ringo fidgeted in front of cameras and
microphones, had a face made for radio, and looked awkward (playing a
right-handed drum set left handed may have added to Ringo’s apparent
problem). George’s face exuded bottomless vacancy and detachment. Paul
looked cute, but so did Natalie Wood, to whom he bore too close a
resemblance for some American men.
So for the album that would break the ice in America, to be released
twenty days before the first Sullivan appearance, Epstein ignored the common
practice of naming the album after the title of its biggest hit. Instead, Epstein
wanted to make a connection between his alien band and the American
audience. So he gave the album a title that invited us to become friends of his
foreign invaders. He called it Meet the Beatles!
Epstein was inviting us in. If we doubt this ploy, we should go online and
read the playlist on the album’s back cover: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
“Till There Was You.” “I Wanna Be Your Man.” His boys were talking to each
of us.
Now look at the very first lyrics of some of the songs on the album:

“Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you”

“It won’t be long, yeh, yeh, yeh… ’til I belong to you.”
“Whenever I want you around…”
“Little child, little child, won’t you dance with me?”
“You know you made me cry…”
 Meet the Beatles! invited us to meet them, to be a part of them. Having
invited you in on its cover, the Beatles did not sing about Maybelline or
Runaround Sue. They sang about each of us, soon to be the centerpieces of
the Me Decade. The Beatles serenaded us, just as advertising copywriters do
when they repeatedly use the word “you” in ads and commercials, even
though they are writing to everyone. The songs on Meet the Beatles! are not
just songs but conversations with us set to 4/4 time, Paul’s German guitar, and
Ringo’s black Ludwig drums.
To make sure the boys connected with the Americans, Epstein stage-
managed Sullivan’s brief interviews with the foursome: Be upbeat, he
insisted, be one of them. (“John, be sweet for six seconds.”) Epstein
understood our wish to feel a part, our discomfort with the unfamiliar, and our
dislike of those who “put on airs.” Like many Brits, he also understood both
our optimism and our unusual need for a major dose of it that night in
February. Just seventy-eight days earlier, we had suffered one of the great
traumas of our century: the assassination of President Kennedy.
Fortunately for Epstein, the boys were at their upbeat best—so much so
that at the conclusion of their third and final appearance, on February 23,
Sullivan thanked them, memorably referring to them as “four of the nicest
youngsters.”
Today, few people question the group’s claim to be history’s greatest
recording group. But Epstein knew what we loved; like children, we are self-
centered. We want even our songs to be about us and our entertainers to talk
to us.
Epstein got us, and that helped the Beatles make history. The following
August, they were movie stars, too, with the U.S. release of A Hard Day’s
Night, which Time magazine years later named one of the one hundred
greatest movies of all time. (Remarkably, Dick Clark still wasn’t convinced.
He told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, “Beatlemania is fading. Their music
is kid stuff.”)
Once Epstein made the Fab Four familiar to us, he refused to let them
become too familiar. From the sweet and innocent rock of Meet the Beatles!,
Epstein and Lennon-McCartney shifted gears, releasing their folk-rockish
Rubber Soul just two years later.
Less than a year after that, they released their guitar-driven Revolver,
followed by their masterpiece, the psychedelic-rock Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band, famously packaged to suggest that the band included
heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston, Marilyn Monroe, W. C. Fields, Bob Dylan,
and a particular band favorite, Marlon Brando. The Lonely Hearts Club Band
was one of us, the all-American band, the album cover told us.
 And wouldn’t you know, the boys had learned that we needed to feel
familiar with this new group, too, just as we had back in 1964. Within
seconds of Sgt. Pepper’s first chord, they ask us,

So may I introduce to you

The act you’ve known for all these years,
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

See what they just said again? We’re new, but we’re familiar. You’ve
known us all this time; meet us once again.

After they first heard the song on July 25, 1965, music legends Carole
King and Frank Zappa separately told friends they were considering quitting
music. Across the country in Seattle at the same time, another legend heard
the song on the radio and reached a slightly different decision: Jimi Hendrix
told himself he was still a guitarist but no longer a singer.
The wonder was that these three legends ever heard the song “Like a
Rolling Stone” at all.
Five weeks earlier, Columbia Records’ marketing executives first heard
the song and, like Dick Clark hearing the Beatles, insisted the song would
never fly. It was 6:09 long, and only two six-minute songs had ever reached
the Billboard Top 100. The song was an unfamiliar fusion: folk-music lyrics,
electronic rock guitars, and classic piano and organ. The organist himself was
a twenty-one-year-old session guitarist named Al Kooper who had never
played the organ before, and it showed: He played an eighth-note behind the
other instruments.
The song might never have been released had it not been for two Dylan
fans at Columbia Records. They snuck copies of the track to Terry Noel,
America’s first celebrity deejay, who was working Manhattan’s hottest disco,
Arthur. Noel liked it, played it, and reported back that his celebrity audience
did, too.
But even after hearing this, Columbia’s executives still feared the song
would never fly, that the celebrities at Arthur were chasms apart from the
typical American record buyer. But they finally caved and on July 20 released
“Like a Rolling Stone.”
Within days it reached Billboard’s number two. It stayed in the top ten for
sixteen weeks, an impressive tenure then and now. Forty years later, the
British rock magazine Mojo named it the greatest single in rock music history,
an honor bestowed on it by Rolling Stone a year later.
 Like Dick Clark contemplating the Beatles and CBS executives
considering the pilot for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Columbia’s executives’
handling of Dylan’s song reminds us how inexpert expert opinion can be. As
important, it underscores how quickly we reject the unfamiliar. Six minutes of
dense and not always comprehensible metaphors (“Napoleon in rags, and the
language that he used”), an off-beat organ, a folk singer with a gravelly voice
playing an electric guitar—it sounded like nothing they’d heard before.
It was a classic human error: concluding too much from too little. Six-
minute songs routinely failed, but then studios had decided that quickly and
stopped releasing those songs. So the executives’ sample of long songs was
too small. Their bigger error, however, was that Columbia’s thirty-five-year-
old executives thought they knew what twenty-year-olds loved. But in the
1960s, the answer to the question “What do kids love?” was “Whatever adults
don’t.” A catchphrase of 1960s youth captures this perfectly: “Never trust
anyone over thirty.”
Incomprehensible lyrics? If anything, that was the appeal of the classic
“Louie Louie” just years before and of Nirvana’s classic “Smells Like Teen
Spirit” many years later.
The executives also failed to realize that after a week at a beach, you stop
noticing the ocean’s roar at night. The radio plays a song several times, and
with each playing the listener adapts: the unfamiliar becomes just familiar
enough. And sometimes, like Mary Tyler Moore, 60 Minutes, the Beatles, and
the greatest song in rock history, the unfamiliar becomes a classic.

A Sunday with Christina Applegate

Just before 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning in February 2000, we are driving

south in Beverly Hills en route to a celebrated church.
My friend has breathlessly told me three times that the church’s leader is
renowned in New Age circles, a circle which, from my visits to her San Diego
church, seemed to have as its first commandment “Whatever Works.”
(Because her church seemed so forgiving that it had banished the very idea of
sin, I had started calling it “The Church of the Holy Go-For-It.”)
Two blocks from the church, the backed-up traffic signaled that my
companion was right: The New Age was descending on this Beverly Hills
church. We finally found a vacant parking spot far from the entrance, made
the trek, and found an eighth-row seat.
Seconds later, two women sat down in the two aisle seats on our right.
Over the next seventy-five minutes, I glanced at these women several
times. I wasn’t drawn by their faces but by the palpable warmth between
them, and I deduced they were mother and daughter. Nothing else about them
caught my attention.
After the ceremony, my friend and I inched from our seats into the 1,100
people squeezing out the doors. I noticed that fair-haired mother and daughter
immediately in front of us.
Halfway to the door, my companion leaned in toward me.
“Do you recognize her?” she whispered in a tone that suggested I should.
“Should I?” I replied.
“Oh, yes! That’s Christina Applegate. The TV star. Married with
Children.”
“She’s a TV star? Her?” I said.
I responded that way because in real life, or at least on that Sunday of my
real life, Christina Applegate looked like a girl we might run into on almost
any block of Ames, Iowa, or Spokane, Washington. Christina Applegate, by
all accounts, is a pretty woman. And like almost every pretty woman, her face
displays one signal trait: It is remarkably average.
Christina Applegate has an average nose; it’s not big, it’s not little. Her
eyes are a fraction bigger than average, and her eyes look slightly grayer than
the average brown eyes. She has nice skin, a shade lighter than average,
certainly not more luminous than average. With the help of Hollywood
makeup artists, Applegate’s generally average features become very attractive
to most people.
Interestingly, we also find most attractive the things that look familiar—
including faces. (Not surprising, considering that in our distant past, an
unfamiliar face could belong to an enemy or intruder.) We like eyes that are
the average distance apart and average-size noses that are the average distance
from the top and bottom lips. Cameron Diaz, as one useful example,
possesses an almost perfectly symmetrical face, an average nose, attractive
but not unusual eyes, attractive but not memorable hair, a light but familiar
tone of skin. Interestingly, most people do not describe Diaz as uniquely
attractive, almost certainly because of her one far-from-average feature: her
mouth. It seems to begin at her left ear and end at her right.
We are more tolerant of a larger-than-average mouth, however, because it
facilitates something else Cameron Diaz has: an enormous smile that makes
the Cheshire Cat look gloomy by comparison. Smiles comfort us; they signal,
“I am a blessing, not a danger,” and they radiate optimism, something to
which we are uniquely attracted.
At this point at least one reader has rebelled, having had a sudden vision of
one startling beauty: the actress Penelope Cruz. Cruz has unusually dark skin,
unusually large and seemingly black eyes, almost black hair, and a much
longer than average nose with an unusually prominent tip that is very close to
her top lip. Nothing is average, and Cruz looks dazzling.
But are we truly and totally attracted to faces like hers? Woody Allen, who
directed Cruz’s Oscar-winning performance in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, told
a Vanity Fair reporter something that echoes what many people feel in Cruz’s
presence: uncomfortable.
“I cannot take her face in all at once,” Allen said. “It’s too overwhelming.”
Just days after I first wrote this, I walked to check out some apple fritters
from my Lunds grocery stores and was stopped cold. Right in front of the
checkout I spied the cover of the new issue of People and its annual
announcement of the Most Beautiful Person in the World. Their choice?
Christina Applegate.
Why? It’s because she’s a perfect combination of remarkably average
features, and a face filled with average features, the most familiar ones, looks
beautiful to us. Her face is simple, smooth, easy on the eyes—a collection of
average features, symmetrically assembled on a face we might see one day in
Ames or Spokane.
This preference of ours for the average and familiar is so strong and
common that scholars have given it a name: koinophilia. That word derives
from the Greek koinos, which means “usual,” and philos, which means
“love,” so koinophilia literally means “love of the usual.”
Might this explain the enthuasism over Apple’s 2010 introduction of
Flipboard? The genius of Flipboard is that it takes a person’s collections of
their friends’ Facebook and Twitter updates and turns them into something
very familiar looking: a magazine.
So it is true in our preferences for beauty, too: We love the familiar.

How the New Gets Old: The Ocean That Stopped Roaring

On the evening of Friday, January 26, 1968, Jeff Greendorfer and his college
roommate arrived at his roommate’s home on a cliff on the northern Oregon
Coast. It was Jeff’s first visit to Oregon’s coast, but he knew the Pacific
Ocean well, having grown up minutes from it in San Francisco. To give Jeff
the full benefit of his visit, his hosts assigned him the green bedroom, from
which he was able to look out its floor-to-ceiling window and see thirty miles
out to sea.
That night was Jeff’s last in the room.
The next morning at breakfast, Jeff apologized to three hosts. He felt
grateful for being given the room with the best view in the house but couldn’t
sleep there again. “The waves sound so loud, they kind of scare me.”
Jeff’s announcement startled his hosts. They’d lived alongside the ocean
for decades, so the ocean sounded different to them; it did not sound at all.
Jeff’s hosts had experienced what psychologists call perceptual adaptation:
they’d adapted to what they heard to the point where they no longer heard it.
That is why advertisers change ads often. We become so accustomed to ads
that we cease to notice them, just like Jeff’s hosts no longer noticed the crash
of the waves on the rocks below.
Familiarity breeds numbness. This is why we often struggle with marriage.
Each partner becomes habituated; we notice less, which causes us to
appreciate less. This also explains why receiving a gift at an unexpected time
makes us smile for several days, but a birthday gift—being expected—usually
touches us less.
We love what is familiar, and then we don’t.
Familiarity eventually breeds fatigue, but until that occurs, we crave what
is familiar and recoil at what is not, as Mary Tyler Moore discovered in the
middle of the 1970s.
And it’s the tightrope several American companies are now walking.

It is August 9, 2009. The wires release a report from Howard Schultz in

Seattle: Starbucks is closing three hundred stores and laying off workers.
Experienced readers of these cutback press releases brace for what they know
will come next: the addendum “We believe these changes will prepare us for
the success we project as economic conditions improve.”
Commentators quickly pointed to an explanation for Starbucks’ struggles:
McDonald’s. McDonald’s had invested multimillions in promoting its
McCafé, so surely its gain explained Starbucks’ loss. Or was Starbucks
simply experiencing what Mary, Rhoda, and Phyllis experienced? One day
you seem fresh, and the next day you taste stale.
Starbucks may be reenacting the Gap saga. That’s where one day you are
the store everyone drives blocks for, the next day you are the store on every
block, and the day after that you are on the block for sale, for anyone willing
to buy something that has become too familiar.
Gap, however, looks vibrant to the people working at Home Office, 6301
Fitch Path, in New Albany, Ohio, today.
That’s the campus office headquarters of Abercrombie & Fitch, whose
sales in June 2009 free-fell an alarming 28 percent. It is too early to predict
the Mary Tyler Moore fate for the retailer, and it’s risky, because A&F has
proven its special insight into its tightly defined, eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-
old market. Its design and concept are brilliant enough. Among other benefits,
its 90-decibel electronic dance music discourages anyone over forty from
entering an A&F, as does that scent wafting through every row; it’s A&F’s
own Fierce, a phenomenal fragrance that shouts teenage hormones.
A&F also smartly diversified. It introduced Hollister to combat A&F
brand fatigue and Gilly Hicks to trade on the company’s sexualized image by
moving into women’s underwear and loungewear. But the risks to the core
Abercrombie & Fitch brand are there; its challenge is to be just fresh enough,
to be familiar without being too familiar.
That’s the challenge of every marketer today: How do we avoid becoming
Mary Tyler Moore—old news just months after being America’s favorite
show?

GM and Ford: Did Their Familiarity Breed Our Contempt?

In 1958, a physician practicing in Wheeler, Oregon, on the northern Oregon

coast splurged on a new car to replace his beloved 1949 Packard. It was a
beige 1958 Mercedes-Benz 190, with its signature red leather upholstery and
wooden window frames and door trim. No one in tiny Tillamook County had
ever seen a Mercedes. Almost every day someone asked him, “Just what
kinda car is that?”
Fourteen years later, his son, living in what soon would be called the
Silicon Valley, bought a 1972 BMW 2002. Despite the affluence of that area
south of San Francisco, BMWs were so uncommon in 1972 that BMW
owners comprised a cult, complete with a club signal. Every time a BMW
owner spotted another BMW approaching, he would flash his headlights on
and off.
Today, BMW and Mercedes, along with their fellow German carmakers
Porsche and Audi, dominate the higher end of the American car market, while
the Japanese, comparatively recent arrivals in our country, threaten to
dominate the lower and middle, and together, they help explain the problems
of Ford and General Motors, which came to a head when our economy nearly
collapsed in 2008.
But as you consider that many imports are relatively new to this country,
and Ford and Chevrolet are so relatively old, it seems worth asking: Is that
part of the problem of America’s car manufacturers? Have American cars
become like Gap stores and Krispy Kremes, just too common and too
familiar?
 Toyota must think so; it must sense how easily we tire of the familiar.
When Toyota decided to grab more of the high and low ends of the car
markets, it created Lexus and Scion.
The first breakout Japanese brand, Datsun, which captivated American car
buyers with its iconic 240Z in 1972, abandoned the Datsun name in 1981 for
a new one, Nissan. Then, as Japanese and German cars began to become
almost too familiar to us, that created an opening for another new brand.
Cooper seized that opportunity with its unconventional Mini Cooper and
equally unconventional advertising.
We love the familiar, but then it becomes too familiar. We are known for
tiring of the old.
We regularly destroy our great old buildings, as one sad example. The two
great buildings of the beginning of the last century in Minneapolis—the West
Hotel and the fabulous Metropolitan Building, which Harper’s once featured
on its cover—were demolished less than forty years after they were built.
Sociologists routinely observe that people of most countries venerate their
old, look to them for wisdom, and live under the same roofs, but Americans
discard their old. Our work policies treat men and women over sixty-four as
apparent liabilities and wrinkled skin as a fate to be avoided at billions in
annual costs.
Are Ford and Chevrolet poorly managed and hopelessly handicapped by
their health care and labor costs? Perhaps. But these companies could solve
those problems and still have this one: They are old and too familiar. To
thrive, Ford and GM may have to become new again, or we will continue to
treat them as we treat our aging buildings and aging people: Out with the old
and too familiar, and in with the new.
The opportunity is there; the Fords of this world have an enormous
advantage that appears to be growing with every decade: the unique power
and influence of brands. Brands derive their power from the Rule of
Familiarity. Brands are familiar and proven to us, which reassures us.
Genuine innovations, by contrast, are neither familiar nor proven, which
makes us uneasy. But when a branded company like Ford introduces an
innovative product, its brand makes the product both familiar and new—
intriguing and reassuring to us at the same time. So whatever else we come
across in our road ahead, we will see brands in the drivers’ seats.
Our era’s most successful investor agrees. Look at Warren Buffett’s seven
largest holdings: Coca-Cola (almost 20 percent of his portfolio), Wells Fargo,
Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Procter & Gamble, American Express, Kraft
Foods, and Wal-Mart: a brand hall of fame. With that fame has come wealth;
over the last ten years, Buffett’s stocks have outperformed the market average
by over 7 percent annually, a signal that brands are only increasing their
unique influence over the products and services that we choose—and even the
investments that we make.
 IV. ETERNAL OPTIMISTS

Hello, Norma Jeane

A dutiful reader will email us soon with the answer to this trivia question:
What television character, when asked about how she wanted to be treated
after she died, answered, “I want you to take my ashes and spread them all
over Burt Reynolds”?
Her idea seemed comical at the time. But not long after, life imitated
television.
The bizarre tale begins after the wedding of the famous baseball player Joe
DiMaggio and the actress Marilyn Monroe. During the marriage, the dutiful
DiMaggio learned that Marilyn had bought a crypt at Pierce Brothers
Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles. So he decided to purchase
two himself: one directly above hers, the other adjacent.
When the couple divorced in 1954, DiMaggio chose to divorce her in
death, too, and sold the crypt above hers to a friend, Richard Posner.
Eight years later, Monroe died.
We flash forward to 1986. Posner became ill. Sensing he was dying, he
summoned his wife, Elsie, close to him as he lay in bed. “Lean down,” he
said, and she did. And then he whispered to her, “If I croak, if you don’t put
me upside down over Marilyn, I’ll haunt you the rest of your life.”
Apparently dutiful herself, Elsie Posner later obliged her husband’s last
request. “I was standing right there,” she later told a Los Angeles Times
reporter, “and the funeral director turned him over.”
Now we flash forward to 2009. Feeling the weight of a $1.8 million
mortgage on her Beverly Hills home and wanting to pass the home to her
children without any encumbrances, Elsie got a thoroughly modern idea: She
would auction off the crypt on eBay.
She set a starting price of $500,000. But when the bidding frenzy ended in
late August, Elsie Posner had another enormous reason to bless the memory
of her ex-husband Richard. The crypt he had bought from DiMaggio went for
$4.6 million.
 This short story perfectly captures us. It reveals the spread of technology
with the eBay auction; our fascination with celebrity and their deaths; our
affluence that leaves some of us with $4 million to spend on a hole in a wall;
and our fascination with sex.
Religion works its way in here, too, obviously. Mr. Posner believed in life
after death, like most Americans. We believe to an extent unmatched almost
anywhere. According to a recent Pew report, 82 percent of us believe in God,
and 9 percent believe in some other higher power; 74 percent believe in life
after death, and 85 percent believe in heaven (although one in three
Protestants believes that only Christians gain admittance there). Only one in
twenty-five of us claims to be atheist or agnostic.
Clearly, Richard Posner believed. But his belief went beyond that and
demonstrated one of our most remarked-upon traits: our bigger-than-Texas
optimism. Richard Posner obviously did not believe just in life after death; he
believed in sex after death, too. And his only-in-America optimism led him to
believe not just in sex after death but in sex with the sex symbol of his entire
generation, through four feet of concrete, in a memorial park in Los Angeles,
California.
Welcome to America the Optimistic.

On March 24, 2005, Americans witnessed a new import from England: a

television show. It was called The Office, and a year later it won an Emmy as
television’s outstanding comedy series.
The original version of the program aired in the United Kingdom in 2001
and was created by Stephen Merchant and the comedian Richard Gervais.
America was not the first country to receive an imported version; the French
adaptation Le Bureau aired in 2004.
When Gervais began to create the American version, however, he realized
it would have to be different, because we are. When later asked about this, he
noted four major differences between Americans and Brits: “You’re smarter,
you have better teeth, you’re more ambitious, you’re slightly broader.” Then
the comedian turned more serious, to a fifth difference: “But the big
difference, Americans are more optimistic. You are told you can be the next
president of the United States, and you can. In Britain, it’s ‘What happened to
you?’ ”
Gervais knew about American optimism because he’d seen American
movies, which for forty years had ended the way you’d expect in a nation of
optimists: happily. They’re so predictable that when the screenwriter in
Robert Altman’s satire of American moviemaking, The Player, insists that
he’s not going for a happy ending, he observes, “It’s not even an American
film at all.”
In 1969, Gervais was only eight years old, so he missed a rare period of
Hollywood films that might have led him to view us differently. All four of
that year’s top-grossing films—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, They
Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider—ended
unhappily. Butch and Sundance, Cowboy’s Ratzo Rizzo, and Easy Rider’s
Wyatt and Billy all die, and Horses’ Jane Fonda character is arrested for her
mercy killing of a marathon dancer.
What accounts for this unusual year in American film? Consider our
culture in the few years leading up to it: the assassination of John F. Kennedy
(1963), Martin Luther King, Jr., (1968), and Robert Kennedy (1969), and the
escalation of both the war in Vietnam and the American protests against it. Is
it surprising, then, that both the happy ending and the American comedy
suffered from 1969 to 1971, and that among the very few top-grossing
comedies we had M*A*S*H* and Catch-22, which were a genre all to
themselves—the antiwar comedy, with tones more cynical than comical?
But that was then. Of course, today we occasionally see sad endings
—Terms of Endearment in 1983 and Steel Magnolias in 1989, for example.
But they’re the exceptions that prove the rule: Americans believe in happy
endings. But then, what else would optimists believe in?

We believe.
We buy thousands of copies of “believe” songs from Mac Davis, Brooks
& Dunn, and the Platters. If it rains today, we know tomorrow will be a
brand-new day; this optimism features in the titles of songs by Sting, Michael
Jackson, and Van Morrison, and in the musical about The Wizard of Oz, The
Wiz, and echoes in the musical about Little Orphan Annie, Annie: “The sun
will come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar.”
In America, even our orphans believe everything will come out okay.
We believe in optimism and insist that others share it. You see it in our
politics, on a bumper sticker that started appearing in 2009: “Annoy a liberal.
Work hard and be happy.” That sentiment suggests that conservatives do not
merely disagree with liberals’ politics; they disagree with their negative
attitudes. Liberals always are unhappy: wars in the Middle East, income
equality, the condition of the economy. Don’t worry, liberals, the bumper
sticker urges them. Be happy.
We see this everywhere we look. Indeed, while we might worry about the
apparent increases in narcissistic behavior, we also might consider this:
Narcissists are likely to call themselves very attractive and are very likely to
make $70,000 a year by the time they reach age thirty. But wouldn’t optimists
do that, too—and isn’t optimism one of our most valuable traits?
That’s the conclusion of the professor David Landes. In his exhaustive
look at world economic history, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, he
concludes that optimism is the salient trait of great nations.

In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always
right, but because they are positive…. [T]hat is the way of
achievement, civilization, achievement and success…. Educated,
eye-open optimism pays.

And we certainly have it. In a December 2008 Harris Interactive/Financial

Times survey, majorities in France (63 percent), Italy (62 percent), Spain (59
percent), Great Britain (58 percent), and Germany (52 percent) were
pessimistic about their own economic situation. But 54 percent of Americans
were optimistic about theirs. In a separate question, 83 percent of the French,
74 percent of Italians, 70 percent of Brits and Spaniards, and 63 percent of
Germans said they were pessimistic about their country’s economic status.
And the Americans? Only 52 percent of us felt pessimistic.
Harris regularly asks Americans about our overall life satisfaction. In
October of 2009, 65 percent of us reported being very satisfied with the life
we lead. In a Europe–U.S. comparison survey a few years earlier, 58 percent
of Americans were very satisfied, almost twice the percentage found in
Europe.
Even when our economy looked worse, in the middle of 2009, we held
strong. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll, 75 percent of those surveyed
had experienced the job or pay cut of a close friend or family member, yet
two-thirds said they felt optimistic about their own family’s future in the next
twelve months, a percentage about the same as researchers had found the year
before.
Two final telling statistics reflect our cheery outlook. A recent study found
that over 80 percent of us believe in miracles. While this doesn’t surprise
American readers, it just startled the readers of this book’s German and
French translations; only 39 percent of Germans and 37 percent of French
people believe in miracles. What they are most likely to believe in instead is
that their day has passed.
We believe in miracles on earth and miracles after it. Again, over 80
percent of us believe in life after death, but only half of French people do.
This is not surprising, given that the classic French work of literature Candide
(its full French title is Candide, ou l’Optimisme) is a merciless attack on the
optimism of the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and is the book that brought
the word “optimism” into our language, just after the American Revolution.
Perhaps this most clearly reveals just how new optimism is; the word itself
is only, and exactly, three hundred years old as this is being printed.

Where did we get all this cheeriness and confidence? Might our history
explain it?
Our ancestors arrived with all of their clothes on their backs or in tiny
bags, many with valuable stamps or coins that they could exchange for a few
months’ food and rent, and within decades they built an empire of mills and
factories and all their products, turning our unique abundance into even more
abundance. The historian David Potter thought this was the case, considering
our character so much a product of our abundance that he titled his classic
work on the American character People of Plenty.
We became the planet’s great believers, almost all of us to some degree a
Jay Gatsby. By the end of Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great
Gatsby, we learn that this man with a closetful of Egyptian cotton shirts of
every color and a sprawling estate overlooking Long Island Sound is actually
Jimmy Gatz, the son of a poor Minnesota farmer. We learn he had risen each
day at 6 a.m., exercised from 6:15 to 6:30, studied from 7:15 to 8:15, worked
for eight hours, and from 5 until 9 p.m. practiced “elocution, poise and how to
attain it.”
When Americans returned from World War II, millions of them made
South Pacific among the most successful musicals, and later movies, of all
time. Its music—two songs particularly—seem to perfectly capture American
optimism. One song sounds like The Power of Positive Thinking. It’s “Happy
Talk”:

Happy talk, keep talkin’ happy talk,

Talk about things you’d like to do.
You gotta have a dream.
If you don’t have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?

Lest we were in doubt about the relentless hopefulness of this musical, set
during a war of all settings, another hit from the show makes the message
even clearer:
 I could say life is just a bowl of Jell-O
And appear more intelligent and smart,
But I’m stuck like a dope
With a thing called hope,
And I can’t get it out of my heart!

The song was called “A Cockeyed Optimist,” and our cockeyed optimism
only grew from there. We saw two Kennedys and Martin Luther King
assassinated, an Asian war drag on without resolution, a president impeached,
the Twin Towers collapse, and a deepening financial recession. Yet after all
that, two years after the Towers fell, Ricky Gervais looked hard at us, took the
American pulse, and said it was beating hard.
We still believed.

Is Irrational Exuberance in Americans’ DNA?

All of this raises for us an interesting question: Was the recent economic
crisis just one of those cyclical events, perhaps set off by greedy financial
firms? Or did we cause it?
Consider at least two of the events that contributed to the near-Depression:
Banks offered mortgages to people who could not repay them, and people
took mortgages they could not repay. But did either party to those transactions
truly think the exchange was doomed from the beginning?
Why would they? We—whether we’re the ones working for a financial
institution or the folks looking for a house—believe that tomorrow will be a
brand-new day. Sure, things look a bit grim, companies are laying people off,
and our credit cards are maxed out. But that’s today; tomorrow will be better.
So optimists offer the mortgages, and optimists take them.
So if bad loans spelled our long period of doom, it’s worth considering:
Did they reflect a weakness in us or just remind us that too much of anything
—including optimism—can be dangerous?
Economists also frequently lament a related issue: Americans spend too
much and save too little. Benjamin Franklin and others, years ago, stressed
frugality: Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish; a bird in the hand is worth
two in the bush; save for a rainy day.
But that was Benjamin Franklin, and he wasn’t here to witness two world
wars and see us become the greatest nation on earth, and then Ronald
Reagan’s Shining City on the Hill. He wasn’t here to hear John Kennedy say
we would have a man on the moon by the end of the decade and then witness
one giant step on the moon just when he promised. He wasn’t here to see us
dominate the digitalization of the globe. And Franklin wasn’t here to gather
the confidence that comes from so many triumphs and so much growth.
So we believe, and then events confirm we should have. And before long,
there’s a reason we don’t save for rainy days: We don’t believe in rainy days.

“Advertising sells one thing: happiness,” reports Don Draper, the ad guru
of AMC’s hit TV show Mad Men. In announcing this, Draper echoes what a
real-life marketer, Charles Revson, famously expressed. When someone
suggested that his company, Revlon, made perfume, Revson corrected him.
“In the factories, we make perfume,” Revson said, “but in the stores, we sell
hope.”
Fortunately, both Draper and Revson find fertile ground in America.
People who believe in major miracles, as we do, are even more apt to believe
in lesser ones, like having thinner thighs in just seconds a day or becoming
rich by working four hours a week. By our nature, we trust claims of “New
and Improved!” because we believe in new and improved.
Skeptics—France has millions; the UK, too—are nearly immune to bold
promises of a better life, and their advertising reflects it. Their ads are almost
apologetic about asking for our patronage. But Americans listen to, and
respond to, “New and Improved!” promises every day.
Americans believe, particularly in the greatness that surrounds them. It’s
what inclines Americans to another distinctive American trait: hyperbole,
which infiltrates our advertising. We find few countries in which the language
is so consistently inflated—the best, the best of all time.
The tall tale is a classic example, virtually an American invention. Our
belief in ourselves and our greatness manifested itself once in a favorite tall
tale of the Kentucky river men, including the famous Daniel Boone, who
could “squat lower, jump up higher, dive in deeper, stay down longer, and
come out drier than anyone.”
Advertising hyperbole therefore hardly seems like hyperbole. The claims
are grandiose and, judging by their repetition, effective.
So doesn’t this seem the case? Being optimists, we believe grand claims
and take our cues from the optimists who make them.

Three Masters at Tapping Our Optimism

To see how our native optimism has been tapped in marketing, we will find
no better examples than two men and one enterprise: a publisher, an author,
and a retailer.
Before 1982, America’s newspapers, in sober black and white, captured
bad news: murders; car, airplane, and stock market crashes; and the untimely
deaths of the famous. After decades of leading cheers for their local teams,
sports pages regularly castigated the stars and the teams’ management and
seemed to feature more crime reports involving players than scores of games.
Enough, Al Neuharth decided, and in August 1982, he gave us USA Today.
USA Today is Annie. It’s a rosier view of “us,” as the paper regularly
refers to us. It talks directly to us and roots for us. To ensure we understand its
cheery view, the paper abandons the traditional black and white. As we see
with the iPod, the paper trades out the classic colors of serious adulthood—
navy blue, charcoal gray, chocolate brown, and forest green—in favor of the
bright Fisher-Price colors of our childhoods—red orange, goldenrod, light
blue, bright green, and lavender blue. All of this deliberately suggests news as
fun and play, typifying the paper that reasonably can be called “America’s
Cheerleader.” USA Today knows: We believe.
To peek into one company that understands our optimism, click on
Target.com—but click first on its competitor, Walmart.com.
Scan several pages of the Walmart site, and what do we see? Stuff: coats,
swim suits, umbrellas, T-shirts. Where we don’t see stuff, we see long lists of
it: America’s shopping list. What we don’t see, however, are people; there are
none. From, this, Wal-Mart makes it clear: It just sells stuff at good prices.
Now click over to Target.com. What do we see? Women, men, boys and
girls, babies. Now notice something else. Yes, they are wearing stuff, but what
we notice first is not their stuff but their faces: They are smiling. They radiate
happiness and optimism.
In sharp contrast to models in fashion magazines, who strike the catatonic
pose of the catwalk—“I’m too sexy for my skirt”—the models on Target’s
website strike the classic pose of the cheerleading squad for the high school
yearbook photo. Each one appears to be posing for a tooth-whitener ad: She is
beaming.
Target gets us; in marketing’s top circles, the retailer is famous for getting
us. Wal-Mart thinks we buy stuff, but Target gets it: Stuff sells well, but
optimism sells even better.
Finally, there is a writer who gets us, and sells millions of books partly
because of it. Malcolm Gladwell graduated from Harvard and writes for the
New Yorker, which sends us two clues that he might be a liberal and
intellectual, and therefore perhaps a pessimist. Is he?
Consider this startling, only-in-America section from Gladwell’s
introduction to Outliers:

What if we… began instead examining our own decision-making

and behavior through the most powerful of microscopes. I think
that would change the way wars are fought, the kind of products
we see on the shelves, the kind of movies that get made, the way
police officers are trained, the way couples are counseled, and on
and on. And if we were to combine all of those little changes, we
would end up with a different and better world.

Could Annie have said this better?

We love Gladwell because he tells interesting stories very well. But we
also like how Gladwell makes us feel. He assures us that things will get better,
that the sun will come out tomorrow.
He believes, and we love him because we do, too.
THE FORCES AND THEIR SOURCES

3. OUR EYES
In 2005, Coors launched a Belgian-style wheat beer called Blue Moon. It
went nowhere—until Coors persuaded bartenders to change one thing: Serve
Blue Moon in a glass with a slice of orange. Sales took off.
In 2008, Interstate Bakeries filed for bankruptcy protection. In 2009, it
announced a revenue increase of 7 percent, which analysts attributed to just
two changes: the introduction of whole-grain Wonder bread and, after twenty-
five years without change, new packages for its iconic Twinkies, Ho Hos, and
Ding Dongs.
In 2008, United States Beverage looked at the numbers for its Seagrams
wine coolers and blanched. What was the problem? They sell their wine
coolers in bars, but the coolers didn’t look like they belonged there; they
looked like wine coolers, a bit prissy. Seagrams repackaged them as Cooler
Escapes in new beerlike bottles. That simple change boosted sales over 10
percent and helped Seagrams capture 36 percent of the wine cooler market.
In February 2009, Tropicana redesigned its orange juice cartons,
eliminating its familiar symbol of a straw stuck into an orange. By April, sales
had dropped 20 percent, forcing Tropicana to bring back the original
packaging.

What happened in each of these cases?

Welcome to the Age of the Eye. In our new life of little time, hundreds of
choices, and exceptional quality—this new life lived in a flash—there is one
compelling force: the brightest flash.
What makes that flash? By definition, it’s an image. It’s design.
The indisputable importance of designers in this new century is the
inevitable result of the last one. In those one hundred years, we learned to
build things. Then we learned to build them faster, then smaller, then more
efficiently. And then, with the influence of the quality movement and pressure
from imports, we learned to build them at near–Six Sigma quality.
What was left for marketers to do? If they were computer manufacturers,
they could try to dazzle us with lengthy descriptions of features we did not
understand. As it became harder to create truly differentiated products, Apple
and others realized a new possibility: the visually differentiated product.
We live in the age of the apparent. Design dominates this age because
design works, and because our love of beauty is deep in our bones. It’s deep
inside us.
 I. OUR NEED FOR BEAUTY

Lessons from Our Keyboard

Walk to your computer, open your word-processing program, and click on

the bar marked “Fonts.”
How many fonts do you find? The computer this book was first typed on
contains eleven different fonts just under the letter A, from Academy
Engraved to Arial Rounded MT Bold.
Of course, our escapades in fontography only start with those starting with
A. You can have all those A through Z fonts in bold, italic, bold italic,
underline; you can it, it, extend or condense it. You can display
it in more than 164 possible sizes and an almost infinite range of colors.
This could go on, but you get the point. You no longer have something like
a typewriter that prints one font, either Pica or Elite. You have a device for
creating over a trillion different typefaces—just from the A typefaces alone.
If you still feel short on fonts, there’s more. Buyfonts.com promises 1,600
fonts for Windows. If you still fear that some copycat may be using your
typeface and you truly want to set yourself apart, there’s an answer:
Fonts.com, as of noon today, offers over 171,000 different fonts.
(If you’ve ever wondered about the force behind our world of a million
fonts, it’s Lloyd Reynolds, for years a professor of art history at Reed College
in Portland, Oregon. In January 1973, a Reed freshman who had just dropped
out after his first semester, inspired by the beautifully lettered posters on the
walls throughout the southeast Portland campus, decided to audit a
calligraphy course taught by Reynolds. Ten years later and inspired by
Reynolds, that Reed dropout, Steve Jobs, helped design the first computer
with multiple typefaces and proportionately spaced fonts: the Apple
Macintosh.)
What is your computer telling you and telling all of us? We are visual
animals.
 We must be visual animals. The past decade’s classic no-frills, cut-to-the
chase CEO, Jack Welch, left GE identified with an extraordinary focus on
quality, the company that made Six Sigma famous. Yet lost in all his emphasis
on the assembly line was Welch’s emphasis on design.
But then, how could any perceptive CEO miss the rise of design? Teenage
boys and our thirty-eight-year-old best friends were coloring their hair; men
and women were making teeth whitening one of America’s fastest-growing
industries; fifty-five-year-old CFOs were adorning their bodies with tattoos;
Sony’s VAIO and Apple’s candy-color iMacs, in Grape, Tangerine, Lime, and
Orange, were demonstrating that a tool originally used to to crunch numbers
had become a fashion accessory for millions of us.
Michael Graves had graduated from designing one of America’s first icons
of postmodern architecture, the Portland Building, to designing everyday
products that appear in every Target store, everywhere—followed not much
later by Philippe Starck, whose greatest fame had come from designing hotels
far too expensive for the typical Target shopper.
Newspapers no longer were black and white and just offering the facts.
Now images in primary colors had replaced a thousand words, in primary
colors.
Starbucks, our newspapers, the jaw-droppingly massive screen that
sprawls most of the length of the new Dallas Cowboys stadium—design and
beauty are everywhere, and people stretch to afford it; design is the value-
added feature. In Chile, as one emerging example, you can scan Santiago’s
crowded streets for hours before you spot a Chilean woman who does not
appear to color her hair.
For men, this is relatively new. In the early 1960s, every man wore the
same beige trench coat, dark gray suit, matching wool homburg hat, and
patternless dark tie—think Don Draper on Mad Men. Men did not make
fashion statements; they put on uniforms.
Then in rapid succession came the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam
war, drugs, dropping out, tie-dye, psychedelic color, and shoulder-length hair.
In their wake, the uniform of The Establishment—the gray flannel suit, plain
dark tie, and white shirt—was out, never to reappear. Today we are brands of
one, making fashion statements that really are comments about ourselves.
Design is hard at work. And work it does, often in startling ways. If you
approach someone today with a resume, for example, how will it be viewed?
Can you afford to simply spew some well-thought-out words in minimally
thought out Helvetica?
Let’s see.
 A young man named Andrew, an excellent high school football player
with dreams of receiving a college football scholarship, presented his
qualifications to evaluators. Suspecting that Andrew’s style of presentation
might affect the evaluator, a group of researchers presented his case in three
different forms.

In the first, they typed out his statistics on a white sheet of paper.
For the second, they showed bar graphs.
For the third, they created a colorful PowerPoint presentation that
included the bar graphs, but which they animated to grow and
shrink during the presentation.

How good a prospect for a football scholarship was Andrew? That

depended.
The evaluators who viewed his sheet of paper rated him a 4.5 of a possible
7, or 64 percent.
The evaluators who saw his bar graph presentation rated him 12 percent
better, at a 5, or 71 percent.
And the evaluators who saw Andrew’s animated PowerPoint?
They gave him a 6: 86 percent. PowerPoint Andrew looked like a 33-
percent better college football prospect than Plain White Paper Andrew.
Andrew’s evaluators confirm for us again: We think with our eyes. Isn’t
that why Twinkies, Seagrams wine coolers, and Blue Moon beer seem to taste
better today than they tasted two years ago, even though the formulas for
those products haven’t changed?

Staring at a Hand Ax: Our 400,000-Year-Old Urge

(For my understanding of the ancient examples of our love of art, I am

particularly grateful to Harvard’s Nancy Etcoff and her excellent book
Survival of the Prettiest.)

When did we begin to love design? We started before our species started.
Even while they finished building their dwellings, fire pits, and other
necessities, our ancient ancestors immediately started creating art. Some
Paleolithic residents of what is now southern France painted hunting scenes in
the Grotto Chauvet, the oldest cave paintings ever discovered—over 34,000
years old.
Now consider an even more remarkable discovery. In 1796 a farmer in
Suffolk, England, named John Frere found several perfectly symmetrical and
polished stone implements with sharp edges, which anthropologists
immediately identified as hand axes. There is no practical explanation for
their symmetry. If the axes’ creators wanted just a tool, they would have kept
one end of the rock blunt and the other sharp, and got on with their axing. But
the creators went further; they made their axes pleasing to their eyes. They
made tools for art’s sake.
And they did this before our species evolved, before there was language,
at a time when the tall males of their species—they were not even Homo
sapiens—barely topped 4 feet tall. They did this over 400,000 years ago.
Almost as soon as we developed alphabets, we began to admire people
who could draw those letters beautifully. We called this now-ancient art
calligraphy, which literally means “beautiful writing.” In Tibet, to be artistic
was seen as holy, and great calligraphers were treated as nobility.
Then and now, beauty looks divine to us—literally.
Might our three basic needs be for food, shelter, and beauty?
Archaeologists have found sticks of red ochre over 40,000 years old in South
Africa; their only possible use was for makeup. In the Ancient Egypt section
of London’s British Museum, we come across a box. It’s almost 3,500 years
old. In it are an ivory comb and several items from the pages of Glamour:
containers of makeup.
In January 2010, archaeologists from the University of Bristol found an
even older kit—an almost incomprehensibly older one. Digging in Spain, they
found seashells containing lumps of a yellow foundation-type pigment and
red powder mixed with a reflective black material. The powder turned out to
be 50,000 years old. That meant this makeup had been used by people we
long had regarded as only partly human: the Neanderthals.
Our love of beauty starts when life starts and springs up from below. Poor
people first discovered and created paints, jewelry, and cosmetics. The Pueblo
Indians were terribly poor and created gorgeous blankets. In impoverished
rural India today you can find some of the earth’s most spectacularly dressed
people, in dresses of the richest reds and other vivid hues.
Any suggestion that design is window dressing or luxury finds no support
in our history. If we do not crave beauty, why do archaeologists and historians
keep finding it everywhere they look?

What Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast Taught Us

But what is good design? What do we love?

 Again, let’s go back to childhood. If someone offered you several toys,
which did you pick? If someone showed you photographs of several different
people, which did you stare at the longest?
Show a baby a series of photographs, and he will focus far longer on
several of them. Those photographs have this in common: They are the
photographs of the people whom adults consider “most attractive.”
But why do we love beauty? Is it partly because from these early years, we
are told that we should?
We read Sleeping Beauty. She was the heroine of her story, a woman not
merely beautiful but, by necessary implication, virtuous. Her archenemy—
although Sleeping Beauty was too virtuous to hate anyone—was not merely
evil but ugly. Evil and ugliness, we learned, arrive as twins.
Sleeping Beauty ultimately triumphs over ugliness and wins her reward
for her happily ever after: the prince. But of course, she does not win just any
prince. She wins the handsome prince.
Sleeping Beauty’s ending is a classic one, almost identical to that of the
Beauty and the Beast. Readers unfamiliar with Beauty and the Beast might
assume that this tale marks the exception in which the beauty overlooks the
beast’s ugliness and lives happily ever after with it. In Beauty and the Beast,
that is almost what happens.
In the climactic scene, Belle (the beauty) visits her family after promising
the Beast she would return to him. The day of her promised return comes, but
she does not, and with each minute that day, the Beast’s heartache deepens.
Fortunately for the Beast, Belle wears a magic ring that allows her to see the
Beast’s castle.
She looks in the ring, sees the Beast dying from his heartbreak, and races
back to his castle. But she’s too late. She shudders over the Beast’s still body,
then weeps. Like the ring, her tears prove magical; they revive the Beast. This
being a favorite story in the Land of Optimists, America, the two live happily
ever after, Belle and the Beast—don’t they?
Not exactly. Belle’s tears work such magical powers that they not only
revive the Beast but transform him. He becomes what Belle deserves: a
handsome prince.
Perhaps we love beauty, then, because adults for years have told us that we
should.
 II. WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL TO US?

But what is attractive to us as children and later as adults?

First, repeated studies show that we love symmetry. As one example, we
prefer faces whose left and right sides are closest to mirror images. The less
the two sides of someone’s face match, the less attractive we find it.
As babies, we stare longest at photographs of the people with the
smoothest skin, just as we wisely prefer smooth surfaces for our toys.
Smooth, seamless surfaces feel good, and rough ones hurt. Rough wood gives
us splinters, and we learn.
Consider how we use the word “rough,” and you see our bias: “They went
through rough times.” “Man, that’s rough.” “The edge looks a little rough; be
sure you sand it.” “Rough” estimates aren’t accurate. In golf, you want to stay
on the fairway and avoid the mess on either side of it: It’s called the rough.
We love the smooth, and not just because it glows or sparkles. Perfectly
smooth objects—the perfectly polished floors of our childhood, for example
—appear spotless to us, and we hate spots. It’s almost certain that we hate
them because we link them to things that are unhealthy, even dangerous. We
know to avoid people with measles or chicken pox, for example, and that
even a small skin imperfection can be a warning sign of cancer or of
something else that may need medical attention.
The spots we see often are specks of dirt, which breeds bacteria; spots
make us sick. That realization is what drove Ray Kroc to not just create
hamburgers and french fries that were identical in every McDonald’s
restaurant but to insist on spotless floors and antiseptic restrooms.
McDonald’s triumphed over a spotty institution that Americans everywhere
called “the greasy spoon.”
We see spotless and think healthy, and what appears healthy appears
beautiful to us. We love rosy cheeks, red lips, full, shining hair: They look
healthy.
In the mid-1990s, radio station producers had learned that for most
American listeners, jazz was too random and unfamiliar, too spontaneous, not
quite pretty enough. The producers knew that we would embrace something
more melodic, something more flowing and seamless, too. They called it
“smooth jazz.”

The Circle and the Cube: The Shape of Beauty

In 1963, State Mutual Life Assurance of America—now Allmerica—needed

help. The company had just acquired another insurance company and was
concerned about the morale of the employees. So its marketing executives
called Harvey Ball, the co-owner of its advertising and public relations firm in
Worcester, Massachusetts, and asked if he could help.
It sounded like a mundane assignment, but Ball said he’d think on it. That
afternoon, he returned to his drawing board and within minutes found himself
drawing a perfect yellow circle with two circles and a semicircle inside: the
now-famous smiley face. Thirty days later Ball received from his client a
check for the entire amount he would make from his creation, $45.
Over the following years, his $45 creation would become a U.S. postage
stamp, a symbol for Wal-Mart, a button that in 1971 alone sold over 50
million copies, and an illustration of our love of simplicity and of the shape to
which we are drawn from childhood: the circle.

The Lion King reminds us we are part of something special: the circle of
life. We speak lovingly of our circle of friends. Our universe itself comprises
circles within circles forming circles: the spherical planets, including ours,
moving around the spherical sun in circular orbits.
Think of water, which we need to survive. How do we draw this very thing
which gives us life? Asked to draw a picture of a source of water, we draw a
circle.
We call a person we think is complete “well rounded.” By telling contrast,
someone behind the times was once called “square.” Boxes are traps; when
our thinking is stuck, we need to think “outside the box.” If we break the law,
we may be confined to a cell, another box. When we die, many of us are
consigned to a box: “They put him in a box and buried him.” The working
space we most deplore is called a cube.
A woman with an appealing figure has curves. We do not use “curves” to
describe a healthy-looking man, but the most appealing male shape has
curves: the arced peaks of the biceps, the shoulder muscles and calves. What
some call a nice butt and others a great booty isn’t flat; it’s rounded. The
objects of special male fascination, the female breasts, are two circles: two
orbs, each with a circle inside. The center of a male’s fertility is rounded on
the end, and the organs responsible for fertility are rounded, like balls.
The world’s best designers realize this love of ours. Among the logos most
often ranked as the world’s twenty-five favorite, we find five circles (BMW,
Mercedes, Firefox, Xbox 360, and Paramount Pictures), a stretched circle
(Batman), a panda in an almost perfect circle shape (World Wildlife
Federation), and three perfect circles (the symbol for Mickey Mouse). The
five-circle symbol of the Olympic Games and the circular symbols of
Starbucks and Target all rank with the most memorable and effective symbols
of our time.
What about squares and rectangle? None of the logos among the world’s
twenty-five favorite logos employs a rectangle, much less a box. (Major
League Baseball’s comes closest, but its four edges are rounded.)

We love the curve and dislike the edge. Why might that be?
Again, look back to our childhoods and our ancestors. What are the first
things that we see, the signals to us that we are safe and loved? The circle of a
mother’s eye, a circle within a circle—followed soon, as mentioned above, by
the life-giving milk of a mother’s breast, another circle within a circle.
Soon, what did we learn was safe and what was not? A rounded surface is
smooth to the touch; an edge is not. The first great weapons and objects of our
ancestors’ fears were spears. When humans started making more lethal spears
by shaping rocks into spear points, their deadly feature was a sharp edge: a
point.
Points and sharp edges symbolize danger and evil. The devil in Christian
tradition carries a trident: a spear with not just one point but three. The devil
has pointed ears, not rounded ones. (By contrast once again, our symbol of
belovedness, Mickey Mouse, has a perfectly round face and perfect circles for
ears.) Verbal attacks are “pointed,” and abrasive people “have an edge.” The
Lone Ranger’s sidekick Tonto noticed the sharp edges of evil, too.
“Kemosabe,” he famously advised, “that man speak with forked tongue.”
Contrast these sharp-edged symbols with those of Jesus and angels. What
is an angel’s signal characteristic? Wings, of course, with well-rounded ends
—interesting, because not all birds have rounded wings. The other holy
symbol is a circle: the halo. Jesus appears with one, but Christians are not
alone in equating the circle with holiness. The ancient Egyptians depicted
their gods Ra and Hathor with halos; so do the Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan
Buddhists, and Hindus.
We love the circle and the curve and dislike the square and the edge.
The New Beautiful

In 2008, Philips Electronics conducted a study intended to measure the cost

to American businesses of returned products. Their conclusion startled many
people: The cost was $100 billion a year.
In years past, this news would have clearly signaled that America’s quality
movement had miles to go, that for all the talk about quality circles and Six
Sigma, American business was still failing.
But in 2008, people reacted differently to the news, because it appeared
the quality movement had shown some effect. Only half of the cost of the
products we returned—$50 billion—could be attributed to defects in the
products.
So what was wrong with the other $50 billion worth of products?
Nothing. We just couldn’t figure out how to use them. They were too
complicated.
Now, we might assume that our fellow consumers tried hard to learn about
all those products before they returned them. We assume wrong again. These
disgruntled buyers didn’t spend days or even hours reading the manuals and
tinkering with the product. They spent just minutes—twenty minutes on
average. Then they surrendered.
Now, if a person disappeared into the rain forest in 1965 and only returned
to America in time to read this Philips study, she wouldn’t understand. She
would remember the most complicated electronic product of the year, the
1965 RCA color television. It had an on-off switch, a color-control
adjustment, a volume control, a channel changer, and the now-obsolete
horizontal hold dial, to fix your picture when it started fluttering horizontally.
In 2008, our naive returnee from her forty years in tropical exile would
discover a phenomenon of our time: feature creep. That’s the clever
expression for the tendency of manufacturers to add features to a product, in
part so they can proclaim that it is new and improved. (Feature creep may
have found its highlight in Microsoft’s Word 2003 program; it featured 31
toolbars and more than 1,500 commands.)
Do we want better phones, or does that “better” just have thirty-five more
functions we would never figure out, even if we could find a use for them?
We never figured out our VCRs before we had to replace them with DVD
players, which we still haven’t figured out. What chance do we have with a
more fully functioned phone?
It seems obvious that the manufacturers believe they need to make
complex phones to satisfy the tech heads. Are they just focusing on the Steve
Wozniaks of this world, the tech wizard who created the first Apple
computers and who probably owns a phone that can rotate his tires, feed his
goldfish, and compose symphonies?
If they are, they’re wrong. When asked about his relatively simple phone,
the immortal Wozniak sounds like most of us: “I find my phone terrifying.”
Even today’s geeks feel overwhelmed by today’s complexity.

As of this writing, these are the five best-selling books on Amazon:

Food Rules
The Help
Game Change
Dear John
The Kind Diet

These are the top five movies:

Avatar
Edge of Darkness
When in Rome
Tooth Fairy
The Book of Eli

These are the four most talked about products:

iPhone
BlackBerry
iPad
iPod

It’s hard to look at those ten titles and four names and not be struck by
their common trait: their brevity. The five top books average just 9 letters and
just 2.2 syllables; the top movies average 10.4 letters and 3.4 syllables; the
top products average 6 characters and 2.25 syllables.
Not one of these products has a name as long as Federal Express, which is
“cognitively long” to our ears because it has five beats—five syllables—to
pronounce. Only Edge of Darkness and The Kind Diet take as many as four
beats, and half of those fourteen products have names with just two syllables.
In 2000, Federal Express decided its name was too long and reduced it to the
two-syllable FedEx, then took the added step of making it appear to be a
single five-letter word. FedEx turned itself into an Apple.
Is something bigger going on here? Compare those five movies to the top-
grossing movies of 1960, and you discover the 1960 titles used over 20
percent more letters and over 50 percent more syllables.
The move to brevity seems obvious. Is it deliberate, and is there a sound
psychological reason for it? That is, are we more apt to buy a book or attend a
movie with a short title or purchase a product with a short name? Is it that
simple is beautiful to us?
The golf swing that today’s golf fans find most beautiful is that of the
South African player Ernie Els, whose nickname reflects the swing they love:
They call him “The Big Easy.” Fittingly, we use that adjective to describe an
attractive woman’s face; she is “easy on the eyes.” Her face requires little
effort to process, and that pleases and comforts us.
We love easy. In the early 1980s, popular music stations realized that
aging Baby Boomers were tired of hard music; it sounded loud, strident.
Fittingly, the radio producers called the offensive sound “hard” and labeled
their more pleasing solution “easy listening.” Easy is beautiful.

Our love of the simple is likely closely related to another of our traits:
impatience. We are famous for being in a hurry. We might never think about
this until we sit down to our first dinner in Italy, the country whose most
famous classical writer, Baldassare Castiglione, insisted that one of the signs
of personal greatness was sprezzatura—in our language, nonchalance. A
nonchalant person does not rush or worry about time, and if the Olympics
ever adds a nonchalance event, Italy’s restaurant employees should be the
early favorites.
In Italy, diners follow this routine: Arrive at 7:00; get a menu at 8; the
waiter comes to take the order at 9 and delivers it at 10; he gets the dishes and
dessert order at 11; brings the check at midnight; and returns the credit card
receipt what seems like most of the night later.
We hurry; others don’t. Procter & Gamble learned this when they
introduced their popular time-saving Swiffer dusting products to Italy. Italian
women wouldn’t buy them. They think that a person should devote time to
cleaning and dusting to get the best results; that cleaning means effort. Italians
are hard to sell on dishwashers, too, for a similar reason—washing by hand is
viewed as superior—and on washing machines, which they believe are hard
on clothes. In the end, we see a cultural difference at work here. Americans
trust machines and technology; Italians believe that humans are far superior.
(Perhaps if our country had produced Leonardo da Vinci, Dante, and
Michelangelo, we might view humans as superior to machines, too.)
Seeing this, P&G in 2009 repositioned Swiffer in Italy as products to use
for the final touchups after cleaning and dusting. And as we probably
guessed, Swiffer sales finally took off.
Time matters immensely to us. We invented the concept of own it now and
pay later, thinner thighs in seconds a day, real-time Internet connections, the
Indianapolis 500, land speed records and the Bonneville Salt Flats, the focus
on new cars’ 0 to 60 times rather than other traits, speed dialing, jaywalking
and sane lanes, and microwaves. We don’t even want to wait for brown skin;
we flock to tanning booths and tanning sprays. And of course, we’re the
country that created fast food.
And simple means faster. Isn’t our impatience, then, among the likely
explanations for our love of simplicity?

Going with the Cognitive Flow

Look at the names of these four companies, and guess which two performed
best—that is, which two experienced the greatest increase in the price of their
stock over a one-year period.

Assume
Moughan
Cripta
Coumor

First, there’s a very good chance that you got the right answers: Assume
and Cripta. And the reason you got it right is that you looked at these
companies the same way that prospective investors would. Subconsciously, at
least, you decided that Assume and Cripta were better investments because
the ease with which you could pronounce them made you more comfortable
with them and confident in them.
Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer in a June 2006 issue of the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported just that:
Companies with easy-to-pronounce names outperformed those with harder-to-
pronounce names. It actually went beyond that; Alter and Oppenheimer
discovered that the companies with easier-to-pronounce ticker symbols also
outperformed those with those with harder-to-pronounce symbols.
Once again, we are not always a thinking animal but an assuming one. We
assume traits of a company from its name; we shortcut.
 This Case of the Ticker Symbol isn’t isolated. There’s also the Case of the
Exercise Programs.
Imagine that you decide to start a new exercise program and are handed
two program descriptions. The first is printed in the simple Arial typeface,
the other in BRUSH font.
How long would you decide that each program would take? How easy and
interesting would each program appear? Which one would you be most likely
to start and continue?
Assuming you are like the people who were administered this test by Yale
graduate student Hyunjin Song and Michigan professor Norbert Schwarz,
your answer would be the Arial exercise program. It would seem shorter,
easier, and more interesting even though—as you have guessed—it was
identical to the Brush font program. The students estimated that the Brush
font exercises would take almost twice as long to finish.
This once again shows that we often don’t think; we assume. We somehow
assume that an easy-to-read exercise program is easier to perform. We
constantly take shortcuts, and the Looks or Sounds Easier is among our
favorites. That is why the marketers of everything—and most obviously
books, movies, and electronic products—are moving so clearly to shorter and
simpler, and why Lars and the Real Girl sounds like a mouthful to us today,
when less than fifty years ago we flocked to mouthfuls like Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the high-
grossing 1965 comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.
Psychologists refer to these as examples of cognitive fluency, an odd
expression because it lacks the precise quality it tries to describe: something
that is easily understood. But despite that, their examples strongly suggest
something deep within us: We take easiness as evidence of quality, simplicity
as evidence of truth, and complexity as evidence that something is wrong.

The Masters of the New Beautiful

In contrast to feature-creep products, which literally cost tens of billions of

dollars, consider the stunning success of their polar opposite.
The iPod Shuffle can claim the distinction of being simpler than a 1965
television—indeed, simpler than any electronic product ever made. This is
what you can do with an iPod Shuffle:

You can turn it on and off.

You can turn the volume up or down.
 You can skip to the next song or back to the previous one.
And you can set it to play songs in sequence or choose them
randomly.

That’s it. That’s all this thing does. And as one mirthful observer noted, it
sells like the wheel did when it first came out, and for the same reason. All
the wheel did was roll, and all the Shuffle does is play songs at different
volumes.
What does this tell us about what Americans want? Last year, we returned
$50 billion worth of products because, after just twenty minutes, we decided
they were too complex. And we spent millions on iPod Shuffles, and more on
the entire line of Apple products that adhere to Apple’s brand platform:
technology for people who don’t like technology and who don’t want to spend
more than twenty minutes figuring theirs out.
Like the iPod, the FedEx name, and the simple standard package offered
on a Toyota Scion, Häagen-Dazs simplified. It reduced all its ingredients to a
simple five and introduced Häagen-Dazs Five.
Chipotle simplifies (and cleverly; by reducing its burrito options, it moves
the ordering lines faster, thus turning over more customers). Its menu lists just
a few options, but the ingredients are so fresh that customers are happy to
have their choices reduced.
Costco simplifies; it’s Costco’s essence. Its competitor Wal-Mart carries
sixty sizes and brands of toothpastes; Costco carries four. Another rising star
in retailing, ALDI, offers only 1,300 products total, a third of what Wal-Mart
offers.
BoltBus simplifies. “A bus for a buck” could hardly be simpler, and that’s
the fare we can get if we’re among the first reservers. Its loyalty program
could not be simpler: Take eight trips, and the ninth is free.
Nintendo’s Wii is so simple that analysts feared people wouldn’t like it,
with its simple motion-controlled wand and simple, childlike graphics. In an
age when we love the simple, the Wii easily outsells the Xbox 360 and PS3.
As happens at Chipotle, simplicity also adds profit. Wii games cost only $1.5
to $4 million to develop, compared to the $10 to $12 million cost of
developing a game for the Xbox or PlayStation, and can go from concept to
shipping at least twice as quickly.
But for sheer simplicity, does anything top Google? (And why don’t more
marketers learn from that and make their home pages simple and quick?)
What do we see there? A logo, a box to type in, and two boxes, one of which
reads “Google Search” and the other “I’m Feeling Lucky,” giving us the
chance to play.
 If a company doesn’t simplify, we do it for them. We learn there’s “an app
for that,” and at this moment, there are 140,000 apps for smart phones. With
all that power at our disposal, how many does the average person use?
According to the research firm Flurry, the answer is seven—the same number
of digits we can remember in a phone number.
The wizards at Google, Nintendo, Apple, Costco, and Chipotle get it: We
love the simple.
 III. OUR EYES’ SHEER FORCE: FIVE STUDIES

The Curious Case of Kensington High Street

Visitors went to Kensington High Street in London twenty years ago only if
they could bear it. Once they arrived, they walked or drove at their own risk.
Accidents and fatalities were constant, and the clutter was worse. Tom
Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, called the area a forest—“a forest of signs.” The
look was a bad collage: streets and sidewalks suddenly would change from
concrete to asphalt or brick for no apparent reason.
Kensington High Street was a mess.
The signs had become a forest because borough officials reasonably
believed that traffic warning signs accomplished their purpose: By warning
people, they reduce accidents. To further ensure that safety, the borough had
also erected guardrails on both sides of the streets and painted those familiar
zebra-striped crosswalks to tell pedestrians where they could walk safely and
where drivers absolutely had to yield.
The problem wasn’t safety at that point. The problem for the Kensington
merchants was that the area was so stuffed with signs, lights, guardrails,
markings, and speed bumps (“Beware of Speed Bump” signs naturally
followed) that it no longer looked like a community. That was a problem,
because something dangerous was taking place nearby: a new shopping
development that threatened to steal the Kensington merchants’ business was
being built.
Kensington’s merchants adopted a reckless-sounding strategy. They
decided to remove almost 95 percent of the signs. They eliminated the zebra-
striped crosswalks and allowed pedestrians to cross anywhere. To expose
walkers to even more risk but beautify the area, the borough even removed all
the protective guardrails.
Everyone agreed: Kensington High Street now looked far more welcoming
—but that could be a problem. The local shops might increase their store
traffic, but the car and pedestrian traffic outside was certain to result in more
accidents.
 But it didn’t. In fact, the opposite of what everyone predicted occurred.
Pedestrian KSIs (Killed or Seriously Injured) dropped 60 percent.
This seems to suggest that the more civilized a place looks, the more
civilized we behave in it. This rides on the hotly debated evidence of the
success of Rudolph Guiliani’s program of reducing graffiti on New York
City’s streets. When that campaign was followed by a reduction in crime,
many argued the point: We behave more civilly in civilized-looking
environments. And from the Kensington example, it appears that we also
walk and drive more carefully in more civilized looking places. Design
changes how we act.
Design changes not just our perceptions but our actions. Perhaps we
should not repeat the old saw “Never judge a book by its cover,” because
covers matter; design alters how we see and feel. The cover is the book; the
package is the product.
We probably find ourselves thinking that what is most remarkable about
design is this: how superficial it isn’t. Design, even the design of our
neighborhoods, changes us—like the colors of our shirts, as we will see next.

Golfers in Red and Goalies in Black: How Color Changes the

Game

Show a four-year-old the photo spread of Tiger Woods’s winning

celebrations of more than seventy professional tournaments, and she may ask
you what Maggy Stemmer asked me when she saw that photo spread on my
table at coffee one morning:
“Why does he have only one shirt?”
It’s a reasonable question. In every photo, Tiger does appear to be wearing
the same red shirt. It’s a practice Tiger has followed since he began his
professional career: He wears a red shirt on Sundays, the final day of every
tournament.
One might assume Tiger is acting as a creature of habit, which he is. But
there is more to Tiger’s red-shirt fetish than mere habit; there is shrewd
design.
To see why this might be true, let’s leap to the 2004 summer Olympic
Games. We likely are familiar with that favorite Olympics shot that NBC
captures almost every night of the games. Our national anthem plays while
the beautifully toned American athlete stands atop the victory stand—and
then it comes: that little tear that trickles slowly down the athlete’s cheek,
right about when we hear “the bombs bursting in air.”
 As we watch, we imagine the athlete’s feeling of triumph, the exquisite
realization that his life’s work has left him standing, literally, on top of the
world. As it turns out, there was a lifetime of effort involved. But in many
cases, there may have been something else: a red shirt.
After those 2004 Olympics, several anthropologists from Durham
University in England studied the results of the games’ four one-on-one
combat sports: wrestling (Greco-Roman and freestyle), boxing, and tae kwon
do. The researchers then isolated the contests in which, according to the
sports’ experts, the contestants were evenly matched. Blue, it turns out, was a
good choice of uniform color. The blue-clad athletes fared well—unless they
were pitted against athletes wearing red.
What happened then? In red versus blue matches, the red-clad athlete won
60 percent of the time.
The color of the uniforms cannot change the outcome of a contest, can it?
And besides, wasn’t that too small a sample? But color does seem to alter our
behavior.
In 2009, Juliet Zhu, an assistant professor of marketing at the business
school at the University of British Columbia, working with a doctoral student,
ran a series of tests. They tested over six hundred participants on several
problem-solving tasks, including solving anagrams and memorizing lists of
words. Each task was performed against a red, blue, or white screen.
The color red, it turned out, worked like a green light.
Participants taking the test against a red background took off. They solved
tasks that required attention to detail—remembering words or checking
spelling—better and faster than when they were presented with the same task
on a blue background. The phrase “red alert,” then, may be remarkably apt;
red does seems to make us more alert to details.
This also suggests that the ancient Egyptians and Chinese knew
something. They practiced chromotherapy—cures using colors—and used red
to stimulate people, physically and mentally. This stimulative effect that the
Egyptians and Chinese found reveals itself in today’s tests, which show that
men are more attracted to women wearing red than any other color. This is
why we often see red heels on a woman’s CFM shoes—invitations to sex.
This finding also makes the use of red for stop lights look like an insight,
because a driver must be alert to any stop sign. The cost of missing one often
is death. The likely danger in failing to respond to a green light, however, is
the shock of hearing a sudden, loud bleat from the car behind us.
Does red clothing stimulate the person wearing it? Does it intimidate the
opponent and explain why every golf commentator notices that Tiger’s head-
to-head opponents, every Sunday, always play horribly—“as if they are
totally intimidated,” the commentators usually add?
Do red uniforms worn in aggressive combat sports, like those four in the
Olympics, prompt the judges to see the red combatant as more aggressive and
therefore more deserving of the win?
If we still say that’s very unlikely, let’s consider hockey.
Hockey is a uniquely aggressive sport, a trait captured perfectly in a
favorite joke: “I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out.”
In hockey, fighting and other mayhem are tolerated but penalized: high-
sticking, hooking, butt-ending, charging, elbowing, kneeing, kicking,
slashing, spearing, and, of course, fighting. Reading hockey’s list of penalties
feels like reading a list of medieval battle techniques.
Now, penalties hurt a team. The penalized player must sit out at least two
minutes of timed play and five minutes for “major penalties” and cannot be
substituted. The penalized team must play a man short, sometimes even two
short.
So here is an interesting thought. Might the color of their uniforms affect
either the aggressiveness of teams, the number of penalties called against
them, or both?
Well, we can start our research in Pittsburgh.
In 1979, the Pittsburgh Penguins were known to be among the mildest-
mannered teams of the National Hockey League. Only three NHL teams
endured fewer minutes in penalties. After the season, the team management
met, argued that the color black was getting big and that penguins are black,
and decided to switch to black uniforms from their white and blue ones.
We can guess what happened. The fourth-least-penalized time in hockey
became the seventh-most-penalized team—despite the fact that there were
now four more teams in the NHL to slash, spear, and head-butt their way into
those standings.
Was this just coincidence? If we think so, let’s return to hockey one more
time.
In 1978, the Vancouver Canucks had finished in the exact middle of the
league for penalties; eight teams had more penalties, eight had fewer. At the
conclusion of that season, the Canucks management decided to abandon their
white uniforms for black ones.
We guessed it. The Canucks became thugs, apparently. Only two teams in
the league were whistled for more penalties than the formerly peace-loving
Canucks.
Even more than red, black signifies power. Judges wear black to signal
their power over a courtroom and to deliver the implied command that no one
in court can do anything that might be punished, literally, as contempt of
court. Professors wear black robes to graduation, striped with black velvet
sashes and black caps, to convey their authority. Executioners, the hooded
men who worked the guillotines, and the Grim Reaper all wear black to signal
their power over our final moments. And black, it turns out, figures in golf
history, worn by a man who came before Tiger Woods.
Seen from behind, and if you ignore the gray in his full head of coal-black
hair, Gary Player looks like an eighth-grader. He’s 5 feet 8 inches and 165
pounds. Yet despite his small frame, Player won 164 tournaments worldwide,
including all four of golf’s major tournaments. It’s an accomplishment that
only Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have equaled. Player also is known by
his choice of attire: People call him The Black Knight.
Early in his career, Player began wearing only black clothes, offering an
explanation we might expect from a small man: “Black makes me feel
powerful.” Perhaps it did. And perhaps it made his opponents, whom he
vanquished a world-record 164 times, feel much less so.
Design changes minds, changes feelings, changes hockey players and
referees, golfers and opponents. Its effect seems clear and almost certainly
greater than we might ever have suspected.

The Mustang That Was Really a Bird

Within weeks of the car’s introduction at the New York World’s Fair on
April 17, 1964, dealers were forced to auction their supply of Ford Mustangs
because they had one car for every fifteen customers who requested one. On
Memorial Day, it served as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500; that autumn
it appeared in the classic James Bond film Goldfinger; by year’s end, Ford
had sold over three thousand cars a day and broken all American car-sales
records. Four years later, the Mustang appeared in the Steve McQueen movie
Bullitt—the promotional posters made it clear it was McQueen’s costar—
figuring prominently in what many regard as the greatest chase scene ever
filmed.
Championed by Ford executive Lee Iacocca, the car created an entirely
new class of American automobiles called the “pony class,” sport coupes with
long hoods and short rear decks, including the Chevy Camaro, AMC Javelin,
and Plymouth Barracuda. But the Mustang’s story goes back several years.
Five years before, Ford had introduced a car named for an animal that can
travel at two-hundred miles per hour: the falcon. Partly the brainchild of Ford
president and future U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara, the Ford
Falcon initially sold in the millions, a huge volume for its day, but sales soon
fell off. By the time Ford executives started considering the idea of a small
sports car that would become the Mustang—the winning design was actually
called the Cougar—Falcon sales had dropped so dramatically that Ford had
surplus Falcon bodies in its plants.
Ten years later, the Falcon would disappear. Never iconic, low in price,
and much slower than the predator for which it was named, the Falcon
became a memory at best.
The different fates of these two cars seems destined to a reader familiar
with automobiles. The Mustang seems an utterly different car than the Falcon,
headed to a greatness that anyone could see would elude the Falcon. But it’s
hard to miss the irony: The Mustang was a Falcon.
The Mustang team took all those surplus Ford Falcon frames and
suspensions and its tiny 170-cubic-inch engine and wrapped the Mustang’s
sheet metal around it. The Mustang changed the Falcon’s skirt and hair style
and offered add-ons like tachometers and special fuel gauges to enhance the
impression of a high-performance car.
And that changed history.
Of course, not any change of skirt and hair style would have worked;
Mustang’s design was so inspired that it won the Tiffany Award for
Excellence in American Design, a recognition no car had ever won.
Beyond its award-winning design, the Mustang’s historic success also
owes a great deal to several other influences stressed in this book.
Management’s faith in the car and its shape led them to make an
unprecedented effort to plant the Mustang’s name in Americans’ minds. For
the night of the car’s unveiling at the World’s Fair, they instructed their ad
agency to buy every available time slot on all three of America’s TV networks
from 9:30 to 10 p.m., which in turn prompted Time and Newsweek to feature
Iacocca and his car on its covers. So Mustang was the story that everyone
heard, just like the Kobe Bryant story is the one every basketball player and
fan hears today. Overnight, the Mustang was familiar.
The car also appealed to Americans because with just two doors and the
Ferrari-like front end that project design chief Joe Oros requested, it was a
sports car. It cried out, “Come in and play,” and we love to play.
Finally, the name. The idea of a mustang speaks to one of our treasured
American values, freedom: A mustang is an untamed horse running free. That
name also evokes our western frontier, which is rich with meaning to us and
the inspiration for what once seemed more than half of our television
programs: Gunsmoke, Have Gun—Will Travel, The Rifleman, Bonanza,
Rawhide (which launched Clint Eastwood), and Wanted: Dead or Alive
(which launched McQueen).
 The icon remains. For all the battles that Ford has endured and lost, its
Mustang remains. Only one other Ford nameplate has been in production
longer: Ford’s F-Series pickup trucks. Ford’s other sport car, the Thunderbird,
came, went, and reappeared in a homage that failed to recapture that car’s
original aura.
Underneath, the Ford Mustang was a Ford Falcon. Yet the Falcon
disappeared and the Mustang flourished, thanks to almost overnight
familiarity, the promise of play, the implication of freedom, and a brilliant
design that turned a mere bird into an icon that broke all the sales records of
its day and that proves that even when they cost tens of thousands of dollars,
we still buy books for their covers.

Vitaminwater’s Sleight of Hand

One of several hundred bottled waters sold in America, Vitaminwater

immediately throws us off its marketing scent. Consider its name. If
marketers wanted to create a breakout name for a bottled water, they’d
consider names like Aqua Energy, Healthy H2O, or Earth’s Blessing. But if
they wanted to attract people who deplore the idea of marketing and to look
like they weren’t marketing to us at all, they’d choose the most banal name
possible. They’d choose a name like Vitaminwater.
With that name chosen, where would marketers distribute Vitaminwater?
Not on the same shelves with energy drinks like Gatorade, because Gatorade
could drown it with advertising. Marketers wouldn’t want it to be with
sweetened drinks, either, because the Coca-Colas and Pepsis dominate those
shelves.
But eliminating those two options leaves the marketers with a dangerous
one: battling with several hundred waters on retailers’ shelves. That would pit
them against the whizzes at Pepsi, who sell Aquafina; the geniuses at Coca-
Cola, who put their mammoth resources behind their boutique brand, Dasani;
and the wizards behind that very European-sounding water, Evian.
Even if the marketers could compete against those giants, how would they
battle the giant and well-financed Nestlé, which markets six of America’s top-
ten-selling waters, including Poland Spring, Arrowhead, and Deer Park,
which account for almost one of every five bottled waters sold in America?
They could not wage their marketing war on television. Coca-Cola, Pepsi,
and Nestlé would crush them with commercials if they showed their timid
face on TV.
So where would they go to get traction? Straight to the grocery shelves.
That space costs them nothing; it’s an advertising medium they’ve already
paid for.
How would they make the bottle their advertisement? If they slapped on a
splashy, look-at-me label, they’d lose the magic and look like other waters.
What do they do?
The marketers create an unpackage; they make a package that resembles a
fact-packed nutrition label for a medically proven, vitamin-enhanced water. If
they do that, many people strolling through the grocery aisles might sense that
Vitaminwater is not a water but a medically endorsed daily antioxidant
supplement.
They do that by printing the classic medical label, with a Helvetica-like
typeface, in black and white.
Now as the brains behind Vitaminwater, marketers make one concession
to packaging. They design two parallel rectangles that wrap around the bottle,
the lower rectangle in white, the upper rectangle in a color—strawberry red,
for example—to match the flavor of that particular water—strawberry, in that
case.
Plain. Simple. But still a problem, perhaps. What makes this water
different, other than vitamins, which no one will realize are in it if they don’t
notice the Vitaminwater bottle first? And they might not notice; dozens of
different waters scream for attention from retail shelves.
What do the marketers do? They look at all those other bottles and ask
what they share in common.
It’s this: Waters are the color of water; they are colorless.
So what do the marketers do? They add color to Vitaminwater. By doing
only that, they haven’t tricked out the banal name or plain package, but the
Vitaminwater bottle leaps off the shelf because in a clear sea, its waters leap
out: They are red, orange, or blue. Browsers cannot miss Vitaminwater; it’s
red in a sea of clear.
By making these changes in creating Vitaminwater, the marketers haven’t
appeared to try too hard, so Americans cannot see the marketing cleverness
behind the product. They notice this red water, the modest, marketing-free
name, and their brains nudge them: “It’s water, but with something more:
vitamins! And it’s medically proven.”
It’s brilliant: truly healthy water. It’s brilliant because it oozes simplicity.
And it’s brilliant because its brilliance, like David Copperfield’s and Penn &
Teller’s and that of other magicians, is hidden from our view.
Part of Vitaminwater’s brilliance, too, is that its executives know that we
feel of two minds about brands. Brands attract us, but to some they can seem
manipulative. Vitaminwater works because it stands out with no apparent
effort and conveys its distinction from the other waters and drinks without
saying more than two words: Vitaminwater—an unname with an unpackage.
Genius. Almost equal to that of the next man, who has changed this
century.

The Man Who Crushed the Box

It came on midnight, August 1, 1998, but we need to go back further to tell

the story.
From computing’s early days—the first Altair, introduced to the world in
Popular Mechanics in 1974—we often called a computer a “box.” It seemed
fitting. Everything was straight lines and sharp edges.
When Apple entered the computer market in July 1976, it created boxes,
too. Even when it set out to revolutionize computing, with its heavily
promoted 1984 introduction of the Macintosh, these innovators still chose a
box, with an almost square screen and a rectangular mouse. Even the Mac
icon that greeted us—literally in the first print ads, with the word “Hello”—
resembled a square version of a smiley face, set inside a rectangular box.
The tyranny of the box became complete when Apple’s future masters of
design introduced their next breakthrough. The name they chose could not
have been more fitting: They called it the Cube.
But thirteen years later, Steve Jobs and his Macintosh team were ready
with something new: a computer so different that computing purists became
even louder in dismissing Apples as computers “for the rest of them,” by
which these early adopter/whizzes meant “people without the bandwidth to
operate a ‘real’ computer.” Apple announced that it would reveal its
masterstroke at exactly midnight, August 1, 1998. They called it the iMac.
The first iMac came in Bondi Blue, the color of California swimming
pools. Seeing the success of this color, Apple then introduced Grape,
Tangerine, Lime, Strawberry, and Blueberry iMacs, making it possible for
customers to own a contradiction: a Blueberry Apple.
But while the color startled people, the shape surprised them more. The
iMac was shaped more like a large half-egg, with the curved screen flowing to
a rounded rear end. The ovoid was born; the sharp edge was gone. Every
iMac team member knew what he had made, a near-clone of what many men
consider the sexiest rear end on earth: that of the Porsche 911.
This curvy product changed the industry, as computer companies rushed to
copy it. But they’d stuck with the box too long, oblivious to what Steve Jobs
knew: We even make our hand axes beautiful, and we create art even when
we are struggling to find food.
We crave aesthetics, particularly in an object as large as a computer. It
takes up eye space in every room; if it’s beautiful, it takes it up well, pleases
us, and says something about us.
The iMac design beautifully incorporates almost everything we’ve talked
about here: It is smooth, curved, symmetric, and famously easy to use, the
product of the company that invented the phrase “user-friendly.”
Not least of all, owning an Apple sent the Tiffany & Co. signal. Famously
expensive, one’s Apple signals to others, “I can afford it.”
The Mac reflected Jobs’s obsession with design. As a famous example of
it, Jobs once insisted on changing all the hinges for the front doors of Apple’s
award-winning New York Apple stores. He said, “They don’t look quite
right.”
Some will say, “Design is fine, but show us the money. What has Jobs’s
meticulous attention to design accomplished?” Being among the great
percentage of Americans who don’t own a Mac, these doubters probably
assume Macs make up not more than 15 percent of the market. Actually, their
market share is lower: around 10 percent. But this misses the point. Macs
dominate the high-margin end of the computer market; 74 percent of the
money spent on computers costing over $1,000 is spent on Macs.
Plus, the Mac merely acted as Apple’s Trojan Horse. It stalked in and
brought Apple’s “digital lifestyle products” along behind it: the iPod, iTunes,
and the iPhone, each obsessively designed and each integrated with the Mac,
which makes the Mac even more attractive.
What has Jobs’s meticulous attention to design accomplished? A year after
introducing the Bondi Blue iMac, Apple was worth around $5 billion. Today
it is worth $171 billion—more than Google, Cisco, Sun, and every other
company in Silicon Valley and all but two other companies in all of America.
And today, Steve Jobs himself is worth what all of Apple was just months
after introducing Bondi Blue: $5 billion.
On November 23, 2009, Fortune magazine named its CEO of the decade;
it was Jobs. Later, it would name his company the company of the year for the
third consecutive year. In the November-issue articles saluting him, the word
“design” and words related to it, like “aesthetics,” appeared fifteen times. His
company has suggested to the rest of the world—one should say shouted to us
—the direction of this new century: It is in the direction of our eyes. We think
with them.
Steve Jobs is the CEO of the decade, and it is accurate to say this: He got
there by design.
 He appeared to be a gruff British prime minister with no use for mere
design, but Winston Churchill once made a perceptive observation about the
unusual influence that design has on us: “People shape buildings, and then the
buildings shape people.”
Our creations change us. McDonald’s creates fast food, and just seeing its
logo causes us to be less impatient and to read faster, if we are to believe the
credible-sounding research of Sanford DeVoe and Chen-Bo Zhong. Our
designs and images change us in ways we’d never guess.
In this section, haven’t we seen just how true that is, of streets, computers,
hockey jerseys, wrestling uniforms, wine-cooler bottles, Twinkies packages,
and ordinary Falcons transformed into iconic Mustangs? We respond to
design, particularly when it understands our love of beauty that we
demonstrated 400,000 years ago. If something is smooth, spotless,
symmetrical, simple, easy, and familiar, it works even more. It makes bar
patrons drink wine colors, people buy more Twinkies but fewer cartons of
Tropicana orange juice, and makes water drinkers choose Vitaminwater over
more heavily advertised competitors. It helps make Steve Jobs worth $5
billion.
And it certainly seems to prove that this is the Age of the Eye.
UNTHINKING: THE ROAD AHEAD
 I. LOOKING BACK TO OUR FUTURE

We’re in a breezy Boston café, but it could be Every Coffee Shop, 2010,
glancing around at the college juniors, recent retirees, and twenty of
America’s 22 million cubeless workers.
Judging by the many rumpled Wall Street Journals and Boston Globes,
they look well informed. We notice at least one laptop per table, beaming into
the transfixed eyes of its owner. They reflect two habits of Us, 2010: We sip
coffee and guzzle information.
These coffee klatchers are in the know, another passion of our time. We
have to know—first, if possible. In the age of information, not knowing is a
form of not belonging.
These Bostonians are the products of decades of trends in the United
States. We have tracked these trends, wondering where they will take us. But
looking around this coffee shop, what do we see?
We see men in polo shirts, button-down long-sleeved shirts, khakis and
jeans. We see Adidas and Puma running shoes, leather loafers, and crew neck
sweaters.
In 1964, what would we have seen? Polo shirts, button-down long-sleeved
shirts, khakis and jeans, Adidas and Puma running shoes, leather loafers, and
crew neck sweaters.
A teenaged boy pulls up in a Mustang wearing Fred Perry tennis shorts;
the fellows heading to work sport two- and three-button suits and black and
brown lace-up shoes; to ward off the sun, four people are wearing Ray-Bans.
It is déjà vu 1964 but with fewer silk ties.
This is where our trends have taken us: forward to our past.

In the 1970s and 1980s, we stood in line for American Graffiti and made
Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, set in the 1950s and 1960s, our hit
television shows. Thirty years later, we return to a time most of us regret: the
1970s.
Austin Powers reprises and spoofs the Bond and spy films.
VW introduces the Beetle, this time with a flower vase on the dashboard.
 Chrysler introduces a car that looks like the cruisers that protected Al
Capone’s gang as they pillaged Chicago in the 1930s.
Bell-bottoms come, go, and return, with hip-huggers close behind.
The Globe entertainment section notes that 2009’s number-one-grossing
concert of 2009 was Britney Spears’. It doesn’t mention that 1999’s was
Britney Spears’, too. AC/DC and Metallica are in town, Korn seems
perennial, and the Rolling Stones, gathering moss as they near seventy, are
this decade’s top-grossing band. The Rolling Stones? At seventy-three, Tina
Turner announces her final final last final tour.
Once there was hip-hop. Most of us think it’s new. But hip-hop came,
declined, then returned: instant retro hip-hop.

In the 1950s, futurists made us confident that by 2000, we would be

wearing jumpsuits and jet-packing through the skies to work. Downtowns
would be car-, slum-, and beggar-free. The Jetsons showed that our rooms
would be stripped of everything but the essentials, that robots would vacuum
our floors, and that we often would wear space helmets. Our clothing would
be free of buttons, perfectly fitted, and ready to fly. In 1968, the movie 2001:
A Space Odyssey envisioned regularly scheduled passenger space travel; it’s
still not here.
In Epcot-like fantasies, we were shown the car of 2000. It still has not
arrived. Car sound systems, however, work much better, featuring more
speakers than anyone used to own in an entire house.
How much have we changed? Our electric power, ships, and planes are
driven by technologies that are 130, 110, and 80 years old, respectively.
Television is nearing hundred years old, and the truly transformative
technologies of refrigeration, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing are
almost as old or older.
These innovations come, and we overestimate their disruptiveness. We
were told television would kill radio and movies and that TiVo would kill
television. They all flourish. We were told that the Internet would kill print. In
1970, 174.5 million people subscribed to magazines; in 2008, the number
reached 324.8 million. In this Boston coffee shop at 2:50 p.m., we can scan
the room and count: Seven people are working on computers, four of them are
on the Internet, and five people are reading today’s Boston Globe.
Some trend spotters assure us that social networking sites like Twitter will
transform our lives and the marketing of products. Coors, Panera, Ray-Ban,
Pampers, Domino’s, and BMW all set up Twitter sites, and as of this writing,
their total number of followers exactly equals the population of Bisbee,
Arizona.
If there are so many trends, why are we still the way we were? If we are
changing so much, why is it so hard to tell?

On June 10, 2007, the New York Times reported another new trend: the
decline in the online sales of products. Here was its evidence for the decline:

Forrester Research, a market research company, projects that online

book sales will rise 11 percent this year, compared with nearly 40
percent last year. Apparel sales, which increased 61 percent last
year, are expected to slow to 21 percent. And sales of pet supplies
are on pace to rise 30 percent this year after climbing 81 percent
last year.

This story is a trick. Let’s start over and put on our own reporter’s glasses
and decide the actual trend was the continued growth of online sales. We
could take the exact same data and write:

Sales in all online categories are up, well ahead of sales trends in
the general retail market. Online book sales are expected to rise 11
percent this year, after rising 40 percent last year. Apparel sales in
stores are up 3 percent but have soared 21 percent online. And pet
supplies are the big winner: They’re up 30 percent this year—six
times the increase in sales in retail outlets.

Why didn’t the Times report that story? Money and fame. The three
biggest stories in journalism of the past thirty years hint at that: Janet Cooke
of the Washington Post winning a 1981 Pulitzer Prize for the riveting story of
an eight-year-old heroin addict; Stephen Glass winning fans and the adoration
of his fellow New Republic editors and writers with his captivating stories
between 1995 and 1998, a story itself so compelling that it was made into the
movie Shattered Glass; Patricia Smith of the Boston Globe being named a
1998 Pulitzer Prize finalist for column writing.
A thread runs through those three writers’ stories: They were fabricated.
The writers’ ambitions to write award-winning and career-making stories
overcame their appreciation for the truth. But that temptation surrounds every
media outlet today, posing the question of this decade: How do we get
eyeballs?
We see the temptation in this New York Times story, too. The writer didn’t
write “Online Sales Continue to Grow” because that wouldn’t be big news; it
would merely continue an old trend. Newspapers must write news; no news,
no eyeballs. So as Cooke, Glass, and Smith did, the headline writers and
reporters succumb to temptation.
Even august-sounding publications like the Harvard Business Review feel
this urge. We see this vividly in its feature “The 20 Breakthrough Ideas of
2005.”
The first surprise: There were twenty huge ideas that year. Have we had
twenty in this decade?
Our suspicions deepen when we scan the too-clever headlines for the
ideas: “The Velcro Organization,” “Everyone into the Gene Pool,” and “Blog-
Trolling in the Bitstream.” But it is the Harvard Business Review, so we
assume it’s credible, maybe even definitive. So we start with “The Velcro
Organization.” Here’s its big idea as summarized by HBR’s editors:

When your customers are located around the world, it’s not enough
to have effective, efficient functions. You also need to know the
people and relationships that work in particular locales.

Okay, we say: only nineteen Big Ideas.

Big Idea #17 advocates midcareer sabbaticals for workers, to reenergize
them and their companies. Many readers in large companies have heard this
idea for years, often from their own lips.
The editors save their remarkable best for last: It’s Big Idea #20, and it
must rank among the truly ironic ideas of 2005 and beyond, given its context
in this article on the 20 Big New Ideas:

“Be skeptical of anything touted as ‘new.’ ”

Everyone reports trends because we love to read about them. Why? We

are optimists, and optimists believe in change. We believe that in every day
and in every way, we are getting better. That belief has created entire
industries to satisfy our appetite.
But the media’s reporting of nontrends finally irritated one writer so much
that he decided to expose it. In August 2003, Slate magazine and Jack Shafer
began a regular feature with the perfect title: “Bogus Trend of the Week
Award.”
Bogus Trend began with a report on the “decline” in online sales, followed
by reports on nontrends including eating locally grown food (supported
entirely by anecdotes from people found buying locally grown items in
stores); men who own cats; booming evangelical attendance (it wasn’t
happening); a purported trend among people leaving areas threatened by
global warming; and increases in shoplifting, a “trend” apparently planted by
retailers to make shoplifters more afraid of the legal consequences, among
many others.
Are there real trends afoot? If there are, the false ones outnumber them, as
this Boston coffee shop reveals. The old saw remains true: The more things
change, the more they stay the same.
And the more we want to see trends, the more we will hear about them—
whether they exist or not.
Today’s smart marketers realize that most trends are small: blue being the
new black, for example. They also know something else; once we spot even a
small trend, we’re too late. These marketers have a term for it: That tiny trend
already is “post peak.”
These marketers also know that these tiny trends come and go, but humans
barely change over centuries. Like the Neanderthals, we still wear makeup
and prefer tools that look good; yesterday’s lovely hand ax is today’s OXO
can opener. Our loves don’t change, and the best marketers know that. So
they don’t follow trends; like us, they follow our hearts.
 II. THE EULOGY AND THE SIX-INCH NAIL: THE
STARTLING POWER OF EXPECTATIONS

In the fall of 1953, Californian Denny Hansen arrived on the campus of Yale
University in New Haven, Connecticut. His blond buzz cut, broad shoulders,
and bright white smile made him the Sun God of gray New Haven.
By Denny’s junior year, almost everyone who knew Denny assumed he
would one day be president. His classmates often played a favorite game:
Which man would serve which cabinet post in the Hansen administration?
They agreed that Denny’s worst career case would be as secretary of state, a
step down but an accomplishment.
That was the least Denny could expect, particularly after he was chosen
for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Yet that Rhodes announcement wasn’t
even the highlight of Denny’s senior year. That came weeks later, when
Denny Hansen’s name and face became known to over ten million
Americans.
In the spring, two editors at Life magazine, one of America’s most popular
publications, decided to cover Yale’s graduation. Hearing about Denny’s
“golden boy” angle, they decided to focus on him.
Reading the article that sprawled over several pages, with stunning Albert
Eisenstadt photos, Life’s readers soon learned that Denny was a young man of
“astonishing completeness.” They were reminded of that just five months
later when, seeing a “Where Are They Now?” angle, the magazine dispatched
a team to Oxford to see how Denny was doing.
He was doing great. Ever the all-American boy, he asked the dons not to
assign him texts written in German and Latin. At night, his fellow Oxonians’
favorite outing was to Oxford’s seven-hundred-year-old tavern, The Bear Inn,
where they downed ale and bitter. Denny ordered Ovaltine and orangeade. His
new classmates found him as radiant, too; they called him “ebullient.”
And then… Like many great stories, Denny’s takes a twist. Thirty-four
years later, in the coastal town of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, neighbors of a
home owned by Scott Thompson called the police. “Something strange next
door,” they said. Two officers immediately drove to Thompson’s house and
noticed smoke coming from the garage. They broke in.
They found a Honda with its engine running. One officer rushed to open
the driver-side door and immediately noticed a body lying on the passenger-
side floor, then spotted a frying pan and hardback book propped on the
accelerator.
The Golden Boy’s body was blue.
This was a tragedy that only Denny’s friends ever would have heard were
it not for another former Yale student and estranged friend of Denny’s: the
author Calvin Trillin.

Almost everything about Calvin Trillin looks rumpled. His shoulders are
rumpled, his walk is rumpled, his brow and chin are rumpled. Even his rare
Mona Lisa smile looks rumpled. It is as rumpled as his frown, which, judging
from Google images of Trillin, represents his favorite pose. There is no
photographic evidence that Calvin Trillin has teeth.
What Trillin does have, despite his rumpledness and perhaps augmented
by it, is wit. Trillin makes people laugh for the same reasons that Jackie
Mason once did and Steven Wright still does. These men look dour. Their
moods are so gloomy and rumpled—Wright’s hair looks to have been
groomed by electricity—that their wit works on one of our great pleasures:
the power of surprise. As when we see a sad clown face, we are surprised
when sad-looking men do or say funny things, and Trillin says funny things
often.
Hansen’s death startled Trillin. He had not heard from or about Denny for
years but often noted his surprise after another year passed without hearing
something of Denny’s fame, somewhere. So after the small memorial
ceremony for Hansen, Trillin began writing Denny’s poignant story.
On April 1, 1993, the result, Remembering Denny, appeared. This turns
out to be yet another story, not of dashed expectations but of expectations
generally, and how they distort the lenses through which we see. It begins in
the American Midwest, days after Trillin’s book was released.
Trillin’s publishers had arranged for a book tour, with one of his first stops
in Minneapolis. On a Tuesday afternoon just days after April Fool’s Day, a
large crowd—at least seventy—squeezed into a musty-smelling room on the
University of Minnesota campus. Minnesotans love to read, partly because
their long, cold winters coop them up indoors, so most of those seventy eager
people knew Trillin from his witty contributions to the New Yorker and thirty
years of articles in the Nation.
Trillin entered the door and walked to the oak podium. The Minnesotans
clapped enthusiastically while they noted that, as usual, he looked rumpled.
He began to tell Denny’s story. Like that story, the story of Trillin’s
presentation has a surprise ending.
Trillin read a brief passage. There were giggles. He read another poignant
passage. More giggles, again and again for twenty minutes. The Minnesotans
loved the gifted humorist, his dry wit brilliantly on display. But there was a
problem.
Trillin was not trying to be funny. He was not even being funny by
accident; he was saddened and mystified by the death of his friend. But the
audience clearly found Trillin very amusing. Why?
Remembering Denny was so new that few audience members had seen it,
much less read their copy. So when they heard Trillin read from his new book,
they laughed for one reason. They laughed because they expected they would.
The man speaking was Calvin Trillin, after all, and Trillin is funny, and so
he was funny—even though he wasn’t. As we’ve heard all our lives, “His
reputation preceded him.”
Everything has a reputation that precedes it. But Trillin’s experience
suggests that reputations do more than set our expectations. Reputations
change the entire experience. They perform like the reputation of Apple CEO
Steve Jobs. As people around Jobs often say, his aura sets off a “massive
reality-distortion field.”
We experience what we expect. If we see a van Gogh for the first time, we
are stunned by the force of Starry Night—unless we are from a circle that
regards van Gogh as a kook who chopped off his ear and painted works with a
perspective that was warped, literally and figuratively.
We think heavily footnoted books by professors sound thoughtful, well-
reasoned, and correct. We expect a movie with Will Ferrell or Matthew
McConaughey to include a scene where the actor appears without a shirt.
Years later, we recall that he appeared shirtless in that movie, even though he
didn’t. We remember what we expected to happen, even if it didn’t.
Psychologists refer to this under the heading expectancy theory, which in
turn relates to the better-known idea of placebo effects. Repeatedly, we taste
what we expect, see what we expect, experience what we expect to
experience.
But it gets even stranger than this. If we think something will do
something, it often does. If we think it makes our hair grow or our teeth
white, our hair sprouts and our teeth whiten. Many products and services have
the effects they promise—perhaps even before we actually use them.
 Dr. Ellen Langer has broken ground in the world of psychology, the first
female tenured professor of psychology at Harvard. Her work has deeply
influenced our understanding of how we make decisions, and among her
many interesting discoveries was one she made in 2006.
Langer wanted to discover how much of the benefits of exercise might
simply be in our heads. To accomplish that, she solicited the help of eighty-
four Boston women between eighteen and fifty-five who worked as
housekeepers in seven Boston hotels.
Langer told the workers at four of the hotels that their housekeeping work
was good exercise and “met the guidelines for a healthy, active lifestyle.” She
told the other housekeepers nothing.
Then she asked all eighty-four workers to record their daily activities,
which later allowed Langer to see that the housekeepers’ work activities
didn’t change during the four weeks she observed them. They cleaned fifteen
rooms a day, up to thirty minutes for a single room.
So we had two identical groups but for one difference: One group was told
that its work was good exercise and the other group wasn’t.
What happened? The housekeepers in the informed group reported their
lives were healthier than those in the uninformed group. But it wasn’t just
what they said; they were healthier.
The members of the informed group lost an average of two pounds and 0.5
percent of their body fat and saw their systolic blood pressure drop 10
percent. The other women showed no such changes.
Doesn’t this strongly suggest that if we think it is, it becomes? That if our
minds decide our work will make us healthier, that thought alone makes us
healthier?
Our expectations change us, inside out.

Late in the fall of 2008, some lovers of Italian food arrived at the Provence
Restaurant on Bleecker Street in the West Village section of New York City.
Surrounded by symbols of Tuscany (curious, considering that Provence is in
France, almost 1,000 miles from Tuscany), the diners were treated to the
chef’s latest creation, a pasta called Tuscani.
As foodies like Calvin Trillin know, better restaurants make their pastas
from scratch, use only breast meat, and grate the Parmesan cheese at the
diner’s table to ensure the freshest taste. Knowing this instinctively at least,
the diners at Provence braced for a delicious dinner.
The Tuscani came and dazzled the diners. “Marvelous!” one proclaimed,
and others joined in. They found that the ingredients and presentation were
worthy of this fine Italian restaurant.
There was a problem, as some of you know. The Culinary Institute of
America–trained chef at Provence had not prepared the pasta; the minimum-
wage cooks at Pizza Hut had.
Pizza Hut’s chef popped out a Tuscani Pasta with Meaty Marinara Sauce
(another mistake; by definition, marinara sauce has no meat). Its key
ingredients were egg yolk powder, “cheese flavor,” xanthan gum, meat from
chicken ribs, and preservatives. The reality—these ingredients—should have
disturbed the diners, but we often cannot see, taste, feel, or hear reality.
The diners’ experience, captured on thirty hidden cameras and edited into
a Pizza Hut commercial that began airing in March 2008, was—well, they
tasted exactly what they expected to taste in this chic New York eatery.
Pizza Hut was recycling an old idea. Decades earlier, Folgers had tried to
coax Americans into drinking its freeze-dried instant coffee with a similar ad,
filmed in famous American restaurants, including the Blue Fox in San
Francisco and New York’s Tavern on the Green. Just as the Tuscani Pasta
samplers would decades later, the diners at these famous restaurants
pronounced their test-tube coffee “marvelous.” It tasted as if the beans had
just arrived from Colombia.
The two ads worked in one sense: They demonstrated that over the course
of forty years, we have not changed. We experience what we expect to
experience. We expect Calvin Trillin to sound witty and the Blue Fox’s coffee
and Provence’s pasta to taste delicious. And they do—even when they don’t.
Our expectation, shaped by our entire view of a brand, doesn’t merely
influence our experience. It is the experience.

Our expectations, many of them arising from the “brand” we have in our
mind, alter our experiences. But just how much?
Incredibly. We can reach this conclusion by starting with another famous
ad campaign: The Pepsi Challenge. These commercials were based on a
sensible proposition. Whenever researchers at Pepsi conducted blind taste
tests with unmarked cups of soda, almost two-thirds of the tasters preferred
their cola to Coca-Cola’s. Voilà! A great idea for an advertising campaign!
Why not just film these taste tests so that people everywhere will see that
Pepsi tastes better?
So they did. Millions saw the ads. And afterwards, those same millions
kept right on drinking their beloved Coca-Cola.
Somewhat curiously, the Coca-Cola people in Atlanta knew that the Pepsi
people in upstate New York were right. In Coke’s blind tests, people preferred
Pepsi’s taste, too, but still chose Coke.
Voilà! Another great marketing idea!
What would happen, the Coke folks reasonably wondered, if we made
Coca-Cola taste even better? What if we made it so that people in blind taste
tests would like us even more than Pepsi? We will flatten Pepsi!
Thus was born the Seward’s Folly of modern marketing, the new Edsel:
New Coke. Reconstituted, more delicious than old Coke, more delicious than
old and new Pepsi, New Coke won blind taste test after blind taste test.
The people at Coca-Cola were merely repeating the mistake of the Pepsi
folks, a mistake that rested on what now looks like a comically glaring error:
In real life, there are no blind taste tests. We do not drink just any cola; we
know what we are drinking.
There is even more to it than that, as a fellow from Dr Pepper country
would soon demonstrate.
In Waco, Texas, Dr Pepper’s home, we find the Baylor College of
Medicine and its Human Neuroimaging Lab. The lab’s director, Read
Montague, had become intrigued with the phenomenon of the mind’s
influence on the body. He started to ponder the Pepsi paradox: Why do people
say they prefer Pepsi’s taste when they don’t know what they are drinking, yet
still prefer Coca-Cola’s taste when they do? Does the mere knowledge in our
brain—“This is Coca-Cola”—actually change how we experience it? Does
the very idea of Coca-Cola affect our sense of taste?
Montague decided to find out. He performed a new Pepsi Challenge while
he scanned the brain activity of the tasters. Once again, more tasters preferred
the unmarked cup that held the Pepsi. One part of the tasters’ brains especially
loved Pepsi: their ventral putamens, one of the brain’s reward centers. This
part of the tasters’ brains fired five times stronger when they tasted the Pepsi
but didn’t know it was Pepsi.
So The Pepsi Challenge was right. Our brains really do like Pepsi’s taste
more—when it doesn’t know what we are drinking.
So Montague added another twist. Before each taster took a sip, Montague
told him which brand he was tasting. Guess what happened? Now the tasters
overwhelmingly preferred Coke.
We say, that’s no surprise; we love what we love. Tell us that something is
our beloved Coke, and we will tell you we love Coke.
But there was more to it than that. It wasn’t just that the taste testers
preferred their old favorite, Coke. Their brains acted differently, too. Their
medial prefrontal cortices, the portion of the brain strongly involved with our
sense of self, fired crazily. The word and idea of Coke apparently strongly
links to our sense of ourselves. It appears that we like Coke because it makes
us feel better about ourselves. It’s not just our taste buds that like Coke. Our
brains like it, and our brains change what we taste, see, feel, and hear.
Montague’s discovery did not surprise people who had been involved in
the testing of hair-restoration products. In controlled tests, 40 percent of
Group A reported that Extra Strength Rogaine had produced for them
“significant hair gain.” Group B had even better luck, with 60 percent
reporting hair gain. There was a small problem, however.
Group A had not been given a hair-restoration product. They were a
control group! They’d been handed a vial of oil and water. Yet they saw hair!
The Rogaine brand name attached to their vial convinced them that it would
grow hair, and so that “Rogaine” grew hair. The idea of Rogaine made them
see hair.
And then there’s the oddest case of all: the case of the six-inch nail.

Just after New Year’s Day 2010, a twenty-nine-year-old British builder

working at a building site west of London jumped from a landing and landed
on a six-inch nail with such force that the nail penetrated his boot and nearly
came out the top. Seeing his extreme pain, his coworkers called emergency
services, and a car soon rushed the young man to an emergency room.
Because moving the nail even slightly caused the man enormous pain, the
ER doctors quickly sedated him with midazolam, which is used before
surgery to induce drowsiness or unconsciousness. It illustrates the severity of
the young man’s pain that the doctors also administered fentanyl, a painkiller
often prescribed for terminal cancer patients that is one hundred times more
powerful than morphine. (Fentanyl had earned some notoriety just months
earlier when investigators found bottles of it in Michael Jackson’s home after
the singer’s death.)
With the patient sedated and his pain controlled, the doctors then
proceeded to carefully remove his work boot. When they finally were able to
remove it, they discovered something startling: The nail had passed cleanly
between the builder’s toes. There was no injury at all.
What happened there? An example of the nocebo effect, one of the more
bizarre examples of how our expectations change our perceptions and
feelings. If we think we have a nail in our foot, it can hurt so much we need a
near-lethal drug to reduce our agony.
Repeatedly we see it: What we expect changes what we feel. We taste a
Provence pasta or a Coca-Cola, or sense a nail in our work boot, and we
experience what we expect to. We experience not things but our ideas of those
things. Our brains fool our bodies, just as our bodies often trick our brains.
 So better or worst aren’t qualities that exist in the world; they are in our
brains—our bewildering, erratic, more-complex-than-the-entire-universe
brains.
This in turn dictates the first principle of marketing in the twenty-first
century. Marketers cannot merely develop great products and services; they
must develop, nurture, and manage great expectations.

There is mounting evidence that for all the expectations that they create,
superior brands, far from delivering superior results, deliver only average
results. The latest evidence comes from financial services, the beleaguered
whipping boys and girls of the recession.
Assigned the task of taking public her new software company, Blue
Mongoose, Emily Peters immediately makes a short list of three banks to help
manage the IPO: JP Morgan, Citigroup, Wells Fargo. She lists these three
banks because they are banks almost every CFO lists: They dominate
American finance. If she chooses a less-reputed investment bank and her IPO
fails to achieve its target price, Emily’s next act as Blue Mongoose’s CFO
may be the swift updating of her résumé. Just as for years executives have
learned the old business saw “No one ever gets fired for choosing IBM,” no
one second-guesses a CFO who chooses one of these firms.
Emily assumes, as most readers do, that these companies represent the best
and the brightest in banking. She assumes that each of these banks is most
likely to get Blue Mongoose the best target price for the IPO, the ultimate
measure of going-public success.
Does she assume right? The data suggests she doesn’t. As James
Surowiecki pointed out in a recent Wall Street Journal article, the big banks
have proven no more successful at managing IPOs than the comparatively
tiny banks whom the Emilys of America overlook—indeed, whom the Emilys
never call on. These big banks are the great brands of their industry, but in
managing IPOs, their performance falls billions short of their reputations.
Their brands act as false indicators.
Perhaps there is an explanation. Companies looking to go public are
relatively small ones eager for the public offering that will generate the cash
to turn them into large companies. Perhaps there is a mismatch here: the
mammoth banks and the five-hundred-person Blue Mongoose almost hidden
in an industrial park in Sunnyvale, California. Huge banks are better able to
manage the financial needs of huge corporations like them, the Procter &
Gambles, Microsofts, and Coca-Colas.
So let’s imagine a better match. If Coca-Cola wants to acquire Jamba Juice
or Evian, should it choose one of these huge firms?
Again, the latest data says no. The four big banks do not perform
demonstrably better at managing mergers and acquisitions. What they do well
is convince us they should manage these transactions, because they are the
biggest and best known, and presumably able to attract the best employees to
manage both IPOs and M&As. The biggest banks are best at creating the
expectation that they will be the best. And so we think they are.
Will examples like these cause Americans to reassess the meaning of
brands? It’s unlikely. That’s because none of us has a reliable method for
comparing banks—or running shoes, toothpastes, shampoos, conditioners, or
hundreds of other products and services. We trust brands because we cannot
devise a more reliable test.
As a test, go to a Target and find the cheapest-branded shampoo you can
find: Pantene. Take it home, take it to your shower, and wash your hair. Does
your hair feel 80 percent less clean, shiny, and manageable?
To the contrary, it probably feels better. There’s a compelling argument
that Pantene causes fewer bad hair days than any shampoo you can find,
including those costing eight times more. Ask the person who cuts and
shampoos your hair some time; just preface it, “Please, tell me the truth. I
won’t tell anyone.”
To each of us, reality rarely is what is, or what is really happening, at any
given moment. It is what we think it is and often merely what we think it must
be. The Wizard of Oz is all powerful not because he is—he’s a little old wild-
haired man behind a curtain—but because Dorothy and her friends have heard
that he is. Paris is magically romantic not because it is but because of all the
stories we have heard for years that tell us, “Paris is magically romantic.”
Southerners are friendly, Volvos are safe, Six Sigma is genius and virtually
indispensable, Maytag washers are indestructible. Or are they?
With all that said—that most trends are not trends and that expectations
continue their incredible influence over everything we experience—we turn to
two events that deserve attention as we try to understand this new century.
 III. WHY WEALTHY RUNNERS LIMP: THE NEW
FRUGALISTAS

Ever playful, Americans in the summer of 1972 took to the streets. Pushed
outside by the race that launched a thousand sports-medicine clinics—Frank
Shorter’s startling win in the 1972 Munich Olympic marathon—Americans
became runners.
They quickly learned that although our ancestors had loped for miles to
chase their food, we moderns are less well adapted to running. Within a
month of Shorter’s win, runners’ conversations focused on tendonitis, plantar
fasciitis, and other ailments that just months earlier would have sounded like
Portuguese to them.
Running’s boom had become medicine’s blessing. America was limping.
Why?
For years, the answer appeared obvious. Doctors gave almost every
running injury a technical description, such as achilles tendonitis, and the
general heading “overuse syndrome.” Runners simply were running too far,
too often, too fast.
To reduce the risk of these overuse injuries, experts suggested stretching.
Their theory was that stretching loosened and warmed muscles and tendons,
which made them less susceptible to injury. Partly because this advice seemed
so logical, many runners heeded it. And kept limping.
The running-shoe companies saw an opportunity and responded with
“biomechanically designed” shoes based on scientific studies of our feet and
legs. Naturally, they charged more for these shoes, a premium runners were
willing to pay to keep on their feet.
Now well into the twenty-first century, the sport continues to attract
millions, and runners continue to limp—provided their doctor hasn’t insisted
that they quit running entirely.
Which brings us to another interesting story about conventional wisdom,
expert wisdom, and the reasons we buy what we buy. It’s the story of what
causes these injuries.
Researchers recently broke down every potentially relevant variable about
runners—their gender, age, height, weight, running surface, miles run per
week, average running pace, athletic background. To everyone who knew that
injuries were caused by overuse, the studies seemed unnecessary, like the
infamous government study that spent months reaching its recommendation
for improving bike safety: Add a third wheel.
But the researchers found that the obvious explanation was wrong:
Overuse wasn’t the cause. Kooks like this author, who once ran an average of
seventeen miles a day, suffered no more injuries than those who ran that much
a week.
Was it failure to stretch? More kooks like this author refused to stretch,
figuring that a slow start to a run was warm-up enough. These impatient
kooks were right. Stretching didn’t hurt, the researchers found, but it didn’t
help, either.
Did gender have an influence? Are women the more-injured sex? No.
Surely then—surely—weight figured into the problem. Extra weight must
cause more injuries. But again, an obvious cause isn’t a cause at all. Being
overweight may be unhealthy, but it doesn’t contribute to injuries.
Running surfaces—were they the explanation? It seems logical that harder
running surfaces would produce more injuries and that softer surfaces, such as
the bark-chipped Pre’s Trail in Eugene, Oregon, help reduce injuries. But
neither is true.
At this point, it might seem that nothing causes injuries. They’re idiopathic
—ailments without clear causes.
But at long last, we discover that they’re not idiopathic. The study found
the real cause of running injuries: As Mars Blackmon (played by the film
director Spike Lee) once said in a memorable Nike ad, “It’s gotta be the
shoes!”
It’s the shoes! Of course! Minimally designed shoes with inadequate
cushioning and little or no motion control result in more injuries than properly
designed shoes!
No. But there is a direct, absolute, and proven correlation between running
shoes and running injuries. It’s this: The more expensive the shoe, the more
injuries the wearer suffers.
A rebel faction of runners suspected this for years. Running over two
thousand miles a year, their bodies and brains gathered plenty of data and
made them think that these more-engineered and expensive shoes were
hazardous. For many of these rebels, their Aha! moment came in 1979.
That was the year the German-based juggernaut Adidas introduced the
ultimate injury-prevention shoe, the startling Adidas TRX. Adidas offered this
garish black and yellow hulk after years of testing. Adidas decided that if they
could completely stabilize a runner’s heel, it would retard the foot’s
inclination to rock inward. By reducing that motion—this entire class of shoes
was called motion control shoes—the shoe would reduce the injuries caused
by the movement.
Desperate for any shoe that would keep them off rest, ice, and aspirin,
many American runners bought TRXs. Out on the roads on the days that
followed, these well-protected men and women could be spotted for blocks. It
wasn’t just the shoes’ Street Sign Alert black and yellow colors that caught
the eyes of passersby; it was their massiveness. A runner in TRXs appeared to
be running on twin waffle irons.
This strange sight, however, lasted only a few months on America’s roads.
It happened because TRX buyers soon became patients; their knees ached like
never before.
The failure of the TRX and the finding that the higher the price, the more
hazardous the running shoe seems to lay waste to the common American
wisdom “You get what you pay for.” It suggests the possible foolishness of
that woman who cooed to us that she spent more on her L’Oréal hair color
because she was worth it. It reminds us that our expensive DVD player is
worth less to us because we have to spend so much time not really learning
how to use it.
We take price tags as quality signals. A bit more is a bit better, a lot more
is a lot better, and the only questions are “What can I afford” and “How
important is this product to me?”
But is a lot more a lot better? Are running shoes a unique case? It’s
unlikely, particularly because of another phenomenon at work in America
today: With age comes wisdom.
You see this in the parking lot of outlet stores today. Years ago, the lots of
these stores were filled with affordably priced, smaller cars. Today, drive into
an Opitz Outlet: Three Mercedes, two Lexuses, a BMW, and a Land Rover
leave fewer spaces for humbler cars.
If these spotless luxury cars catch our eyes first, the second thing that
surprises us is the crowd. It’s 2:20 p.m. on a chilly Tuesday; it’s not a
shopping hour on a shopping day in shopping weather. Plus Opitz’s frequent
buyers know that Tuesday is the wrong day to shop because the next day,
Wednesday, is new shipment day.
But it doesn’t matter. Americans are learning that if you head off on a
treasure hunt, it’s treasure you will find: $167 rich brown leather Rockport
boots, fit for a cool night on South Beach in Miami, for $48.
Those Beemers in that lot belong to the Boomers. Over their years,
they’ve learned that everything they ever bought at Neiman Marcus or Macy’s
was overpriced, at least temporarily. They’ve learned that patience, at least in
shopping, is a virtue.
Their big first lesson came with calculators over twenty years ago. One
day they cost $300 and could do only math. In what seemed like weeks, they
could get a calculator just for opening a new bank account, and the device
could calculate Fibonacci sequences. Seeing that, Boomers realized that had
they just waited on that calculator back then, they would have saved almost
every penny they spent.
This is where we are now. Welcome to the Age of the Great Recession, the
Frugalistas, and the Beemers in the Opitz lots. Much like the fellow who
submits to his first diet and afterward realizes that he doesn’t really need
butter and whole milk, we are apt to bring the habits of the new frugality with
us, but our love of the freedom that money brings and our passion for play
suggests that we will consume again, just not quite as conspicuously.
Conscious consumption seems more likely as we give a new twist to the old
L’Oréal saw:
“I paid $119 dollars less for my boots. I’m worth it.”
 IV. THE CYCLING CLOWN AND WANDERING
GORILLA: OUR NATIONAL ATTENTION DEFICIT

In this age of faster, how do we explain millions of Americans watching

baseball games—for three hours?
How do we explain three hundred people listening to a speaker for two
hours without averting their eyes? Their faces? They look completely
engaged and content.
Why?
Because we so rarely experience these moments of single focus on a
simple thing, and that feeling—our Zen-like moment of connection to one
thing—delights us.
Consider our constant alternative: enduring the siege of words and images.
Watch CNN financial news, for example. We hear a dark-suited anchorperson
talking quickly. We may notice sentences like “Dow drops on IBM earnings
report” jogging across the bottom of the screen. At the top of the screen, we
might notice abbreviations and numbers racing by with the current prices of
the most active stocks. We spot the time in the upper-right-hand corner, the
temperature in the left, and the list of upcoming stories on the right. We are
viewing as multitasking.
Meanwhile, we’re scanning our local newspaper and checking our voice
mails while Norah Jones sings in the background and our daughter croons in
the foreground, “Can you play with me now?”
After we’re done, we go check golf on the CBS website. On just the
portion that fits our screen, we see fifty-nine—fifty-nine!—different web links
we can hit. To check scores for the Masters, we see two links to
“Scoreboard.” We wonder, is one scoreboard better than the other? What if
we choose the bad one? We are besieged by information and bewildered by
what to do.
What is the almost inevitable result? But of course. When did we first hear
of attention-deficit disorder, and why was it not more than fifteen years ago?
Was this because no one suffered ADD in 1980? Or had it just not reached
epidemic proportions?
 What caused the epidemic? Did our species suddenly start selecting for a
gene that predisposes humans to deficient attention? Or did the world change
and the cascades of images and words so overwhelm so many of us that ADD
became not just a diagnosis but a description of our culture?
In a world of people who cannot concentrate, how do we get and keep
their attention? We’ve suggested that nothing gets attention like surprise.
Surprises delight us, intrigue us, grab us by the necks. The Oscar Meyer
Wienermobile parks outside our favorite local burger spot. Many of the diners
leaving the restaurant squeal when they see it, and every diner asks a passerby
to take his photo. We love a surprise.
But even surprises are having trouble surprising us in this new century, as
a clown discovered recently.

Imagine this spectacle: A clown in full clown regalia rides a unicycle

across our favorite college’s campus. Thousands of passersby stop, and
dozens laugh out loud. But the clown steers by dozens of students who, when
asked later, “Did you see the clown?” answer, “What clown?”
This spectacle occurred at Western Washington University in 2009, where
researchers hired a clown to unicycle across campus. Yes, many students
noticed the clown and reacted as the researchers predicted. But dozens of
other students said, “What clown?” How could they?
It was because when the clown pedaled by, these students were talking on
their cell phones. They cannot talk and see at the same time? Isn’t that worse
than being the fall guy in our famous old slam, the guy who could not walk
and chew gum at the same time?
The clown at Western Washington suggests that our brains can do only so
much. If it’s engaged in talking, it’s not seeing; if it’s busy reading, it’s not
hearing. We multitask, perhaps, but our brains do not and cannot.
We are texting, talking, and Tweeting; we are checking the Web,
religiously checking our email, seeing who has called. The more of this we
do, the less of everything else we notice.
The researchers call us victims of inattention blindness. We are lost in the
inner space of our brains. Out in the real world, clowns pedal by us on
unicycles, ads cry out to us from every surface.
But we are blind.
Writing in the November 9, 2009, New Yorker about the clown case, Nick
Paumgarter reminded readers of a bizarre parallel case: the missing plane.
Just two weeks earlier, two Northwest Airline pilots overshot Minneapolis,
their destination, by 150 miles. Their explanation?
 At the moment when they should have been landing, they were reading on
their laptops the new flight-crew scheduling procedures. One can only
wonder: What if their laptops were showing a Ford Bronco fleeing the Los
Angeles police? Would they have realized their mistake over Honolulu?
These stories of the unicycling clown and the distracted pilots reinforce
the lessons of a famous older test. Dr. Daniel Simon of the University of
Illinois and Christopher Chabris of Harvard once asked subjects to watch
films of a basketball game and to keep track of the number of passes thrown
by one team. When the test was completed, the test subjects proved to be
experts at counting. What they weren’t, however, were experts at noticing.
Midway through the film, a woman wearing a gorilla suit walked though
the middle of the players for nine seconds, even stopping to face the camera
and thump her chest. And what happened? Almost half of the viewers didn’t
notice.
But we know why, don’t we? The more we try to see and do, the less we
notice. Trying to notice basketball passes, we miss chest-thumping gorillas.
As any marketer knows, labeling something makes it seem real. Combine
that with our characteristic self-confidence, and it’s easy to see that we’ve
come to believe in multitasking. But we don’t multitask; we multitry. We are
trying to do more, but we are accomplishing, and noticing, less.
This case of the missed gorilla seems unusually ironic. That’s because fifty
years ago, the iconic ad man David Ogilvy decried the trend in advertising
toward award-winning ads that merely surprised, or even shocked, the
viewers. Ogilvy said that an ad must offer a compelling premise, and that
anyway, getting people’s attention was simple. “All you have to do is show a
gorilla in a jock strap.”
Ogilvy might have been right then, but that was then. Today, it’s not just
marketing messages that are cluttered. It’s our desks, our phones, and the
focal point of all marketing, our brains. They’re jammed.
This is not the Information Age. It’s the Inundation Age.
Attention blindness has become the disease of our century. It forces
marketers into being so surprising than even the blind will notice their ads.
But ten years from now, will even that kind of audacity work? And what will?

In 2007, HarperCollins spent $10,000 creating three risqué videos to

promote Chad Kultgen’s book The Average American Male. In just two
weeks, one million people watched the videos, which seemed to show that
classic push techniques, pushed through new media like YouTube, could
produce startling returns. But what were those one million eyeballs worth?
 A blip: HarperCollins printed just ten thousand copies of the book. There’s
no record that it sold them; it just printed them. Publishers regularly go into
second, third, even thirtieth printings of books, which raises the question: Did
those one million YouTube viewers translate into one more buyer of the
book?
The marketers’ problem isn’t just that we suffer from attention blindness.
It’s that even when we notice, we do nothing. We notice a Coors ad and say
we love it—and go buy a Miller Lite instead. As HarperCollins might ask,
what are a million eyeballs worth?
They might ask the former dot-com executives who saturated the 2000
Super Bowl with so many commercials that the game is also known as the
Dot-Com Super Bowl. Those twelve companies spent $80,000 per second
trying to get our attention. What did they end up with? Pennies on their
original dollars or, in the cases of Pets.com, Epidemic.com, Computer.com,
and OurBeginning.com, nothing.
These ads outperformed the clown on the unicycle and the gorilla—they
got our attention—but the start-ups didn’t realize the problems that creates.
The first time someone gets our attention, we take away two messages: that
they exist and that and we’ve never heard of them before. They’re new and
unfamiliar, and we love the familiar.
It’s not attention good marketers want; it’s attention over time, and
products and services that deserve people’s attention because they appeal to
what Americans—we childlike Americans who think with our eyes—love.
SUMMING UP
We’ve just looked into our heads, and we may find ourselves nearing this
conclusion: We’re out of our minds.
We could excuse our foolishness—Dick Clark insisting that the Beatles
would never fly, for example, and NBA players insisting that Kobe can—by
recognizing that most of what we call thinking isn’t. During our decision
making, the organ that processes our data sits on the sidelines while our
feelings do the work. When our feelings reach their decision, they summon
our brains to come in and draft the rationale, a task it does so well that it
manages to convince us that it’s right—and that it was in charge the whole
time.
Rational or emotional, do we ever grow up? We fight age, trying to live
the Dylan wish that we stay forever young. We still love to play. Apple,
Cuisinart, and the Mini Cooper turn phones, blenders, and cars into toys, and
we crave them. The marketer who wants to thrive today asks, “How can I
make this playful?”
From birth, we love surprises. Pose us a riddle—name our search engine
Yahoo! or Google, for example—and we need to know the answer. Add a
surprise to something familiar to us—a computer shaped like an egg and
colored like a grape—and we inch closer to the cash register with it in hand.
One of our first long words is “story,” and for good reason; we crave
stories. Our movies, our songs, our evening news, our favorite television
program of all time—they all are stories. The best marketers find their stories
and they follow the ancient motto of McCann-Erickson: “The Truth well
told.” Those who try to make it up suffer the backlash that comes from our
contempt for anyone who tries to fool us.
We want to be a part. As David Riesman noted in his 1959 classic The
Lonely Crowd, we are “other-directed.” We obsess over polls and best-seller
lists because they reveal what others are thinking. The founders of Facebook,
Twitter, and MySpace knew how much we dread loneliness and crave the
respect and company of others. Of the three, Facebook appears to be the one
true social gathering spot that will survive because it’s the most “a part of”
medium. Sell a motorcycle, and you sell some motorcycles; sell a motorcycle
club, and you sell far more.
Yet we want to be apart, too. Gold is good, platinum even better. Nike
shoes are good; our very own Nike shoes—or a Toyota Scion, with all its
accessories—are even better. Like Malcolm Gladwell, the shrewd marketer
realizes this and speaks not to all of us but to each one of us: “Where do you
want to go today?”
We crave the familiar. Our ancestors survived because of that: They had to
fear anything new—large men uttering an odd language, for example. It’s a
risk, then, to offer us something too new, as Mary Tyler Moore and 60
Minutes learned, as magazines learn every time they introduce a new design,
and as Tropicana learned when it changed its packaging too dramatically. So
today’s marketer knows the key: Be just familiar enough. Apple introduces
the Shuffle and flourishes because it feels familiar: We understand on-off and
volume switches.
Our preference for the familiar suggests that brands will dominate this
century, just as they did the previous one. We’re all the Chicagoans who want
their Marshall Field’s, even if it’s actually a Macy’s, to be a Marshall Field’s;
we want what we know. Because we are uniquely impatient and have less
time to choose among more products to choose from, brands represent simple,
fast, and safe choices—and we crave simple, fast, and safe.
But new brands will emerge, and quickly if they give us what we love
most: a unique and satisfying experience. It’s happening already, of course:
Facebook and Twitter are just two examples of services so new and attractive
that they became forceful brands in months. That’s today’s Killer Brand: the
unique, and uniquely satisfying, product.
We experience the world through our senses, particularly our eyes; we
think with them. From childhood, we learn that beautiful is good for us; spots,
rough edges, and discolorations are all signals of danger, and smooth is safe.
Beauty tricks us from our childhoods, casting a halo that makes us give
scholarships to football players who use PowerPoint. Colors change us, too;
they make hockey teams play more aggressively or make hockey referees
more biased against teams in black—or perhaps they do both.
We shape things and then they shape us; we unclutter a neighborhood, and
traffic fatalities soon drop dramatically. Design is a force, and it will grow as
our products continue to mature and our choices grow in number; design
breaks ties among our choices, and our world overflows with choices. Design
has become the great value-added feature; we think with our eyes.
We love beauty, and nothing looks more beautiful to us than something
simple. Today we will take twenty minutes to figure out a product. If we’re
still confused, we’re driving back to the store with the receipt; we haven’t got
time for the pain. Simple is the new beautiful; complicated is the new
defective.
But of all forces, none surpasses reputation. Reputations do not merely
seduce us into choosing things; reputations change our experiences. If we
think a concoction will sprout hair, for example, we soon see hair.
Reputations also make us laugh when a humorist mourns the death of an old
friend, make us prefer Coke when our taste buds adore Pepsi, and make our
feet throb when we think six-inch nails are sticking through them.
Reputations create our expectations, and our expectations change our
perceptions.
We see that few trends are trends; most are fads that start to decline almost
from the second we spot them. Fads come and go, and marketers eager to
endure look beyond them and ask the question at the heart of this book: What
leads us to choose what we choose?
This book has been my attempt to understand that better, by peeking into
the most complex force in the universe: our minds. A few readers might
disagree, arguing that physicists face more puzzling questions every day.
They don’t. Ask a few Ph.D.s in physics, and eventually you will learn
something startling: The possible interactions of neurons in our brains
outnumber all the particles in our universe.
So speaking of surprises, just think about that.
For the last fourteen years, I have argued that Marketing’s goal is to reduce
an enterprise’s sales and advertising costs toward zero; to perform so well at
the five must-dos—conceiving, designing, positioning, naming, and
packaging—that little else is needed. If we learn later that we must do more—
that we need to push—our problem isn’t with our media or message; it’s with
our product.
And our solution isn’t Twittering, Facebooking, or any form of “engaging
the customer” that doesn’t enhance peoples’ experience. It’s creating what
people love. It’s ingenious products like the Adidas micoach shoe, which
makes the shoe more service—a coaching, training, and record-keeping
service—than shoe; and the equally clever Polyvore website, which lets
visitors mix and match clothes and accessories from twenty different store
websites and share their concoctions and thoughts with the six-million-and-
growing Polyvore fashion community.
This book has tried to find some patterns in our fascinating complexity
and share them with you. If it has done nothing else, I hope this book has
thumped you on your head a few times. It certainly has me; it’s made me
think, made me wonder, and made me smile.
If it has done that to you, too, that’s all I could hope for—except to say
thank you, and my best to you,

Harry Beckwith
 THE UNTHINKING MARKETER’S CHECKLIST
Thinking About Kobe: Shortcutting and Stereotyping
What assumptions do your prospects likely make about your company,
your product, your service, or you?
How can you take advantage of their positive assumptions?
What can you do to overcome their negative assumptions?

Big Versus Little

Is there a risk that you appear too big for some of your prospects, leading
them to fear being treated as unimportant?
Similarly, can you reposition your larger competitors as being a risk for
your prospects?
If you are a small company, are you leveraging the advantages of the
underdog: an eagerness to serve and the tendency of underdogs to be
more innovative?

Play
Do your website, promotions, and other marketing elements exploit the
opportunities for offering viewers play—quizzes, contests, puzzles?
Do your products and services appropriately address our love of play?
Are you too serious?

The Power of Surprise

Do you have a $180,000 diamond in your marketing arsenal?
Are you surprising your customers and prospects?
Is your website surprising? Your storefront, office, and/or lobby?
Do your messages have an element of surprise that engages a reader?

The Power of Stories

Have you discovered your best stories?
Are your presentations story-based?
Are you telling your stories well?
 Are your stories authentic and honest?
Do they resonate emotionally?
Do they develop dramatic tension, then surprise the reader with the
outcome?

Our Obsession with Fairness

Are your customers convinced that your offerings and prices are fair?
Are they convinced that you and all your services are, too?

Our Preference for the Familiar

When you introduce something new, are you careful to make sure it is just
familiar enough?
Are you making your brands and product names familiar to your most
important prospects?

Freedom and Individualism

Have you “NikeiD-ed” your offering: Are your customers able to modify
and customize your offering?

Our Need to Be a Part

Do you have your own Harley Owners Group: Have you considered ways
of bringing customers into a community of users—of making them “a
part”?

The Importance of Me
Do you address your prospects as individuals in all of your messages, or
are your messages about your company and product instead?
Are you certain you are doing what you must to make sure your valued
clients and customers feel truly important to you?
What tools and services can you create to make your most important and
profitable customers feel special?
Are you hiring for your key customer-contact positions people who make
others feel important? Are you particularly careful to hire good
listeners?

The Importance of Just New Enough

 Are your products and services just new enough, or are they like the
Twinkies package, which had gotten too old?
Are you regularly updating your website?

Simplicity
Is what you are offering easy to understand, choose, order, and buy?
How can every step of the buying process be made faster?
Is your design simple and beautiful? (Buckminster Fuller once said he
never thought about beauty as designing something, but that if his
solution was not beautiful, he knew it was wrong.)
Does every element of the product or design matter?
Is it utterly clear how it works? (Note to makers of shower faucets: Could
you agree on this somehow, so we don’t waste minutes a year in hotel
showers trying to figure out how to make the water warmer or cooler?)

Clarity and Cognitive Fluency

Are your name, message, customer interface, website, system, process, and
instructions cognitively fluent—remarkably easy to understand,
pronounce, access, and use?
Is it not just understandable but incapable of being misunderstood?

The Influence of Shapes and Colors

Are you certain that the shapes and colors you use convey the right
message and mood? (For guidance, we recommend Color Image Scale
by Shigenobu Kobayashi as a useful color guide.)
What do your colors convey?
What do they fail to convey?

Appealing to Feeling
Does your message appeal strongly to the emotions, or is it merely
rational?
Have you identified the emotional forces that drive people to your products
and those that might drive them away?
Do you know the emotional forces that drive people to choose your
competitors?
How can you address and counter them?
Optimism
Is your message presented optimistically?
Is it focused on achieving good outcomes rather than on avoiding bad
ones?

Conquering Our Attention-Deficit Disorder

Are you communicating so vividly that even people talking on their cell
phones will notice, or are you too easy to overlook when other stimuli
reach your prospective purchasers?
Are you making sure you get not just attention but the sustained attention
that makes you familiar to prospects so they are comfortable with
choosing you?
Are you getting attention in an honest and authentic way?

The Dominant Force of Expectations

Do you create the expectation that your product or service will be
exceptional?
Are you using all your marketing channels to create the impression of
excellence?
And are you managing all your processes to ensure that you regularly meet,
and sometimes exceed, those expectations?
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One muggy August afternoon in 1987, three months after my son Will was
born, a TV reporter stopped me at an intersection of 11th and Nicollet in
downtown Minneapolis.
“What do you think giving birth would be like?” he asked.
His timing was perfect.
At that moment I pictured Will’s mother, Valerie, during labor, flashing
looks at me that looked not just pained but homicidal. Fortunately, her
anesthesiologist saved us both by injecting Val with huge doses of morphine.
So until now, whenever I recalled my favorite book acknowledgment, in
which James Simon Kunen compared writing a book to having a baby
—“Both bring something new into the world, and both are a pain in the a
—”—I’d always thought, “That’s clever, but writing a book doesn’t make you
hurt all over.” That was until now.
I used to run 110 miles a week; that was easier. After edit eighteen on this
book, I stopped counting. The table of contents may be the most edited in
publishing history. I changed a single verb in the Beatles story six times; I
beat up that poor word so many times that I started to fear it might retaliate.
Fortunately, many people helped on the birth of this one.
Rick Wolff, Leila Porteous, and everyone else at Hachette have praised,
paid, and waited patiently throughout our sixteen-year partnership; L&B
McCree and Bernadette Evangelist always make my ideas look better; Kristen
Azzara and Bob Castillo fixed everything else.
Stanford’s David Potter’s ovation-provoking course on the American
character inspired this book, and my other teachers—Theodor Geisel, John
McPhee, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., David Kennedy, Paul Robinson, James
Robinson, Robert Horn, Cliff Rowe, William Zinsser, and William Clebsch—
still influence me. I’d never have met most of those men were it not for Fred
Hargadon and his admissions staff at Stanford, who in 1969 placed a wild bet
on an underachiever from an Oregon town of sixty-five people. Thank you,
everyone.
Larry Espel introduced me to Thomas Gilovich, whose work changed how
I think, what I write, and what I advise.
Anyone who writes a book like this must be under some spell of Dr. Ellen
J. Langer, who one day might be remembered as the pioneer of the great
revolution of this century: how we think about ourselves.
The editors of Science Daily, Arts & Letters, and Reveries nicely
summarize news in psychology, culture, and consumer behavior and gave me
several ideas.
Twenty-two years ago my first editor, Steve Kaplan, advised me, “Tell
stories.” Every time I thank him for that, Steve acts as if it never happened. It
did, Steve.
Years later, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated that I needn’t rush those
stories, a lesson that helped me discover even more.
Three men have been special inspirations: Roger McGuinn, best known
for leading The Byrds; John Lloyd Young, the Tony Award–winning actor in
Jersey Boys; and Brandon Flowers of The Killers.
My father Harry and mother Alice promised my life would turn out nicely
if I listened to them. Before they died—Dad much too young, mom four
months before I began this manuscript—I hoped they realized they were right
and that I was grateful. I still am.
Will, Harry, Cole, and Cooper always asked, “How’s the book going?” and
give me the spirit that infuses my books at their sunniest.
My remarkable sister Becky and her husband Jim—a delightful marriage
of art and science—and brother David look smarter to me every week.
Neroli Lacey, Pam Haros, and Ty Votaw always listen hard and speak
gently and provided valuable feedback. Thanks to you, too, Tyler Pace.
Laura, Kevin, Chirsty, Jim, Alex, Rachelle, and Auri of Burger Jones; Jen,
Luke, Brianna, Eddie, Abby, Stevie, Shauna, Merrit, Kryn, and Kate at
Caribou Coffee. Thanks for not charging rent for the tables.
I am indebted and grateful to Jason Damberg and Suzanne Remington, for
reasons they know well.
Peter Glanville, Jim Stein, Jim Rockwell, Tim Klein, Molly Gillin, and
Stephanie Prem, all of Lowry Hill, I’ve loved our ride.
As always, thank you Cliff Greene—and Kim, too.
Midway through this book’s creation, The Duke and his saintly companion
introduced me to their faith. Later on those Sunday nights and many others,
we sat under bright moons that lit up their cobbled steps while we kept alive
the world’s cigar, gin, and wine industries and talked until we were drowsy.
On my last day, I will remember those nights.
If the Olympics ever adds Tandem Laughing, Kevin McGregor and I will
one day stand atop the medal stand as the “Star-Spangled Banner” plays. Its
final notes will prompt tears down my cheeks, and Kevin to lean over and
whisper something about a blonde in the second row. Everyone needs a Kevin
McGregor, but decades on earth convince me: There’s only one.
 On December 13, 2009, Rita Lundgren, who had lived for twenty-one
years in my snapshot memory of her, reappeared. By Christmas Eve I learned
that she has a gift like my sister’s, a painter’s gift for seeing. Although she
arrived late, Rita gave wise advice, and her spirit jumped right in here. You
can hear it in my introduction and summary and are hearing it now.
All my life, I’ve been blessed to have lived among gifted people like
Kevin and Rita. My mother’s cooking attracted praise from the legendary chef
James Beard, and my father Harry eliminated any need in our home for
encyclopedias. Of three Rhodes Scholar friends, my best friend John Tillman,
by his legendary freshman feat of writing a twenty-two-page research paper
on the Albigensian Crusade entirely from memory, showed me that I needed
to work much harder, particularly after my humbling afternoon two weeks
later when I saw his professor’s note on the paper: “With minor revisions, this
could be the seminal work on the subject.” Several friends inspired me by
winning national championships and Olympic medals, which today are buried
in their sock drawers because those medals are merely among their many
accomplishments.
The last of these women and men became widely known for their gifts, but
everyone listed here has a gift that he or she shared with me. I am incredibly
grateful—damp-eyed as I write this. You make me know how lucky I am.
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HARRY BECKWITH has advised companies around the world, including

Target, Microsoft, and twenty-two other Fortune 200 companies, focusing on
marketing and consumer behavior, and has won the American Marketing
Association’s highest award.
His previous books are required in business schools worldwide, have sold
over 900,000 copies in twenty-four translations, and have been New York
Times, Wall Street Journal, and Business Week best-sellers. Selling the
Invisible appears on numerous “best business books of all time” lists.
Harry is an award-winning lecturer and speaker, having addressed
graduate business schools including Stanford, Wharton, Chicago, NYU Stern,
Carlson, Technologio de Monterrey (Mexico), and Amity (Delhi, India), and
companies and groups in twenty-one other countries.
His background in American history and culture traces to his
undergraduate years at Stanford University, from which he graduated Phi Beta
Kappa in history. He has written extensive papers on the Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty of 1962, the evolution of American entertainment forms, the 1765–
1771 Regulator controversy in North Carolina, and the relationship between
technology and American values, a senior thesis that was made part of
permanent exhibit of the Ford Foundation.
He also has written documentaries on the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
for the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum; on Hubert Humphrey’s landmark
speech on civil rights at the 1942 Democratic National Convention, for the
Hubert Humphrey Museum; and on Lost Twin Cities, an acclaimed
documentary produced for Minnesota Public Television. As a law clerk to a
federal judge in 1976, after receiving his doctorate of jurisprudence degree
and serving as editor-in-chief of the Oregon Law Review, he authored the U.S.
District Court opinion for Wilson vs. Chancellor, still considered a major
American case on freedom of speech.
As a careful reader of this book might suspect, he’s also a former national-
class marathoner (and cofounder of a famous road race, the Cascade Run Off)
and former college disc jockey, as well as the writer of three pop—but not
popular—songs.
He is the proud father of three sons—Harry IV, Walter William, and Cole
—and a daughter Cooper; a member of the Stanford University Board of
Athletic Advisors; and a participant in several initiatives aimed at improving
American education.
Harry can be reached at beckwithpartners.com, read on Twitter, or emailed
directly—at invisble@bitstream.net (please first notice the missing letter “i”)
or beckwithpartners.com. Please know that he returns emails—in English,
Spanish, Hungarian, and Turkish—with a speed that has stunned
correspondents from all over the world.
Recognized as one of the world’s most prestigious business imprints,
Business Plus specializes in publishing books that are on the cutting edge.
Like you, to be successful we always strive to be ahead of the curve.
Business Plus titles encompass a wide range of books and interests—
including important business management works, state-of-the-art personal
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 Acclaim for

Unthinking

“Beautifully showcases his strength as a marketer.”

—Chattanooga Times Free Press (TN)

“Amazing. The master of humanistic insights on marketing now turns his

attention to American culture. One reference after the next, each insightful on
its own, but connecting into a brilliant (and useful) view of the world.”
—Derek Sivers, Founder, CD Baby

“Should not be sold as a book—it should be sold as a secret weapon. Some

books are filled with theory. UNTHINKING is filled with gems and ‘a-ha!’
moments.”
—Mitch Joel, President, TwistImage; bestselling author of Six
Pixels of Separation

“Harry Beckwith’s insight into the minds of consumers is compelling,

engaging, and masterful.”
—Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com; bestselling author of
Delivering Happiness

“Grabbed me from the first page. Harry Beckwith serves up the perfect blend
of evidence, deft storytelling, and one useful (and often surprising) tidbit after
another.”
—Robert Sutton , Stanford University professor and bestselling
author of Good Boss, Bad Boss

“Harry Beckwith is a man of uncommon wisdom who has gotten that way
through unthinking. You can, too, by reading this book.”
—Ty Votaw, Executive Vice President, Communications +
International Affairs, PGA TOUR
 Thank you for buying this e-book, published by
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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mustang: An American Classic, Mike Mueller

Iacocca, Lee Iacocca and William Novak
A Hard Day’s Write, Steve Turner
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Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Greil Marcus
American Gothic: The Biography of Grant Wood’s American Masterpiece,
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The Creators, Daniel J. Boorstin
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How We Know What Isn’t So, Thomas Gilovich
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The Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione
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Stumbling Into Happiness, Daniel Gilbert
Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense, Jeffrey Pfeffer and
Robert I. Sutton
The Knowing-Doing Gap, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton
Influence, Robert B. Cialdini
The Marketing Imagination, Theodore Levitt
The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, David Hackett
Fischer
Remembering Denny, Calvin Trillin
The White Album, Joan Didion
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Trust, Francis Fukuyama
Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt
“The Unicycling Clown Phenomenon: Talking, Walking, and Driving With
Cell Phone Users,” Ira E. Hyman, Applied Cognitive Psychology 24 (9),
December 2009.
“If It’s Hard to Read, It’s Hard to Do,” Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz,
Psychological Science 19 (10), May 2008, 987–988.
“The Dark Side of Self- and Social Perception: Black Uniforms and
Aggression in Professional Sports,” Mark G. Frank and Thomas Gilovich,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54(1), January 1988, 74–
85.
“Predicting Short-Term Stock Fluctuations by Using Processing Fluency,”
Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103(24), June 13,
2006, 9369–9372.
“The Keats Heuristic: Rhyme as Reason in Aphorism Interpretation,”
Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh, Poetics 26(4), May 1999,
235–244.
“Red Enhances Human Performance In Contests,” Russell A. Hill and Robert
A. Barton, Nature 435(293), May 19, 2005, 1226–1229.
“Blue or Red? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task
Performances,” Ravi Mehta and Rui (Juliet) Zhu, Science 27 323(5918),
February 27, 2009, 1226–1229.
“The Bidder’s Curse,” Young Han Lee and Ulrike Malmendier, NBER
Working Paper No. W13699, December 2007.
“Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Daniel Kahneman
and Amos Tversky, Econometrica 47(2), March 1979, 263–291.
“You Are How You Eat: Fast Food and Impatience,” Chen-Bo Zhong and
Sanford E. DeVoe, Psychological Science 21(5), May 2010, 619–622.
“Mind-Set Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect,” Alia Crum and Ellen
Langer, Psychological Science 18(2), February 2007, 165–171.
For video of the “gorilla in the basketball game” experiment, see
http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html
For the footage of Stuart Brown’s presentation on play and the polar bear and
husky encounter, see
 www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital.html
For added insight into the counterintuitive idea that trying to scare us into
doing something—fastening our seat belts or stopping smoking, for
example—can actually stimulate us to engage in that hazardous activity,
see “When Scary Messages Backfire: Influence of Dispositional
Cognitive Avoidance on the Effectiveness of Threat Communications,”
Steffen Nestler and Boris Egloff, Journal of Research in Personality
44(1), February 2010, 137–141.

Science Daily: Consumer Behavior News

www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain/consumer_behavior/
Best summary of current consumer research.

Predictably Irrational.com, Dan Ariely

http://predictablyirrational.com
Useful resource from the author of a book by the same name.

The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/03/a_science_of_medical_performan.php
Ruminations of a bright new thinker.

Metafilter
www.metafilter.com
Outstanding trend-spotting source from thousands of nonmainstream stories.

PsyBlog
www.spring.org.uk/
Exceptional source on psychology based in the UK.

Mind Hacks
http://mindhacks.com/
Excellent source on psychology and the workings of the human brain.

Arts and Letters Daily

aldaily.com
The creation of Denis Dutton, a philosophy professor from New Zealand and
author of The Art Instinct, a site maintained by the Chronicle of Higher
Education and widely regarded as the Internet’s best source for culture
 and ideas. Named the world’s best website by the Observer. Added bonus:
the best teaser headlines in journalism.

Reveries.com
The valuable brainchild of Tim Manners, author of Relevance. An excellent
daily summary of news in marketing, drawing on the New York Times,
Wall Street Journal, and other leading sources, with a special focus on
retail and shopper marketing.

The New York Times, 2003–2009 and select older issues

Business Week, 1994–2009 and select older issues
The Wall Street Journal, 2003–2009
Fortune, 1994–2009 and select older issues
Business 2.0, 1995–2009 and select older issues
Inc., 1992–2009 and select older issues
The Economist, select topics
The New Yorker, select issues
Vanity Fair, select issues
Rolling Stone, select issues
Billboard, select issues
 CONTENTS

Welcome
Dedication
Introduction
Deciding Without Thinking
The Very Strange Case of Kobe Bryant
THE FORCES AND THEIR SOURCES

1. Our Childhoods
I. Our Love of Play
All Play, Some Work
eBay and Our Other Toys
Fridays at Maine South: Forever Young
II. Our Love of Surprise
“Chasing Pavements” Up “Solsbury Hill”: How Music Gets Us
Riddles & Rhymes & Theming Lines
Issaquah’s Wizards of Surprise
III. Our First Love: Stories
The Story Behind 60 Minutes
The Great Communicator’s Secret
George Eliot’s Grandfather’s Wild Ride
J. Peterman’s Fantasies
The Storytellers of Stumptown
The Moral of Two Stories: Nike and Scion
IV. Little Versus Big
The Moral of a Hundred Childhood Stories
Underdogs in the Mist

2. Our Culture
I. Me: The Great Individualists
 What Howard Hughes and 50 Cent Showed Us
Getting Bonnies and Clydes to Buckle Up
The Solved Mystery of the $70 Watch
Our Wish to Stand Apart
Tattoos, Nightsters, and Design-Us-Ourselves
The Rise and Fall of Krispy Kreme
The Age of Me: Talking to Us
II. We: The Great Togetherists
American Gothic, Chris Isaak, and Cast Away
We Are the World
Tall, Dark, and Handsome? The Lesson of American Actors
The American Way: Trust None of Us But All of Us
Following the Crowds over the Cliffs to the Malls: 2008–2010
The Hog’s Wonderful Tale: CAAS
Panera’s Invisible Secret
III. Lovers of the Familiar
What Was in the Marshall Field’s Name?
The Fall, Rise, and Fall of The Mary Tyler Moore Show
How the Mop Tops Cleaned Up
A Sunday with Christina Applegate
How the New Gets Old: The Ocean That Stopped Roaring
GM and Ford: Did Their Familiarity Breed Our Contempt?
IV. Eternal Optimists
Hello, Norma Jeane
Is Irrational Exuberance in Americans’ DNA?
Three Masters at Tapping Our Optimism

3. Our Eyes
I. Our Need for Beauty
Lessons from Our Keyboard
Staring at a Hand Ax: Our 400,000-Year-Old Urge
What Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast Taught Us
II. What Is Beautiful to Us?
The Circle and the Cube: The Shape of Beauty
The New Beautiful
 Going with the Cognitive Flow
The Masters of the New Beautiful
III. Our Eyes’ Sheer Force: Five Studies
The Curious Case of Kensington High Street
Golfers in Red and Goalies in Black: How Color Changes the Game
The Mustang That Was Really a Bird
Vitaminwater’s Sleight of Hand
The Man Who Crushed the Box

Unthinking: The Road Ahead

I. Looking Back to Our Future
II. The Eulogy and the Six-Inch Nail: The Startling Power of Expectations
III. Why Wealthy Runners Limp: The New Frugalistas
IV. The Cycling Clown and Wandering Gorilla: Our National Attention
Deficit

Summing Up
The Unthinking Marketer’s Checklist
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Acclaim for Unthinking
Newsletters
Bibliography
Copyright
 Copyright

Copyright © 2011 by Harry Beckwith

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