عمومی کردن

Public

Ken Segall was Steve Jobs’s right hand man. For twelve years, Ken worked as creative director at Jobs’s ad agency. He started with Apple’s account in the early 1980s. When Jobs was fired and started NeXT Computer, Ken moved to be part of the project. And when Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, Ken came along as well. Ken worked on the “Think Different” campaign, was on the team that developed the “Crazy Ones” ad, and started the iCraze by naming Apple’s bulbous all-in-one egg-looking desktop the iMac.

During those later years, Ken’s team would sit down with Jobs every two weeks. It was a status meeting of sorts. Ken’s team would share everything they were working on advertisingwise: promising ideas, new copy, and potential layouts. Jobs would do the same. He would update Ken’s team on how Apple was doing, which products were selling, and whether anything new was coming down the pipeline that they might need a campaign for.

One week, Jobs approached Ken’s team with a conundrum. Jobs was obsessed with the absolute best possible user experience. He always put the customer first. Customers shelled out all that money; they should be treated right. So Apple carried this mantra into all aspects of product design. From opening the box to calling for tech support. Ever notice the slow delay when you first pull the cover off the box of your new iPhone? That’s because Apple has been hard at work designing that experience to provide the perfect feeling of luxury and heft.

The conundrum concerned the design of the new PowerBook G4. The laptop was going to be a marvel of technology and design. Its titanium body was revolutionary—stronger than steel yet lighter than aluminum. And, at less than one inch thick, it would be one of the thinnest laptops ever.

But Jobs wasn’t concerned about the laptop’s strength or weight. He was concerned about the direction of the logo.

The cover of PowerBook laptops always had a small apple with a bite taken out of the side. Consistent with their user focus, Apple wanted the logo to look right to the owner of the computer. This was particularly important given the frequency with which laptops are opened and closed. People stuff the laptops in their backpacks or bags only to pull them out later and start working. And when you pull the laptop out it’s hard to know which way is up. Which side has the latch and so should face toward you when you set the laptop down on a desk or table?

Jobs wanted this experience to be as fluid as possible, so he used the logo as a compass. It faced the user when the computer was closed so that the user could easily orient the laptop when he set it down.

But the problem came when a person opened the laptop. Once the users had found a seat at the coffee shop and sat down with their macchiato, they would open their computer to start working. And once they opened the laptop the logo would flip. To everyone around them the logo would be upside down.

Jobs was a big believer in branding, and seeing all those upside-down logos wasn’t a great feeling. He was even worried it might be hurting the brand.

So Jobs asked Ken’s team a question. Which is more important—to have the logo look right to the customers before they opened their PowerBook, or to make it look right to the rest of the world when the laptop was in use?

—————

As you can see the next time you glance at an Apple laptop, Ken and Jobs reversed their long-held beliefs and flipped the logo. The reason? Observability. Jobs realized that seeing others do something makes people more likely to do it themselves.

But the key word here is “seeing.” If it’s hard to see what others are doing, it’s hard to imitate it. Making something more observable makes it easier to imitate. Thus a key factor in driving products to catch on is public visibility. If something is built to show, it’s built to grow.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF IMITATION

Imagine you’re in an unfamiliar city. You’re out of town on a business trip or vacationing with a friend and by the time you finally land, check into the hotel, and take a quick shower you’re famished. It’s time for dinner.

You want to go somewhere good, but you don’t know the city that well. The concierge is busy and you don’t want to spend a lot of time reading reviews on the Internet, so you decide to just find a place nearby.

But when you step out onto the bustling street you’re struck by dozens of options. A cute Thai place with a purple awning. A hip-looking tapas bar. An Italian bistro. How do you choose?

If you’re like most people you’d probably follow a time-tested rule of thumb: look for a restaurant full of people. If lots of people are eating there, it’s probably good. If a place is empty, you should probably keep on walking.

This is just one example of a much broader phenomenon. People often imitate those around them. They dress in the same styles as their friends, pick entrées preferred by other diners, and reuse hotel towels more when they think others are doing the same. People are more likely to vote if their spouse votes, more likely to quit smoking if their friends quit, and more likely to get fat if their friends become obese. Whether making trivial choices like what brand of coffee to buy or important decisions like paying their taxes, people tend to conform to what others are doing. Television shows use canned laugh tracks for this reason: people are more likely to laugh when they hear others laughing.

People imitate, in part, because others’ choices provide information. Many decisions we make on a daily basis are like choosing a restaurant in a foreign city, albeit with a little more information. Which one is the salad fork again? What’s a good book to take on vacation? We don’t know the right answer, and even if we have some sense of what to do, we’re not entirely sure.

So to help resolve our uncertainty, we often look to what other people are doing and follow that. We assume that if other people are doing something, it must be a good idea. They probably know something we don’t. If our tablemates seem to be using the smaller fork to pick at the arugula, we do the same. If lots of people seem to be reading that new John Grisham thriller, we buy it for our upcoming vacation.

Psychologists call this idea “social proof.” This is why baristas and bartenders seed the tip jar at the beginning of their shift by dropping in a handful of ones and maybe a five. If the tip jar is empty, their customers may assume that other people aren’t really tipping and decide not to tip much themselves either. But if the tip jar is already brimming with money, they assume that everyone must be tipping, and thus they should tip as well.

Social proof even plays a role in matters of life and death.

Imagine one of your kidneys fails. Your body relies on this organ to filter the toxins and waste products from your blood, but when it stops working, your whole body suffers. Sodium builds up, your bones weaken, and you’re at risk of developing anemia or heart disease. If not treated quickly, you will die.

More than 40,000 people in the United States come down with end-stage renal disease every year. Their kidneys fail for one reason or another and they have two options: either go through time-consuming back-and-forth visits to a treatment center three times a week for five-hour dialysis treatments, or get a kidney transplant.

But there are not enough kidneys available for transplant. Currently more than 100,000 patients are on the wait list; more than 4,000 new patients are added each month. Not surprisingly, people on the wait list for a kidney are eager to get one.

Imagine you are on that list. It is managed on a first-come, first-served basis, and available kidneys are offered first to people at the top of the list, who usually have been waiting the longest. You yourself have been waiting for months for an available kidney. You’re fairly low on the list, but finally one day you’re offered a potential match. You’d take it, right?

Clearly, people who need a kidney to save their lives should take one when offered. But surprisingly, 97.1 percent of kidney offers are refused.

Now, many of those refusals are based on the kidney not being a good match. In this respect, getting an organ transplant is a bit like getting your car repaired. You can’t put a Honda carburetor in a BMW. Same with a kidney. If the tissue or blood type doesn’t match yours, the organ won’t work.

But when she looked at hundreds of kidney donations, MIT professor Juanjuan Zhang found that social proof also leads people to turn down available kidneys. Say you are the one hundredth person on the list. A kidney would have first been offered to the first person on the list, then the second, and so on. So to finally reach you, it must have been turned down by ninety-nine other people. This is where social proof comes into play. If so many others have refused this kidney, people assume it must not be very good. They infer it is low quality and are more likely to turn it down. In fact, such inferences lead one in every ten people who refuse a kidney to do so in error. Thousands of patients turn down kidneys they should have accepted. Even though people can’t communicate directly with others on the list, they make their decisions based on others’ behavior.

—————

Similar phenomena play out all the time.

In New York City, Halal Chicken and Gyro offers delicious platters of chicken and lamb, lightly seasoned rice, and pita bread. New York magazine ranked it as one of the top twenty food carts in the city, and people wait up to an hour to get one of Halal’s tasty but inexpensive meals. Go during certain times of day and the line will stretch all the way down the block.

Now I know what you are thinking. People must wait that long because the food is really good. And you’re partially right: the food is quite good.

But the same owners operate an almost identical food cart called Halal Guys right across the street. Same food, same packaging, basically an identical product. But there is no line. In fact, Halal Guys has never developed the same devout following as its sibling. Why?

Social proof. People assume that the longer the line, the better the food must be.

This herd mentality even affects the type of careers people consider. Every year I ask my second-year MBA students to do a short exercise. Half the students are asked what they thought they wanted to do with their life right when they started the MBA program. The other half are asked what they want to do now. Neither group gets to see the question the other was asked and responses are anonymous.

The results are striking. Before they start the MBA program, students have a broad range of ambitions. One wanted to reform the health care system, another wanted to build a new travel website, and a third wanted to get involved in the entertainment industry. Someone wanted to run for political office and another student thought about becoming an entrepreneur. A handful say they want to go into investment banking or consulting. Overall, they possess a diverse set of interests, goals, and careers paths.

The responses from students when asked what they want to do a year into the program are much more homogeneous and concentrated. More than two-thirds say they want to get into investment banking or consulting, with a small sprinkling of other careers.

The convergence is remarkable. Sure, people may learn about different opportunities during the MBA program, but part of this herding is driven by social influence. People aren’t sure what career to choose, so they look to others. And it snowballs. While less than 20 percent of people might have been interested in investment banking and consulting going into the program, that number is larger than any other career. A few people see that 20 percent and switch. A few more see those people switch, and they follow along. Soon the number is 30 percent. Which makes other people even more likely to switch. Soon that 20 percent has become much larger. So through social influence this initially small advantage gets magnified. Social interaction led students who originally preferred different paths to go in the same direction.

Social influence has a big effect on behavior, but to understand how to use it to help products and ideas catch on, we need to understand when its effects are strongest. And that brings us to Koreen Johannessen.

THE POWER OF OBSERVABILITY

Koreen Johannessen started at the University of Arizona as a clinical social worker. Originally, she was hired by the mental health group to help students deal with problems like depression and drug abuse. But after years of treating students, Johannessen realized that she was working on the wrong end of the problem. Sure, she could try to fix the ongoing issues that afflicted students, but it would be much better to prevent them before they started. So Johannessen moved over to the campus health group and took over health education, eventually becoming the director of health promotion and preventive services.

As at most universities in the United States, one of the biggest issues at Arizona was alcohol abuse. More than three-quarters of American college students under the legal drinking age report drinking alcohol. But the bigger concern was the quantity that students consume. Forty-four percent of students binge-drink, and more than 1,800 U.S. college students die every year from alcohol-related injuries. Another 600,000 are injured while under the influence of alcohol. It’s a huge issue.

Johannessen addressed the problem head-on. She papered the campus with flyers detailing the negative consequences of bingeing. She placed ads in the school paper with information about how alcohol affects cognitive functioning and performance in school. She even set up a coffin at the student center with statistics about the number of alcohol-related deaths. But none of these initiatives seemed to put much of a dent in the problem. Simply educating students about the risks of alcohol didn’t seem to be enough.

So Johannessen tried asking the students how they felt about drinking.

Surprisingly, she found that most students said they were not comfortable with the drinking habits of their peers. Sure, they might enjoy a casual drink once in a while, just like most adults. But they weren’t into the heavy binge drinking they saw among other students. They spoke distastefully about the times they nursed a hungover roommate or held someone’s hair while she threw up in the toilet. So while their peers seemed fine with the drinking culture, they weren’t.

Johannessen was pleased. The fact that most students were against binge drinking seemed to bode well for eliminating the drinking problem—until she thought about it closely.

If most students were uncomfortable with the drinking culture, then why was it happening in the first place? Why were students drinking so much if they don’t actually like it?

Because behavior is public and thoughts are private.

Put yourself in a college student’s situation. When you look around, you’d see a lot of drinking. You’d see tailgates at the football games, keg parties at the frat house, and open bars at the sorority formal. You’d witness your peers drinking and seeming happy about it, so you’d assume that you are the outlier and that everyone else likes drinking more than you do. So you’d have another drink.

But what students don’t realize is that everyone is having similar thoughts. Their peers are having the same experience. They see others drinking, so they drink, too. And the cycle continues because people can’t read one another’s thoughts. If they could, they’d realize that everyone felt the same way. And they wouldn’t feel all this social proof compelling them to drink as much.

For a more familiar example, think about the last time you sat through a bewildering PowerPoint presentation. Something about equity diversification or supply chain reorganization. At the end of the talk, the speaker probably asked the audience if anyone had any questions.

The response?

Silence.

But not because everyone else understood the presentation. The others were probably just as bewildered as you were. But while they would have liked to raise their hands, they didn’t because each one is worried that he or she is the only person who didn’t understand. Why? Because no one else was asking questions. No one saw any public signal that others were confused so everyone keeps his doubts to him- or herself. Because behavior is public and thoughts are private.

—————

The famous phrase “Monkey see, monkey do” captures more than just the human penchant for imitation. People can imitate only when they can see what others are doing. College students may personally be against binge drinking, but they binge because that is what they observe others doing. A restaurant might be extremely popular, but if it’s hard to see inside (e.g., the front windows are frosted), there is no way passersby can use that information to inform their own choices.

Observability has a huge impact on whether products and ideas catch on. Say a clothing company introduces a new shirt style. If you see someone wearing it and decide you like it, you can go buy the same shirt, or something similar. But this is much less likely to happen with socks.

Why?

Because shirts are public and socks are private. They’re harder to see.

The same goes for toothpaste versus cars. You probably don’t know what kind of toothpaste your neighbors use. It’s hidden inside their house, inside their bathroom, inside a cabinet. You’re more likely to know what car they drive. And because car preferences are easier to observe, it’s much more likely that your neighbors’ purchase behavior can influence yours.

My colleagues Blake McShane, Eric Bradlow, and I tested this idea using data on 1.5 million car sales. Would a neighbor buying a new car be enough to get you to buy a new one?

Sure enough, we found a pretty impressive effect. People who lived in, say, Denver, were more likely to buy a new car if other Denverites had bought new cars recently. And the effect was pretty big. Approximately one out of every eight cars sold was because of social influence.

Even more impressive was the role of observability in these effects. Cities vary in how easy it is to see what other people are driving. People in Los Angeles tend to commute by car, so they are more likely to see what others are driving than New Yorkers, who commute by subway. In sunny places like Miami, you can more easily see what the person next to you is driving than in rainy cities like Seattle. By affecting observability, these conditions also determined the effect of social influence on auto purchases. People were more influenced by others’ purchases in places like Los Angeles and Miami, where it is easier to see what others were driving. Social influence was stronger when behavior was more observable.

Observable things are also more likely to be discussed. Ever walked into someone’s office or home and inquired about a weird paperweight on the desk or a colorful art print on the living room wall? Imagine if those items were locked in a safe or tucked away in the basement. Would they get talked about as much? Probably not. Public visibility boosts word of mouth. The easier something is to see, the more people talk about it.

Observability also spurs purchase and action. As we discussed in the Triggers chapter, cues in the environment not only boost word of mouth but also remind people about things they already wanted to buy or do. You may have meant to eat healthier or visit that new website your friend mentioned, but without a visible trigger to jog your memory, you’re more likely to forget. The more public a product or service is, the more it triggers people to take action.

So how can products or ideas be made more publicly observable?

MAKING THE PRIVATE PUBLIC . . . WITH MOUSTACHES

Every fall I teach about sixty MBA students at the Wharton School, and by the end of October I’ve gotten some sense of most of the students in the class. I know who is going to be five minutes late every day, who will be the first to raise a hand, and who will be dressed like a prima donna.

So I was a bit surprised a few years ago when I walked into class in early November to see what I’d thought was a pretty buttoned-down guy sporting a big moustache. It wasn’t simply that he had forgotten to shave; he had a full handlebar with ends almost ready to curl up on the sides. He looked like a cross between Rollie Fingers and a villain in an old black-and-white movie.

At first I thought he must be trying a facial hair experiment. But then when I looked around the room I noticed two other new moustache devotees. A trend seemed to be catching on. What precipitated the sudden outburst of moustaches?

—————

Every year, cancer claims the lives of more than 4.2 million men worldwide. More than 6 million new cases are diagnosed each year. Thanks to generous donations, great headway has been made in research and treatment. But how can organizations that work to fight this disease leverage social influence to increase donations?

Unfortunately, as with many causes, whether you support a particular cancer fund is typically a private matter. If you’re like most people, you probably have little idea which of your neighbors, coworkers, or even friends have donated to help fight this disease. So there is no way for their behavior to influence yours or vice versa.

And that is where the moustaches come in.

It all started one Sunday afternoon in 2003. A group of friends from Melbourne, Australia, were sitting around drinking beers. The conversation meandered in various directions and finally ended up on 1970s and 80s fashion. “What ever happened to the moustache?” one guy asked. A few beers more and they came up with a challenge: to see who could grow the best moustache. The word spread to their other friends, and eventually they had a small group of thirty people. All grew moustaches for the thirty days of November.

Everyone had so much fun that the next November they decided to do it again. But this time they decided to put a cause behind their efforts. Inspired by the work being done with breast cancer awareness, they wanted to do something similar for men’s health. So they formed the Movember Foundation and adopted the tagline “Changing the face of men’s health.” That year 450 guys raised $54,000 for the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia.

It grew from there. Next year there were more than 9,000 participants. The following year, more than 50,000. Soon the annual event started spreading around the world. In 2007, events were launched everywhere from Ireland and Denmark to South Africa and Taiwan. The organization has since raised more than $174 million worldwide. Not bad for a few tufts of facial hair.

Now, every November, men pledge to raise awareness and money by growing moustaches. The rules are simple. Start the first of the month with a clean-shaven face. For the rest of the month, grow and groom a moustache. Oh—and along the way, conduct yourself like a true country gentleman.

The Movember Foundation succeeded because they figured out how to make the private public. They figured out how to take support for an abstract cause—something not typically observable—and make it something that everyone can see. For the thirty days of November people who sport a moustache effectively become walking, talking billboards for the cause. As noted on Movember’s website, Through their actions and words they [participants] raise awareness by prompting private and public conversations around the often-ignored issue of men’s health.

And start conversation it does. Seeing someone you know suddenly sprout a moustache generates discussion. People usually gossip a bit among themselves until someone gets up the courage to ask the wearer what prompted the new facial hair. And when he explains, he shares the social currency and generates new devotees. Each year I see more and more of my students sporting moustaches come November. Making the cause public helped it catch on more quickly than it ever could have otherwise.

—————

Most products, ideas, and behaviors are consumed privately. What websites do your coworkers like? Which ballot initiatives do your neighbors support? Unless they tell you, you may never know. And though that might not matter to you personally, it matters a lot for the success of organizations, businesses, and ideas. If people can’t see what others are choosing and doing, they can’t imitate them. And, like the binge-drinking college students, people might change their behavior for the worse because they feel their views aren’t supported.* Solving this problem requires making the private public. Generating public signals for private choices, actions, and opinions. Taking what was once an unobservable thought or behavior and transforming it into a more observable one.

Koreen Johannessen was able to reduce Arizona students’ drinking by making the private public. She created ads in the school newspaper that merely stated the true norm. That most students had only one or two drinks, and 69 percent have four or fewer drinks, when they party. She didn’t focus on the health consequences of drinking, she focused on social information. By showing students that the majority of their peers weren’t bingeing, she helped them realize that others felt the same way. That most students didn’t want to binge. This corrected the false inferences students had made about others’ behavior and led them to reduce their own drinking as a result. By making the private public, Johannessen was able to decrease heavy drinking by almost 30 percent.

ADVERTISING ITSELF: SHARING HOTMAIL WITH THE WORLD

One way to make things more public is to design ideas that advertise themselves.

On July 4, 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith introduced a new e-mail service called Hotmail. At the time, most people got their e-mail through Internet service providers like AOL. You’d pay a monthly fee, dial up from home using a phone line, and access your messages through the AOL interface. It was restricting. You could connect only from the place where you had the service installed. You were chained to one computer.

But Hotmail was different. It was one of the first Web-based e-mail services, which allowed people to access their inbox from any computer anywhere in the world. All they needed was an Internet connection and a Web browser. Independence Day was chosen for the announcement to symbolize how the service freed people from being locked into their current provider.

Hotmail was a great product, and it also scored well on a number of the word-of-mouth drivers we’ve talked about so far. At the time, it was quite remarkable to be able to access e-mail from anywhere. So early adopters liked talking about it because it gave them Social Currency. The product also offered users significant benefits over other e-mail services (for starters, it was free!), so many people shared it for its Practical Value.

But the creators of Hotmail did more than just create a great product. They also cleverly leveraged observability to help their product catch on.

Every e-mail sent from a Hotmail account was like a short plug for the growing brand. At the bottom was a message and link that simply said “Get Your Private, Free E-mail from Hotmail at www.hotmail.com.” Every time current Hotmail customers sent an e-mail, they also sent prospective customers a bit of social proof—an implicit endorsement for this previously unknown service.

And it worked. In a little over a year Hotmail signed up more than 8.5 million subscribers. Soon after, Microsoft bought the burgeoning service for $400 million. Since then more than 350 million users have signed up.

Apple and BlackBerry have adopted the same strategy. The signature lines at the bottom of their e-mails often say “Sent using BlackBerry” or “Sent from my iPhone.” Users can easily change this default message to something else (one of my colleagues changed his signature to say “Sent by Carrier Pigeon”), but most people don’t, in part because they like the Social Currency the notes provide. And by leaving these notes on their e-mail, people also help spread awareness about the brand and influence others to try it.

—————

All these examples involve products that advertise themselves. Every time people use the product or service they also transmit social proof or passive approval because usage is observable.

Many companies apply this idea through prominent branding. Abercrombie & Fitch, Nike, and Burberry all garnish their products with brand names or distinctive logos and patterns. For Sale signs broadcast which Realtor the seller is working with.

Following the notion that more is better, some companies have increased the size of their logos. Ralph Lauren has always been known for its characteristic polo player, but its Big Pony shirts made this famous emblem sixteen times larger. Not to be outdone in the escalation for logo supremacy, Lacoste made a similar move. The alligator on its Oversized Croc polo shirt is so large it looks as if it will bite the arm off of any person wearing it.

But large logos aren’t the only way products can advertise themselves. Take Apple’s decision to make iPod headphones white. When Apple first introduced the iPod, there was lots of competition in the digital music player space. Diamond Multimedia, Creative, Compaq, and Archos all offered players, and music on one company’s device couldn’t easily be transferred to another. Further, it wasn’t clear which, if any, of these competing standards would stick around, and whether it was worth switching from a portable CD player or Walkman to buy this new, expensive device.

But because most devices came with black headphones, Apple’s white headphone cords stood out. By advertising themselves, the headphones made it easy to see how many other people were switching away from the traditional Walkman and adopting the iPod. This was visible social proof that suggested the iPod was a good product and made potential adopters feel more comfortable about purchasing it as well.

Shapes, sounds, and a host of other distinctive characteristics can also help products advertise themselves. Pringles come in a unique tube. Computers using the Microsoft operating system make a distinctive sound when they boot up. In 1992, French footwear designer Christian Louboutin felt his shoes lacked energy. Looking around, he noticed the striking red Chanel nail polish an employee was wearing. That’s it! he thought, and applied the polish to his shoes’ soles. Now Louboutin shoes always come with red-lacquered soles, making them instantly recognizable. They’re distinctive and easy to see, even for people who know little about the brand.

Similar ideas can be applied to a host of products and services. Tailors give away suit bags imprinted with the tailor’s name. Nightclubs use sparklers to broadcast when someone pays to get bottle service. Tickets usually sit in people’s pockets, but if theater companies and minor league teams could use buttons or stickers as the “ticket” instead, “tickets” would be much more publicly observable.

Designing products that advertise themselves is a particularly powerful strategy for small companies or organizations that don’t have a lot of resources. Even when there is no money to buy television ads or a spot in the local paper, existing customers can act as advertisements if the product advertises itself. It’s like advertising without an advertising budget.

—————

A product, idea, or behavior advertises itself when people consume it. When people wear certain clothes, attend a rally, or use a website, they make it more likely that their friends, coworkers, and neighbors will see what they are doing and imitate it.

If a company or organization is lucky, people consume its product or service often. But what about the rest of the time? When consumers are wearing other clothes, supporting a different cause, or doing something else entirely? Is there something that generates social proof that sticks around even when the product is not being used or the idea is not top of mind?

Yes. And it’s called behavioral residue.

LIVESTRONG WRISTBANDS AS BEHAVIORAL RESIDUE

Scott MacEachern had a tough decision to make. In 2003, Lance Armstrong was a hot commodity. As his sponsor at Nike, MacEachern was trying to figure out the best way to harness all the attention Lance was getting.

Lance had a powerful story. Diagnosed with life-threatening testicular cancer seven years earlier, Lance had been given only a 40 percent chance of survival. But he surprised everyone not only by returning to cycling, but by coming back stronger than ever. Since his return, he had won the Tour de France an astounding five times in a row and inspired millions of people along the way. From fifteen-year-olds dealing with cancer to college students trying to stay in shape, Lance helped people to believe. If he could come back from cancer, they could overcome the challenges in their own lives. (Note that in the decade since 2003, it has become apparent that Armstrong may have achieved his success through the use of performance-enhancing drugs. But given the powerful success of Livestrong wristbands, and the Lance Armstrong Foundation more generally, it is worth considering how they became popular, outside of whether Armstrong’s personal story is tainted or not.) MacEachern wanted to capitalize on this enthusiasm. Lance had transcended sports. He had become not only a hero, but a cultural icon. MacEachern wanted to recognize Lance’s achievements and celebrate his upcoming attempt at a record sixth Tour de France victory. He also wanted to use the outpouring of interest and support to raise funds and awareness for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

MacEachern developed two potential ideas.

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

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

MacEachern liked the wristband idea, but when he pitched it to Lance’s advisors they weren’t convinced. The foundation thought the bands would be a dud. Bill Stapleton, Armstrong’s agent, thought they had no chance of success and called them “a stupid idea.” Even Armstrong was incredulous, saying, “What are we going to do with the 4.9 million that we don’t sell?” MacEachern was stuck. While he liked the wristband idea, he wasn’t sure it would fly. But then he made one seemingly innocuous decision that had a big impact on the product’s success. MacEachern made the wristbands yellow.

—————

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

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

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

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

It’s hard to know how well the ride across America would have done if Nike had implemented it. And it’s easy to Monday-morning-quarterback a successful strategy and say it was obviously the better choice. But regardless, one thing is clear: the wristband creates more behavioral residue than the cross-country ride ever could have. As MacEachern keenly noted: The nice thing about a wristband is that it lives on. The bike ride doesn’t. There’ll be pictures of the bike ride and people will talk about the bike ride, but unless it goes on every year—even if it does go on every year, it doesn’t live on as a reminder every day of this sort of stuff. But the wristband does.

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANTI-DRUG COMMERCIALS?

A sprightly, dark-haired teenager walks down the stairs of her apartment building. She’s wearing a pretty silver necklace and carrying a sweater in her hand. She could be on her way to work or to meet up with a friend for coffee. Suddenly a neighbor’s door opens and a voice whispers, “I got some good pot for you.” “No!” She scowls and hurries down the stairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They didn’t.

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

Because it made drug use more public.

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

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

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

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

As Hornik said,

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

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

Take the music industry. It thought it could stop illegal downloads by showing people how big the problem is. So the industry association’s website sternly warns people that “only 37 percent of music acquired by U.S. consumers . . . was paid for” and that in the past few years “approximately 30 billion songs were illegally downloaded.” But I’m not sure that message has the desired effect. If anything, it may have the opposite effect. Less than half of people are paying for their music? Wow. Seems like you’d have to be an idiot to pay for it then, right?

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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