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The four-letter code to selling anything | Derek Thompson | TEDxBinghamtonUniversity
The four-letter code to selling anything | Derek Thompson | TEDxBinghamtonUniversity
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21:09 · May 8, 2018
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0:14
For thousands of years,
0:15
some of the smartest people in the world have been asking themselves versions of
0:18
the same question.
0:20
Why do we like what we like?
0:22
Is there a formula for beauty?
0:26
For popularity?
0:27
For human affinity?
0:29
And the ancient Greeks said, yes, of course there is.
0:31
It's the golden ratio.
0:35
1.62 etc. etc. to 1.
0:36
And then the enlightenment enlightenment thinkers said, yes, of course there is.
0:39
It's It's Kant's theory of aesthetics.
0:43
But today, we don't have the golden ratio.
0:45
We don't have philosophers.
0:47
We have Google and Facebook.
0:49
We have advertisers.
0:51
And in the advertiser formula, the first variable is always novelty.
0:57
This is a scientific fact.
0:59
They actually went through, several decades ago,
1:02
all of the words they could possibly find in all the advertisements
1:04
that were out there.
1:06
And the most common word in all of those ads wasn't buy, wasn't now,
1:12
wasn't risk-free warranty.
1:15
It was new.
1:17
We are living in a cult of novelty.
1:22
Companies want us to like new things, to buy new things,
1:26
to crave new things.
1:28
But the truth is that we don't like novelty.
1:32
In fact, we hate it.
1:34
According to the mere exposure effect,
1:37
one of the oldest and most robust theories in the history of psychology,
1:42
the mere exposure of any stimulus to you over time will bias you toward
1:48
that stimulus.
1:50
In English, familiarity good.
1:53
And indeed, when you think about it, we seek out new songs.
1:57
But the songs that we most reliably enjoy are those with familiar chord structures
2:01
and timbers.
2:02
We seek out new movies.
2:04
But every year this century,
2:06
a majority of the top 10 films in America have been sequels, adaptations,
2:11
or reboots.
2:12
Familiar, familiar, familiar.
2:15
In fact, maybe the best proof of the power of familiarity is
2:18
that thing that is
2:19
so familiar to you,
2:21
your own face.
2:24
It turns out that people prefer the face they see in mirrors to the
2:29
face they see in photographs.
2:31
Maybe you have a friend who complains constantly about how he
2:34
or she looks in Facebook photos,
2:36
but is often constantly admiring his or herself in the mirror.
2:40
Well, this is not pure vanity.
2:42
This is mere exposure effect.
2:46
The face is slightly asymmetric.
2:48
We see different versions when we see a reflection versus a photo.
2:52
And if you're not a celebrity,
2:54
then the version you're most used to seeing is not in a photograph,
2:58
but rather in the most common reflection in the world, in a mirror.
3:01
You prefer that version of your face not
3:04
because it's you at your most beautiful,
3:06
but because it's you at your most familiar.
3:09
In fact, the power of familiarity seems
3:10
so deep that people think it must be written into our genetics.
3:14
The evolutionary theory for the preference for the familiar is
3:17
that if you're a hunter-gatherer
3:20
and you're the trawling the savanna of Africa
3:24
and you see a plant
3:26
or an animal and you recognize it,
3:29
that's a very good sign that plant or animal has not killed you yet.
3:33
So, of course you should prefer it.
3:38
But this creates an enormous problem for creators, for creative types.
3:42
Because I just told you
3:43
that people only like new things
3:46
if they're just like old things.
3:48
So, the question before us today is,
3:51
how do you balance familiarity
3:53
and surprise in such a way
3:55
as to design hits?
3:58
To design things that people love.
4:00
Is it possible to engineer a familiar surprise?
4:06
And to begin to answer that question,
4:08
I want to tell you a short story about a man who is a
4:10
hero of mine,
4:11
a hero of my book,
4:13
but also a man
4:14
that I would imagine 90 to 95% of this room does not know.
4:18
His name is Raymond Loewy.
4:20
And he designed the 20th century.
4:23
Raymond Loewy was a French orphan who came over to the United States after
4:28
World War I.
4:30
And his brother picked him up in a cab,
4:32
and this is in the 1920s where they drive down to downtown Manhattan where
4:36
one of the tallest buildings down there is the Equitable Building,
4:40
which looks a bit like a a tuning fork with sort of two large
4:43
uh buildings rising into the sky.
4:46
And Raymond Loewy takes an elevator to the top of this building
4:49
and he looks out over Manhattan from this vista.
4:52
And he's expecting from his dreams in Paris to see a world
4:56
that is beautiful,
4:58
that is round, that is feminine.
5:01
But the New York that unfurls in front of him is the exact opposite.
5:04
It's grungy.
5:05
It's noisy.
5:06
It's the hulkiness of the industrial age.
5:09
And Loewy makes a promise to himself and his brother.
5:12
He says, I'm going to devote the rest of my life to beautifying America
5:17
in my image.
5:18
And Loewy did just that.
5:20
Raymond Loewy designed the most famous car of the 20th century, the 1953 Studebaker.
5:26
He designed the most famous train and locomotive of the 20th century,
5:30
the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1.
5:32
He designed the modern Greyhound bus and the modern tractor,
5:35
the modern Coca-Cola fountain.
5:37
He designed that pencil sharpener
5:39
that looks like an egg with a little spindle coming out of it
5:41
that you've seen in a hundred thousand classrooms.
5:44
He designed the logos for Exxon and USPS.
5:48
He basically designed all of 1950s Americana.
5:53
And in fact, one day Raymond Loewy was hanging out with his friend
5:56
and he saw the president's plane take off
5:58
and he said,
6:00
it looks gaudy.
6:02
So, President Kennedy invited Loewy to the Oval Office where they sat on the
6:05
floor and cut little papers until they achieved the perfect design for Air Force
6:11
One.
6:12
And in fact, the design
6:13
that Raymond Loewy came up with there on the floor of the Oval Office
6:16
with JFK still adorns the most famous plane in the world today.
6:22
So, the question is,
6:24
what did this man possibly understand about human psychology
6:28
that he knew what we wanted from planes
6:30
and trains and automobiles?
6:32
This man was like Don Draper meets Steve Jobs for the 20th century.
6:36
He understood everything.
6:38
And fortunately for us, Raymond Loewy had a grand theory of everything.
6:43
It was called Maya.
6:46
M A Y A.
6:48
Most advanced yet acceptable.
6:53
Raymond Loewy said that human preferences are torn between two opposing forces.
6:58
On the one hand, there is neophilia,
7:01
a love of new things and an appreciation for the new,
7:05
a need to discover.
7:07
But on the other hand, there is neophobia,
7:09
a fear of anything that is too new, a deep conservativeness.
7:14
And Loewy said that in order to make hits,
7:16
you need to make products
7:17
that live right at
7:18
that intersection of the familiar surprise.
7:21
To sell something familiar, you have to make it surprising.
7:25
But to sell something surprising, you have to make it familiar.
7:31
And Loewy was not a scientist.
7:33
But this theory has been proved
7:35
and validated by scores of studies
7:37
and meta-studies since he died.
7:40
It has been used to explain hits in technology, in academics, in culture,
7:45
and even in politics.
7:48
Let's start with technology.
7:50
Technologists are often in the position of having to make something new
7:55
and then make that new thing popular with an audience
7:57
that doesn't understand it.
7:59
This was the problem recently at Spotify.
8:02
Spotify, obviously the famous streaming music company, which was developing its app,
8:06
which probably many people in this audience have used, called Discover Weekly.
8:10
If you haven't used Discover Weekly, every single Monday,
8:13
discov- um Spotify will dump 30 songs onto your phone.
8:17
And initially, they wanted those 30 songs to be entirely new
8:20
so that people had never heard the songs
8:22
and they had never uh heard the artist.
8:26
But when they were initially testing it,
8:28
there was a bug in the algorithm
8:29
that accidentally let slip through some familiar songs
8:33
and some familiar artists.
8:35
So, they quickly fixed the bug and they kept testing.
8:39
But what happened is
8:40
that when they kept testing the app once they'd fixed the bug,
8:43
engagement with the app plummeted.
8:46
It turned out that having just a little bit of familiarity in this discovery
8:51
platform made it significantly more popular.
8:55
To sell that which was surprising, they had to make it familiar.
9:03
Two.
9:03
Academics.
9:03
I'd imagine that most academics don't think of themselves as hitmakers.
9:06
They don't think of themselves as operating in a cultural marketplace.
9:10
But in order to become a star in your discipline,
9:13
you often need to be published by the most famous uh publishers.
9:17
And therefore, you are essentially giving up your research,
9:20
proposing your research to people who are essentially your audience.
9:25
So, in 2014, a group of researchers from Harvard University
9:29
and Northwestern wanted to figure out,
9:31
what is the formula for a hit paper?
9:35
They wanted to figure out what sort of paper was most likely to be
9:38
accepted by the NIH.
9:41
Was it really, really novel proposals or was it extremely familiar ones?
9:47
So, they created a dummy list of 150 papers
9:51
and they coded each of them for novelty.
9:54
And then they delivered those papers to a group of 150 researchers who scored
9:58
their favorites.
9:59
And the graph of that score looks a bit like an upside-down U.
10:04
Over here, you have utmost familiarity.
10:08
Over here, you have utmost novelty.
10:11
But it turned out that the researchers who were evaluating these proposals,
10:15
they too preferred that which they called optimally familiar.
10:20
Advanced, yet acceptable.
10:26
Maya.
10:26
Three, identity.
10:28
In my book Hit Makers,
10:29
I spent a long time trying to figure out this issue of why do
10:33
fashions exist?
10:36
Indeed, if the brain is an organ of ancient chemistry,
10:41
then why should we change our opinion of what is good?
10:44
But of course we do.
10:46
Guitar solos are weird in the 1930s, extremely popular in the 1970s,
10:52
and then weird again in the 2000s.
10:54
Skinny jeans are unpopular and then popular and unpopular and popular,
10:58
and they follow the sign the sign curve.
11:00
So why does this happen?
11:03
Well, it's really important to understand that for the vast majority of human history,
11:06
fashions really didn't exist.
11:08
People wore the same clothes for centuries, for millennia.
11:12
It never occurred to people wearing togas
11:14
that they should somehow change the look of their toga from one decade to
11:17
the next.
11:20
But a really interesting way to look at fashion is to say, all right,
11:22
well, let's say people clearly do have different, you know, clothing fashion preferences,
11:27
but let's imagine a make-believe store.
11:31
And at this store, all clothes simply exist.
11:34
They all cost the same price, and there is no marketing.
11:39
It's important to think about this store sort of in your head
11:41
because as a as an economic writer,
11:43
I often think, all right, well, to explain fashion,
11:46
I would think that it must be explained explained by price
11:51
or by the fact
11:52
that J.
11:52
Crew doesn't want you to wear a certain kind of pant anymore,
11:55
so they take it away.
11:56
Or they want you to wear a new kind of pants, they market it.
11:59
But imagine with me this magical store where all of the clothes exist,
12:02
and they're all the same price, and marketing is impossible.
12:06
Well, in fact, that store exists here in the real world.
12:11
It is the marketplace of first names.
12:16
Think about it.
12:17
All first names exist.
12:20
They all cost the same price, and there's no direct marketing.
12:24
Nike really, really wants you to buy its next shoe,
12:27
but there's no advertisement in Nike history that has ever said, "Oh,
12:31
and after you buy your shoe,
12:33
would you please name your baby girl after the Greek goddess of victory
12:36
and speed?"
12:37
It's never happened.
12:39
So why do first names follow the same hype cycles as clothes?
12:46
So the sociologist named Stanley Lieberson investigated this,
12:49
and he came up with a really interesting theory
12:51
that essentially just went right back to Maya.
12:55
He found that people tend to prefer names that are familiar surprises.
13:01
So take a name like Samantha.
13:03
Samantha in the 1980s was not a particularly popular name.
13:06
It was about the 30th most popular baby girl name in the country.
13:10
But just enough young couples decided
13:12
that that was a perfectly popular name for their baby girl
13:15
that in 1992,
13:16
222,000 couples named their baby girl Samantha,
13:21
making it the second most popular baby girl name of that year.
13:25
But then think about what happens 5 years later.
13:27
All these little Samanthas go into kindergarten together,
13:31
and the kindergarten is suddenly just run amok with Samantha, Samantha,
13:34
Samantha when all these parents thought they were giving their daughter a unique name.
13:39
And so since most parents have a preference for names
13:41
that are familiar but also surprising,
13:44
the name Samantha naturally, without any organization, rises in popularity and then falls.
13:51
One of the more interesting proofs for the fact
13:53
that parents have a specific taste for popularity is
13:58
that siblings tend to have similarly common
14:01
or uncommon names.
14:04
And this is intuitively true.
14:06
If you meet the siblings Michael, Emily, and Sarah,
14:11
it's a little bit strange if they say, "And this is our sister, Xanthippe."
14:17
But if you meet the siblings Xanthippe, Prairie Rose, Esmeralda,
14:22
it's very strange if they're like, "Also, here's our brother Chad."
14:28
Parents have a specific taste for familiarity.
14:32
But one of the most interesting proofs of this naming theory is looking at
14:36
the phenomenon of baby girl names for black Americans.
14:40
For the vast majority of human history, um for American history, excuse me,
14:44
uh blacks and whites had similar names.
14:47
But starting about the 1960s,
14:48
there was a great forking where some names began to sound white
14:51
and others other names sounded black.
14:54
And one of those markers for a black name is the L A
14:57
or L E prefix,
14:59
like for LeBron James or LaDainian Tomlinson.
15:03
But this was basically unheard of before the 1960s.
15:07
But Stanley Lieberson found that starting in 1967,
15:10
eight distinct baby um a black baby girl names peaked in popularity with a
15:16
La prefix,
15:17
and they peaked in the following order.
15:21
Latonia, Latanya, Latasha, Latoya, Latrice, Laquisha, Lakisha, Latricia.
15:31
And what's so fascinating about the sequence is just how orderly it is.
15:37
Every next popular name is a play on what came before it.
15:42
It takes the familiar and it makes it surprising.
15:49
Fourth, politics.
15:49
In this age of hyper-partisanship and polarization,
15:54
there is an enormous demand to figure out how people can talk to each
15:57
other,
15:58
how we can persuade each other.
16:01
But often when we get into debates, when we get into discussions,
16:04
and we try to persuade someone of our point of view,
16:07
we begin with our code of ethics.
16:10
So if you're a liberal, you'll say,
16:12
"You shouldn't like Donald Trump because his policies are cruel to Hispanics."
16:17
Or if you're a conservative, you might say,
16:19
"You shouldn't like Bernie Sanders because he's trying to turn us into Denmark."
16:24
Now, on its face, these statements are perfectly genuine and sincere,
16:29
but they fail immediately
16:31
as articles of persuasion
16:34
because if you're a conservative who supports Trump,
16:37
you probably like those policies that are discriminatory.
16:41
And if you are the liberal supporting Bernie Sanders,
16:43
you kind of want to nudge the US toward Denmark.
16:47
But imagine if instead we invert the process,
16:51
and we begin with the code with the code of ethics of the person
16:55
that we're talking about.
16:56
We piggyback off of their familiarities.
17:00
So if you're talking to someone as a liberal,
17:03
and you're talking to someone who supports Donald Trump, you might say,
17:06
"One of the things
17:07
that I've always respected about the Republican Party is their emphasis on patriotism,
17:13
putting country over self, and seeking service.
17:18
Help me think through times in Donald Trump's business career he's been a paragon
17:22
of these values."
17:27
Now, you might not create a Bernie Sanders supporter on the spot.
17:30
You might be slapped for insouciance.
17:33
But you're going to get a lot farther following this path than you are
17:37
putting forth first principles
17:39
that the person you're speaking to disagrees with.
17:42
The model that I've just proposed is called the moral foundations theory,
17:47
and it says essentially
17:48
that it's always more beneficial
17:50
when debating with somebody else to begin with their first principles,
17:53
to begin with their code of ethics,
17:56
and then show how slow-walking those code of ethics toward the center might make
18:01
their position leak into your position.
18:05
All debate involves a form of ideological advertising.
18:11
And in both polemics and in products, to make it Maya, make it familiar.
18:19
The last story I want to tell takes us back to Raymond Loewy.
18:24
And it takes us back to his last assignment as an industrial designer.
18:29
Raymond Loewy was told to design the interior habitat for the first NASA space
18:34
orbital,
18:35
the most surprising and unfamiliar
18:38
and exotic environment you could possibly imagine a human being in,
18:42
in deep space.
18:44
And Loewy conducted a bunch of habitability studies,
18:47
and he made some tweaks here and some tweaks there,
18:49
but his most famous contribution to space history is
18:52
that he cut a hole in the side of the NASA space orbital.
18:56
He placed a sheet of glass there and created a viewing portal for Earth.
19:02
Yes, that viewing portal that you have seen in all of those movies,
19:07
that too is Raymond Loewy's innovation.
19:10
And I cannot think of a more perfect illustration for Maya
19:14
or a more beautiful inspiration to creators everywhere.
19:19
Because it says that a window to a new world can also show you
19:24
home.
19:26
Thank you.
19:39
So Maya is just such an interesting concept with so many unique applications.
19:44
I'm wondering, do you think
19:46
that there are ways to apply this idea to help people from diverse backgrounds
19:51
better relate to each other?
19:52
Yeah, absolutely.
19:53
I mean, one of the ideas
19:54
that comes up in developmental psychology is this issue of sensitive periods.
19:58
Um that people develop taste,
20:00
develop their particular familiarities during specific periods in their life,
20:05
which tends to be relatively young.
20:07
Um people tend not to change their taste in music
20:10
or their taste in food after the age of 40
20:12
or 50.
20:13
Um so when thinking about this question um of sort of uh of justice,
20:18
um it's important sometimes to not only focus on adults,
20:21
not only trying to remediate adults,
20:23
but also realizing that the way to get liberal-minded people,
20:26
the way to get people who think multiculturally
20:29
and embrace those of all stripes
20:31
and colors and creeds is actually to have a kind of cradle-to-grave strategy,
20:36
where you say we should build neighborhoods.
20:38
We should focus on neighborhoods
20:40
and build neighborhoods where you have a combination of ideologies
20:44
and colors and creeds
20:45
and all of this.
20:46
So, I think sometimes we think of justice as as purely remedial,
20:50
and of course there's lots of people doing very important work there,
20:53
but it's also so important
20:54
that we think about taste formation even on important issues like politics um
20:59
as being a project
21:00
that involves the neighborhood level.
21:02
Absolutely, thank you.
21:03
Thank you.
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