The four-letter code to selling anything | Derek Thompson | TEDxBinghamtonUniversity

For thousands of years,

some of the smartest people in the world have been asking themselves versions of

the same question.

Why do we like what we like?

Is there a formula for beauty?

For popularity?

For human affinity?

And the ancient Greeks said, yes, of course there is.

It's the golden ratio.

1.62 etc. etc. to 1.

And then the enlightenment enlightenment thinkers said, yes, of course there is.

It's It's Kant's theory of aesthetics.

But today, we don't have the golden ratio.

We don't have philosophers.

We have Google and Facebook.

We have advertisers.

And in the advertiser formula, the first variable is always novelty.

This is a scientific fact.

They actually went through, several decades ago,

all of the words they could possibly find in all the advertisements

that were out there.

And the most common word in all of those ads wasn't buy, wasn't now,

wasn't risk-free warranty.

It was new.

We are living in a cult of novelty.

Companies want us to like new things, to buy new things,

to crave new things.

But the truth is that we don't like novelty.

In fact, we hate it.

According to the mere exposure effect,

one of the oldest and most robust theories in the history of psychology,

the mere exposure of any stimulus to you over time will bias you toward

that stimulus.

In English, familiarity good.

And indeed, when you think about it, we seek out new songs.

But the songs that we most reliably enjoy are those with familiar chord structures

and timbers.

We seek out new movies.

But every year this century,

a majority of the top 10 films in America have been sequels, adaptations,

or reboots.

Familiar, familiar, familiar.

In fact, maybe the best proof of the power of familiarity is

that thing that is

so familiar to you,

your own face.

It turns out that people prefer the face they see in mirrors to the

face they see in photographs.

Maybe you have a friend who complains constantly about how he

or she looks in Facebook photos,

but is often constantly admiring his or herself in the mirror.

Well, this is not pure vanity.

This is mere exposure effect.

The face is slightly asymmetric.

We see different versions when we see a reflection versus a photo.

And if you're not a celebrity,

then the version you're most used to seeing is not in a photograph,

but rather in the most common reflection in the world, in a mirror.

You prefer that version of your face not

because it's you at your most beautiful,

but because it's you at your most familiar.

In fact, the power of familiarity seems

so deep that people think it must be written into our genetics.

The evolutionary theory for the preference for the familiar is

that if you're a hunter-gatherer

and you're the trawling the savanna of Africa

and you see a plant

or an animal and you recognize it,

that's a very good sign that plant or animal has not killed you yet.

So, of course you should prefer it.

But this creates an enormous problem for creators, for creative types.

Because I just told you

that people only like new things

if they're just like old things.

So, the question before us today is,

how do you balance familiarity

and surprise in such a way

as to design hits?

To design things that people love.

Is it possible to engineer a familiar surprise?

And to begin to answer that question,

I want to tell you a short story about a man who is a

hero of mine,

a hero of my book,

but also a man

that I would imagine 90 to 95% of this room does not know.

His name is Raymond Loewy.

And he designed the 20th century.

Raymond Loewy was a French orphan who came over to the United States after

World War I.

And his brother picked him up in a cab,

and this is in the 1920s where they drive down to downtown Manhattan where

one of the tallest buildings down there is the Equitable Building,

which looks a bit like a a tuning fork with sort of two large

uh buildings rising into the sky.

And Raymond Loewy takes an elevator to the top of this building

and he looks out over Manhattan from this vista.

And he's expecting from his dreams in Paris to see a world

that is beautiful,

that is round, that is feminine.

But the New York that unfurls in front of him is the exact opposite.

It's grungy.

It's noisy.

It's the hulkiness of the industrial age.

And Loewy makes a promise to himself and his brother.

He says, I'm going to devote the rest of my life to beautifying America

in my image.

And Loewy did just that.

Raymond Loewy designed the most famous car of the 20th century, the 1953 Studebaker.

He designed the most famous train and locomotive of the 20th century,

the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1.

He designed the modern Greyhound bus and the modern tractor,

the modern Coca-Cola fountain.

He designed that pencil sharpener

that looks like an egg with a little spindle coming out of it

that you've seen in a hundred thousand classrooms.

He designed the logos for Exxon and USPS.

He basically designed all of 1950s Americana.

And in fact, one day Raymond Loewy was hanging out with his friend

and he saw the president's plane take off

and he said,

it looks gaudy.

So, President Kennedy invited Loewy to the Oval Office where they sat on the

floor and cut little papers until they achieved the perfect design for Air Force

One.

And in fact, the design

that Raymond Loewy came up with there on the floor of the Oval Office

with JFK still adorns the most famous plane in the world today.

So, the question is,

what did this man possibly understand about human psychology

that he knew what we wanted from planes

and trains and automobiles?

This man was like Don Draper meets Steve Jobs for the 20th century.

He understood everything.

And fortunately for us, Raymond Loewy had a grand theory of everything.

It was called Maya.

M A Y A.

Most advanced yet acceptable.

Raymond Loewy said that human preferences are torn between two opposing forces.

On the one hand, there is neophilia,

a love of new things and an appreciation for the new,

a need to discover.

But on the other hand, there is neophobia,

a fear of anything that is too new, a deep conservativeness.

And Loewy said that in order to make hits,

you need to make products

that live right at

that intersection of the familiar surprise.

To sell something familiar, you have to make it surprising.

But to sell something surprising, you have to make it familiar.

And Loewy was not a scientist.

But this theory has been proved

and validated by scores of studies

and meta-studies since he died.

It has been used to explain hits in technology, in academics, in culture,

and even in politics.

Let's start with technology.

Technologists are often in the position of having to make something new

and then make that new thing popular with an audience

that doesn't understand it.

This was the problem recently at Spotify.

Spotify, obviously the famous streaming music company, which was developing its app,

which probably many people in this audience have used, called Discover Weekly.

If you haven't used Discover Weekly, every single Monday,

discov- um Spotify will dump 30 songs onto your phone.

And initially, they wanted those 30 songs to be entirely new

so that people had never heard the songs

and they had never uh heard the artist.

But when they were initially testing it,

there was a bug in the algorithm

that accidentally let slip through some familiar songs

and some familiar artists.

So, they quickly fixed the bug and they kept testing.

But what happened is

that when they kept testing the app once they'd fixed the bug,

engagement with the app plummeted.

It turned out that having just a little bit of familiarity in this discovery

platform made it significantly more popular.

To sell that which was surprising, they had to make it familiar.

Two.

Academics.

I'd imagine that most academics don't think of themselves as hitmakers.

They don't think of themselves as operating in a cultural marketplace.

But in order to become a star in your discipline,

you often need to be published by the most famous uh publishers.

And therefore, you are essentially giving up your research,

proposing your research to people who are essentially your audience.

So, in 2014, a group of researchers from Harvard University

and Northwestern wanted to figure out,

what is the formula for a hit paper?

They wanted to figure out what sort of paper was most likely to be

accepted by the NIH.

Was it really, really novel proposals or was it extremely familiar ones?

So, they created a dummy list of 150 papers

and they coded each of them for novelty.

And then they delivered those papers to a group of 150 researchers who scored

their favorites.

And the graph of that score looks a bit like an upside-down U.

Over here, you have utmost familiarity.

Over here, you have utmost novelty.

But it turned out that the researchers who were evaluating these proposals,

they too preferred that which they called optimally familiar.

Advanced, yet acceptable.

Maya.

Three, identity.

In my book Hit Makers,

I spent a long time trying to figure out this issue of why do

fashions exist?

Indeed, if the brain is an organ of ancient chemistry,

then why should we change our opinion of what is good?

But of course we do.

Guitar solos are weird in the 1930s, extremely popular in the 1970s,

and then weird again in the 2000s.

Skinny jeans are unpopular and then popular and unpopular and popular,

and they follow the sign the sign curve.

So why does this happen?

Well, it's really important to understand that for the vast majority of human history,

fashions really didn't exist.

People wore the same clothes for centuries, for millennia.

It never occurred to people wearing togas

that they should somehow change the look of their toga from one decade to

the next.

But a really interesting way to look at fashion is to say, all right,

well, let's say people clearly do have different, you know, clothing fashion preferences,

but let's imagine a make-believe store.

And at this store, all clothes simply exist.

They all cost the same price, and there is no marketing.

It's important to think about this store sort of in your head

because as a as an economic writer,

I often think, all right, well, to explain fashion,

I would think that it must be explained explained by price

or by the fact

that J.

Crew doesn't want you to wear a certain kind of pant anymore,

so they take it away.

Or they want you to wear a new kind of pants, they market it.

But imagine with me this magical store where all of the clothes exist,

and they're all the same price, and marketing is impossible.

Well, in fact, that store exists here in the real world.

It is the marketplace of first names.

Think about it.

All first names exist.

They all cost the same price, and there's no direct marketing.

Nike really, really wants you to buy its next shoe,

but there's no advertisement in Nike history that has ever said, "Oh,

and after you buy your shoe,

would you please name your baby girl after the Greek goddess of victory

and speed?"

It's never happened.

So why do first names follow the same hype cycles as clothes?

So the sociologist named Stanley Lieberson investigated this,

and he came up with a really interesting theory

that essentially just went right back to Maya.

He found that people tend to prefer names that are familiar surprises.

So take a name like Samantha.

Samantha in the 1980s was not a particularly popular name.

It was about the 30th most popular baby girl name in the country.

But just enough young couples decided

that that was a perfectly popular name for their baby girl

that in 1992,

222,000 couples named their baby girl Samantha,

making it the second most popular baby girl name of that year.

But then think about what happens 5 years later.

All these little Samanthas go into kindergarten together,

and the kindergarten is suddenly just run amok with Samantha, Samantha,

Samantha when all these parents thought they were giving their daughter a unique name.

And so since most parents have a preference for names

that are familiar but also surprising,

the name Samantha naturally, without any organization, rises in popularity and then falls.

One of the more interesting proofs for the fact

that parents have a specific taste for popularity is

that siblings tend to have similarly common

or uncommon names.

And this is intuitively true.

If you meet the siblings Michael, Emily, and Sarah,

it's a little bit strange if they say, "And this is our sister, Xanthippe."

But if you meet the siblings Xanthippe, Prairie Rose, Esmeralda,

it's very strange if they're like, "Also, here's our brother Chad."

Parents have a specific taste for familiarity.

But one of the most interesting proofs of this naming theory is looking at

the phenomenon of baby girl names for black Americans.

For the vast majority of human history, um for American history, excuse me,

uh blacks and whites had similar names.

But starting about the 1960s,

there was a great forking where some names began to sound white

and others other names sounded black.

And one of those markers for a black name is the L A

or L E prefix,

like for LeBron James or LaDainian Tomlinson.

But this was basically unheard of before the 1960s.

But Stanley Lieberson found that starting in 1967,

eight distinct baby um a black baby girl names peaked in popularity with a

La prefix,

and they peaked in the following order.

Latonia, Latanya, Latasha, Latoya, Latrice, Laquisha, Lakisha, Latricia.

And what's so fascinating about the sequence is just how orderly it is.

Every next popular name is a play on what came before it.

It takes the familiar and it makes it surprising.

Fourth, politics.

In this age of hyper-partisanship and polarization,

there is an enormous demand to figure out how people can talk to each

other,

how we can persuade each other.

But often when we get into debates, when we get into discussions,

and we try to persuade someone of our point of view,

we begin with our code of ethics.

So if you're a liberal, you'll say,

"You shouldn't like Donald Trump because his policies are cruel to Hispanics."

Or if you're a conservative, you might say,

"You shouldn't like Bernie Sanders because he's trying to turn us into Denmark."

Now, on its face, these statements are perfectly genuine and sincere,

but they fail immediately

as articles of persuasion

because if you're a conservative who supports Trump,

you probably like those policies that are discriminatory.

And if you are the liberal supporting Bernie Sanders,

you kind of want to nudge the US toward Denmark.

But imagine if instead we invert the process,

and we begin with the code with the code of ethics of the person

that we're talking about.

We piggyback off of their familiarities.

So if you're talking to someone as a liberal,

and you're talking to someone who supports Donald Trump, you might say,

"One of the things

that I've always respected about the Republican Party is their emphasis on patriotism,

putting country over self, and seeking service.

Help me think through times in Donald Trump's business career he's been a paragon

of these values."

Now, you might not create a Bernie Sanders supporter on the spot.

You might be slapped for insouciance.

But you're going to get a lot farther following this path than you are

putting forth first principles

that the person you're speaking to disagrees with.

The model that I've just proposed is called the moral foundations theory,

and it says essentially

that it's always more beneficial

when debating with somebody else to begin with their first principles,

to begin with their code of ethics,

and then show how slow-walking those code of ethics toward the center might make

their position leak into your position.

All debate involves a form of ideological advertising.

And in both polemics and in products, to make it Maya, make it familiar.

The last story I want to tell takes us back to Raymond Loewy.

And it takes us back to his last assignment as an industrial designer.

Raymond Loewy was told to design the interior habitat for the first NASA space

orbital,

the most surprising and unfamiliar

and exotic environment you could possibly imagine a human being in,

in deep space.

And Loewy conducted a bunch of habitability studies,

and he made some tweaks here and some tweaks there,

but his most famous contribution to space history is

that he cut a hole in the side of the NASA space orbital.

He placed a sheet of glass there and created a viewing portal for Earth.

Yes, that viewing portal that you have seen in all of those movies,

that too is Raymond Loewy's innovation.

And I cannot think of a more perfect illustration for Maya

or a more beautiful inspiration to creators everywhere.

Because it says that a window to a new world can also show you

home.

Thank you.

So Maya is just such an interesting concept with so many unique applications.

I'm wondering, do you think

that there are ways to apply this idea to help people from diverse backgrounds

better relate to each other?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, one of the ideas

that comes up in developmental psychology is this issue of sensitive periods.

Um that people develop taste,

develop their particular familiarities during specific periods in their life,

which tends to be relatively young.

Um people tend not to change their taste in music

or their taste in food after the age of 40

or 50.

Um so when thinking about this question um of sort of uh of justice,

um it's important sometimes to not only focus on adults,

not only trying to remediate adults,

but also realizing that the way to get liberal-minded people,

the way to get people who think multiculturally

and embrace those of all stripes

and colors and creeds is actually to have a kind of cradle-to-grave strategy,

where you say we should build neighborhoods.

We should focus on neighborhoods

and build neighborhoods where you have a combination of ideologies

and colors and creeds

and all of this.

So, I think sometimes we think of justice as as purely remedial,

and of course there's lots of people doing very important work there,

but it's also so important

that we think about taste formation even on important issues like politics um

as being a project

that involves the neighborhood level.

Absolutely, thank you.

Thank you.