The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  IV. Boosting sensory appeal doesn’t require extravagance. Money can easily be misspent. When researchers at Emory University surveyed 3,000 people about their weddings, they found that more expensive weddings were correlated with a higher chance of divorce. That’s not a statement of causation—so if you’re planning a wedding, don’t worry that you’re endangering your marriage by splurging on flowers. But the results are a good reminder to focus on meaning rather than money. If you imagine a $1,000 wedding versus a $30,000 wedding, for instance, which one is more likely to take place in a personally meaningful, emotion-heavy location rather than a pretty but generic banquet hall? Which one is likely to feel “handmade” rather than produced?

  4

  Break the Script

  1.

  Chris Hurn’s son would not go to sleep. It was the boy’s first night home from a vacation in Amelia Island, Florida, and he had accidentally left behind Joshie, his beloved stuffed giraffe. There was no sleeping without Joshie. Yet Joshie was in Florida. So Hurn was left with a predicament.

  In the long tradition of parents desperate to get their kids to sleep, Hurn assessed his options and concluded that he’d better start lying. “Joshie is fine,” he told his son. “He’s just taking an extra-long vacation at the resort.” His son seemed to buy it, eventually drifting off to sleep.

  Later that night, to Hurn’s great relief, a Ritz-Carlton staffer called to report that Joshie had been found. Hurn asked the staffer a favor. He explained what he’d told his son and asked if someone at the Ritz could take a picture of Joshie on a lounge chair by the pool, to show he’d been vacationing.

  A few days later, Joshie arrived—along with a binder full of pictures. One showed Joshie lounging by the pool, another showed Joshie driving a golf cart. Others captured him hanging with the hotel parrot, getting a massage in the spa (with cucumber slices covering his eyes), and even monitoring the security cameras in the control room.

  Hurn and his wife were delighted, and their son was ecstatic. Hurn wrote a blog post about the experience, which went viral.

  Why did everyone love the story of Joshie? Because it shattered our expectations. What do we expect to happen when a boy loses a stuffed animal on vacation? For it to be returned, maybe. If he’s lucky. (And if so, it would probably be crumpled inside a box to reduce postage.)

  Instead, someone at the Ritz spent a few hours zipping around the resort with a stuffed giraffe, snapping absurd pics—“somebody get some cucumber slices for his eyes!”—so they could please some guests who had already checked out and gone home. It was a strange and magical thing to do.

  The staff at the Ritz broke the script. The term script, used this way, dates back to some research from the 1970s; it refers to our expectations of a stereotypical experience. As an example, the “restaurant script” runs something like this: We walk in the door. Someone greets us, shows us to a table, and hands us menus. Then someone else brings over glasses of water. Our waiter stops by to take drink orders. And so on. That’s the way restaurants work.

  The psychologists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson used the concept of a script to explain how our brains store and access knowledge. For instance, consider this simple scenario:

  JOHN ORDERED A HAMBURGER.

  IT CAME OUT COLD.

  HE LEFT A SMALL TIP.

  The scenario is easy to visualize, which is odd, because it never mentions a waiter or a plate or a table or even a restaurant. Our underlying restaurant script supplies all the missing details. Now consider a different scenario:

  HARRIET WENT TO JACK’S BIRTHDAY PARTY.

  THE CAKE TASTED AWFUL.

  HARRIET LEFT JACK’S MOTHER A VERY SMALL TIP.

  Wait, what? We have a clear “birthday party script”: parents giving gifts, friends eating cake, kids learning to bludgeon animals until candy comes out. But we never tip Jack’s mother—ever. The story breaks a script.

  In the last chapter, we saw that creating moments of elevation involves boosting sensory pleasures and raising the stakes. Breaking the script—defying people’s expectations of how an experience will unfold—is the third method.

  Isn’t “breaking the script” just surprise by a different name? Yes, surprise is what makes the moment memorable. But the takeaway isn’t quite as simple as “Surprise people!” Surprise is cheap and easy. If your local power company promoted “Blackout Tuesdays!” that would be surprising (especially if that event was meant to store up energy for “Bug Zapper Saturdays!”). But that surprise accomplishes nothing.

  Breaking the script isn’t just surprise, it’s strategic surprise. The Ritz-Carlton created the Joshie photo album because it wants to be known for its extraordinary service. It wasn’t simply a random act of kindness.

  The other difference between “breaking the script” and generic surprise is that the former forces us to think about the script. Our lives are filled with scripts: The script for how your family spends Sundays. The script for your team’s staff meetings. The script for a hotel check-in. To break the script, we’ve first got to understand the script.

  The script of eating at McDonald’s is so familiar that it’s a source of comfort. It’s nice to know that, anywhere in the world, you’ll understand exactly what to expect. But here’s the problem: Familiarity and memorability are often at odds. Who cherishes the memory of the last time they ate at McDonald’s? If you’re looking to create memorable moments for your customers, you’ve got to break the script.

  A study of hotel reviews on TripAdvisor found that, when guests reported experiencing a “delightful surprise,” an astonishing 94% of them expressed an unconditional willingness to recommend the hotel, compared with only 60% of guests who were “very satisfied.” And “very satisfied” is a high bar! Surprise matters. (Think of the Popsicle Hotline.) But how can you possibly replicate “delightful surprises”?

  In some ways, the Magic Castle Hotel has it easy, because its guests might only stay there once or twice in a lifetime. The Popsicle Hotline never gets old. What if your customers come weekly or even daily? That’s trickier.

  Imagine, for instance, that a coffee shop owner decided to give away free biscotti every Friday. On the first Friday of the giveaway, it would be a delightful surprise. But by the fourth Friday, the free biscotti would be an expectation. If the offer were ever discontinued, it’s easy to imagine customers (ungrateful wretches!) actually complaining about it.

  So how do you break the script consistently enough that it matters—but not so consistently that customers adapt to it? One solution is to introduce a bit of randomness. At the café chain Pret A Manger, for example, regular customers noticed that, every now and then, they’d be given something for free with their order. One service expert wrote, of getting free coffee, “It has happened a few times over the last few years, too often for it to be a coincidence, yet so infrequent that it is unexpected. This makes me feel valued as a customer, puts a smile on my face and encourages me to visit again.”

  These “spontaneous” gifts are only half-spontaneous, as it turns out. Pret A Manger employees are allowed to give away a certain number of hot drinks and food items every week. Pret CEO Clive Schlee said of his staffers, “They will decide ‘I like the person on the bicycle’ or ‘I like the guy in the tie’ or ‘I fancy that girl or that boy.’ It means 28% of people have had something free.”

  Think on that. Almost a third of customers have gotten something free at least once. (Probably more than once, if they have dimples.)

  Other retail chains provide discounts or freebies to customers who use loyalty cards, of course, but Schlee told the Standard newspaper he rejected that approach: “We looked at loyalty cards but we didn’t want to spend all that money building up some complicated Clubcard-style analysis.”

  This is ingenious. Pret A Manger has restored the surprise and humanity to perks that, in a loyalty card scheme, would have been systematized. Note that the giveaways are satisfying for the staff as well as the customers
. In an industry where rules tend to govern every employee behavior, it’s a relief for employees to be given some discretion: Hey, every week, give away some stuff to whomever you like. It broke the script for them, too. In the service business, a good surprise is one that delights employees as well as customers.

  Another example of good surprise comes from Southwest Airlines, which has thrived by offering passengers the combination of low fares and friendly service. Southwest’s flight attendants try to have fun with even the boring parts of the job, like making the flight safety announcements. Many of their cheeky safety announcements have gone viral over the years; in fact, there’s a “wall of fame” at Southwest headquarters that commemorates some of the best jokes:

  • Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to smoke, the smoking section on this airplane is on the wing and if you can light ’em, you can smoke ’em.

  • To activate the flow of oxygen, pull down on the mask, place it over your nose and mouth, then insert one quarter for the first five minutes of oxygen and an additional dime every five minutes after. Exact change only, please!

  • If you should get to use the life vest in a real-life situation, the vest is yours to keep.

  • Put the oxygen mask on yourself first, then on your child. If you’re traveling with more than one child, start with the one who has more potential or who is less likely to put you in the home.

  These wisecracks create peaks—they break the script of the usual monotonous announcements. But what are they worth? Do they have any economic value? In a workshop with the Southwest analytics team—the people who analyze customer data looking for helpful insights—Chip asked them, “How many extra flights does a customer take when they hear a funny flight safety announcement?”

  There was silence in the room. They had never asked that question before. But they also knew that they could answer it—they had the right data. Southwest, like many companies, has obsessive amounts of customer data. Unlike most companies, though, they had the data in a form that could be used to make critical decisions. The analytics team had previously figured out, for instance, that passengers are forgiving of short flight delays, but past 25 or 30 minutes, they become less likely to take future flights with Southwest. As a result, Southwest’s executives evaluated purchasing two additional Boeing 737s as reserve aircraft, providing a backup option when other planes had to be taken out of service. The investment would not eliminate delays but it would mitigate them. Total cost? Roughly $50–70 million per plane, for a total of around $120 million.

  Intrigued by the safety announcement question, the insights team, including Frank Tooley, Katie Boynton, and Michael Overly, dug into the customer data. In the company’s surveys, about 1 in every 70 customers will mention, unprompted, that they heard a funny flight safety announcement. The insights team used those surveys to identify all the passengers on that same flight, since they all would have heard the same announcement.

  The team was particularly interested to analyze the habits of customers who travel more than once per year on Southwest; let’s call them “loyal customers.” (Other passengers fly so infrequently, it’s hard to detect changes in their behavior.) Here’s what the analysis showed: When loyal customers were on a flight with a funny flight safety announcement, they flew one half-flight more over the next year than did similar customers who hadn’t heard one. (These are averages, of course, since it’s difficult to fly a half-flight without a parachute.)

  What’s the value of those extra half-flights? The analytics group calculated that if Southwest could double the number of customers hearing a funny flight safety announcement, the result would be more than $140 million in revenue! That’s more than the cost of two 737s. But the revenue figure is an annual number—in other words, every single year that you could maintain the comedic performance, you’d earn extra revenue equal to the price tags of two jets. Just because your crew told some more jokes. That’s an astonishing return on investment, given that there is no real financial investment at all. (You don’t even need to train the attendants, really—just circulate recordings or transcripts of the funny bits.) As we saw with Pret A Manger, there’s great value in good surprise.

  The serial entrepreneur Scott Beck believes that good surprise is a fundamental principle of retail businesses. Beck, who had top leadership positions in three enormous retail chains—Blockbuster Video, Boston Chicken, and Einstein Bros—said that the secret to growing a business is to “reduce negative variance and increase positive variance.” To reduce negative variance is to prevent stores from operating differently in a way that harms the customer experience. If one Einstein Bros store toasts a bagel perfectly and another burns it half the time, that’s negative variance. To manage the problem, store owners need systems that ensure the bagels are toasted right every time.

  But Beck believes it’s a mistake to squeeze the “variance” out of the way customers are treated. Certainly there should be a baseline level of service: Employees should be polite and make eye contact. What customers want and need, though, will vary a great deal. Some customers want small talk, others want speed. Some are in a bubbly mood, others have dried tears under their eyes. To increase positive variance is to welcome humanity and spontaneity into the system. And that means giving employees license to break the script.

  This insight applies not just to employees, but also to parents. In families, so often we are hustling to “minimize negative variance”—getting kids to school on time, managing household chaos, keeping sibling spats under control. But are we focusing as much energy on increasing positive variance from week to week?

  As an example, in researching this book, we periodically tried out exercises with groups of people to see whether they were finding the book’s ideas practical. One of our most popular exercises was what we called “Saturday Surprise.” The instructions were incredibly simple: Break the script on your Saturday routines.

  People seemed to have a blast doing this. Two broke roommates pooled their gas money to check out Red Rocks, a famous amphitheater in Colorado surrounded by rock outcroppings. A romantic husband prepared a Saturday evening picnic for his wife on the San Antonio Riverwalk. A woman asked her daughter to plan the day’s activities and was astonished when she (the daughter) came back with an hour-by-hour logistical plan. (The woman said, “I’m an engineer, so my heart just sang!”)

  The Saturday Surprise yielded bite-sized defining moments. Just by disrupting routines, we can create more peaks.

  2.

  Peaks spice up our experience. They can enrich high school education (the Trial) and garnish flights (Southwest) and delight children (Joshie’s vacation). In that sense, they are evergreen—they can happen at any time and retain their power of elevation. But don’t forget that peaks can also be used to mark transitions. (Think weddings and graduations.) Executives who are leading change should be deliberate about creating peaks that demarcate the shift from the “old way” to the “new way.” The heart of change, after all, is the need to break the script.

  In 2008, the CEO of VF Corporation asked Stephen Dull, the vice president of strategy, to head up an effort to make the company more innovative. Dull and a colleague he had recently hired, Soon Yu, led the innovation project, and the two of them prepared an insightful, data-rich presentation describing their plan. The duo, both former consultants, kept adding clever refinements to the plan, until their final PowerPoint presentation weighed in at 120 slides.

  Then, two months before they were due to present the plan company-wide, Dull lost faith in the approach and scrapped it. He realized that if they were going to succeed, they had to break the script.

  The situation at VF was complicated. You may not recognize the company’s name, but it owns a portfolio of famous fashion brands, including Wrangler and Lee Jeans, Vans, Nautica, JanSport, Timberland, and The North Face. Traditionally, the brands had been run autonomously, with the holding company VF Corporation staying in the background providing financial and logistical
support. But when the economy crashed in 2008, the company hit a wall, and the top executives began to reconsider the strategy of running VF like a loose confederacy.

  The brands North Face and JanSport, for instance, had a lot in common: Both were outdoors focused, and they even marketed similar products, such as backpacks. In San Leandro, California, the teams shared a facility, separated by a wall that was cubicle-height. Yet, according to Yu, “that wall was treated as the equivalent of the Korean DMZ. They would not talk to each other. They would not share information with each other, yet they were talking to the same vendors, creating pretty much the same thing. But they weren’t sharing any ideas.”

  The brands were not just independent, they were insular. They’d become too dependent on the whims of their “merchants,” who are the people in fashion businesses responsible for anticipating consumer tastes. “There’s a temptation to say, ‘Well, consumers don’t know what they want three years from now,’ ” said Yu, “ ‘so I’m going to tell them what they want.’ ”

  Putting so much trust in the merchants dulled the brands’ instinct to learn. They stopped getting closer to the customer, stopped obsessing about competitors, and stopped looking for new partnerships. And that, in essence, was the cultural stagnation that Dull and Yu were trying to reverse. They wanted the brands to learn from each other and, more than that, to learn from the giant world outside their doors.

  When Dull decided to scrap the 120 PowerPoint slides, he and Yu had to restart from scratch. What they realized was that they didn’t need their colleagues to understand something, they needed them to feel something. And it had to happen at the leadership meeting scheduled for September 2010 in Los Angeles.

  “We decided we had to change absolutely everything about the meeting that was to take place,” said Dull. “What’s the standard? Well, you go to a place and you have the same universal metal chair that’s uncomfortable, around round tables, in some low-ceiling conference room. And you have speaker after mind-numbing speaker, mostly internal . . . and that’s your leadership meeting.”