by Dan Heath
Tire Chains at Nordstrom
Nordstrom is a department store known for outstanding customer service. That extra service comes at a price: Nordstrom can be an expensive place to shop. Yet many people are willing to pay higher prices precisely because Nordstrom makes shopping so much more pleasant.
For Nordstrom’s strategy to work, it must transform its frontline employees into customer-service zealots. And they do not walk in the door that way. Most people with service experience come from environments where managers spend much of their energy trying to minimize labor costs. The prevailing schema of customer service might be, roughly, “Get customers in and out the door as fast as possible, and try to smile.”
Job applicants at Nordstrom will likely have years of experience acting on this schema. But Nordstrom has a different philosophy: Make customers happy even at the expense of efficiency. How does Nordstrom break down one schema and replace it with another?
The company solves this problem, in part, through unexpected stories. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in their book Built to Last, describe stories told at Nordstrom about unexpected service by employees, who are known within the firm as “Nordies”:
The Nordie who ironed a new shirt for a customer who needed it for a meeting that afternoon;
the Nordie who cheerfully gift wrapped products a customer bought at Macy’s;
the Nordie who warmed customers’ cars in winter while they finished shopping;
the Nordie who made a last-minute delivery of party clothes to a frantic hostess;
and even the Nordie who refunded money for a set of tire chains—although Nordstrom doesn’t sell tire chains.
You can imagine the surprise, if not shock, that these stories provoke in new Nordstrom employees. “Wrap a gift from Macy’s! I don’t get it. What’s in it for us?” These stories attack the unspoken assumptions of customer service, such as: Service stops at the door of the store. Don’t waste your time on someone who’s not buying. Once you close a sale, move on to the next prospect.
To new employees, the idea of wrapping a gift bought at a competitor’s store is so absurd, so far outside the bounds of their existing notion of “service,” that the story stops them in their tracks. Their guessing machines have been broken. Their old “good service” guessing machine would never have produced the idea of altruistic gift-wrapping. The stories provide the first step toward replacing a new employee’s schema of “good service” with the Nordstrom service schema.
In this way, Nordstrom breaks through the complacency of common sense. Instead of spreading stories about “Nordies,” Nordstrom could simply tell its employees that its mission is to provide “the best customer service in the industry.” This statement may be true, but, unfortunately, it sounds like something that JCPenney or Sears might also tell its employees. To make a message stick, you’ve got to push it beyond common sense to uncommon sense. “Great customer service” is common sense. Warming customers’ cars in the winter is uncommon sense.
Note that these stories would be even more unexpected—and even less commonsensical—if they were told about a 7-Eleven employee. “Yeah, I went in to get a pack of smokes and the counter clerk ironed my shirt!” The value of the stories does not come from unexpectedness in and of itself. The value comes from the perfect alignment between Nordstrom’s goals and the content of the stories. These stories could just as easily be destructive in another context. The 7-Eleven management does not want to face an epidemic of gift-wrapping clerks.
Nordstrom’s stories are a classic example of the power of unexpectedness. There’s no danger that the stories will feel gimmicky, because the surprise is followed by insight—the stories tell us what it means to be a good Nordstrom employee. It’s uncommon sense in the service of a core message.
Journalism 101
Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher.
Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalists gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why.
As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.”
The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento … blah, blah, blah.”
The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment.
Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’”
“It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls. “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.” For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret—a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.
This idea should be in the Sticky Hall of Fame. This teacher had a huge impact not because he was a dynamic speaker or a caring mentor—though he may have been both—but because he crafted a brilliant idea. It was an idea that, in a matter of seconds, rewrote the schema of journalism in the minds of his students. An idea that changed a student’s career plans and stuck with her thirty years later.
What made this idea work? First, the teacher knew that the students had a defective schema of journalism, and he knew how it was defective. Second, he made them publicly commit to their defective models with the “write the lead” assignment. Then he pulled the rug out from under them with a well-structured surprise. By revealing the right lead—“There will be no school next Thursday”—he took their mental models, gave them a swift kick, and made them work better.
CLINIC
Does America Spend Too Much
on Foreign Aid?
THE SITUATION: Over the years, polls have shown that the majority of Americans think the federal government spends too much on foreign aid. The ratio has dropped toward fifty/fifty since 9/11, but half of Americans still think we overspend. Let’s look at two arguments that try to persuade people that we spend too little, not too much.
• • •
MESSAGE 1: Here is a message from the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center, a Catholic advocacy group:
Americans persist in thinking we spend too much on foreign aid despite honest efforts to inform the public by the State Department and other government agencies. Even President Bush’s proposed increases, though welcome, will not make the United States generous in its foreign assistance. In fiscal year 2003, the Bush administration will spend about $15-billion in foreign aid, but over $7-billion of this amount—almost half—will be military, not economic assistance. The $8-billion in foreign economic assistance is, according to a recent estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, less than the cost of one month of war with Iraq. Of all the industrialized nations, the U.S. spends proportionally the least amount on foreign aid, and has for many years. All of sub-Saharan Africa receives ju
st over $1-billion of economic assistance, about the cost of a B-2 bomber. Our foreign aid programs do not support our belief that we are a nation known for its good works around the world.
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1: First, notice that the lead has been buried. The last sentence is the most effective argument. Americans’ schema of the United States is that it is a generous, caring country—“known for its good works around the world.” The way to break that schema is to lay out the blunt fact that the United States “spends proportionally the least amount on foreign aid, and has for many years.”
The numbers in billions are unlikely to stick—huge numbers are difficult to grasp and hard to remember. One effective part of the message, in combating this “big-number problem,” is the analogy comparing our sub-Saharan Africa aid to the cost of a single B-2 bomber. We really like this comparison, because it puts the reader in a decision-making mode: “Would I trade one B-2 bomber for the chance to double aid to sub-Saharan Africa?”
To make this message stickier, let’s try two things. First, let’s just reshuffle the great raw materials that are already there while downplaying the numbers in the billions. Second, let’s choose a concrete comparison that has a better emotional resonance. Some people might think B-2 bombers are a reasonable expense. Let’s try to create a comparison that would be more unexpected because it’s clearly frivolous.
• • •
MESSAGE 2: Our foreign-aid programs do not support our belief that we are a nation known for its good works around the world. The public believes we spend a great deal more money helping other countries than we actually do. Polls suggest that most Americans think the federal government spends about 10 to 15 percent of its budget on foreign aid. The truth is that we spend less than 1 percent, the lowest of any industrialized nation.
All of sub-Saharan Africa receives just over $1 billion in economic aid. If everyone in the United States gave up one soft drink a month, we could double our current aid to Africa. If everyone gave up one movie a year, we could double our current aid to Africa and Asia.
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2: Here’s what we tried to do to make this message stickier: First, we built interest by quickly and directly breaking our schema of a “generous America.” We also shifted the conversation to percentages, which are easier to understand than billions. Second, we tried to make the B-2 analogy more concrete by replacing it with soft drinks and movies. Soft drinks and movies are more tangible—does anyone really have a “gut feel” for what a B-2 bomber costs, or what it’s worth? Soft drinks and movies, because they are frivolous expenses, also provide an emotional contrast to the critical human needs present in Africa.
SCORECARD
Checklist Message 1 Message 2
Simple -
Unexpected (B-2 comparison) (intro & comparison)
Concrete
Credible
Emotional -
Story - -
PUNCH LINE: The best way to get people’s attention is to break their existing schemas directly.
KEEPING PEOPLE’S ATTENTION
The Mystery of the Rings
We began this chapter with two questions: How do we get people’s attention? And how do we keep it? So far, most of our unexpected ideas represent relatively simple, quick adjustments to a model. They may be profound—as with Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher—but they happen rapidly, so they only need to get people’s attention for a short time. Sometimes, though, our messages are more complex. How do we get people to stick with us through a more complex message? How do we keep people’s attention?
A few years ago, Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, set out to improve the way he talked about science in his writing and in his classes. For inspiration, he went to the library. He pulled down every book he could find in which scientists were writing for an audience of nonscientists. He photocopied sections of prose that he liked. Later, flipping through his stack of copied passages, he hunted for consistencies.
In passages that weren’t interesting, he found mostly what he expected. The purpose wasn’t clear, and the prose was too formal and riddled with jargon. He also found a lot of predictable virtues in the good passages: The structure was clear, the examples vivid, and the language fluid. “But,” says Cialdini, “I also found something I had not expected—the most successful of these pieces all began with a mystery story. The authors described a state of affairs that seemed to make no sense and then invited the reader into the material as a way of solving the mystery.”
One example that stuck in his mind was written by an astronomer, who began with a puzzle:
How can we account for what is perhaps the most spectacular planetary feature in our solar system, the rings of Saturn? There’s nothing else like them. What are the rings of Saturn made of anyway?
And then he deepened the mystery further by asking, “How could three internationally acclaimed groups of scientists come to wholly different conclusions on the answer?” One, at Cambridge University, proclaimed they were gas; another group, at MIT, was convinced they were made up of dust particles; while the third, at Cal Tech, insisted they were comprised of ice crystals. How could this be, after all, each group was looking at the same thing, right? So, what was the answer?
The answer unfolded like the plot of a mystery. The teams of scientists pursued promising leads, they hit dead ends, they chased clues. Eventually, after many months of effort, there was a breakthrough. Cialdini says, “Do you know what the answer was at the end of twenty pages? Dust. Dust. Actually, ice-covered dust, which accounts for some of the confusion. Now, I don’t care about dust, and the makeup of the rings of Saturn is entirely irrelevant to my life. But that writer had me turning pages like a speed-reader.”
Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. “You’ve heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?” he says. “Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience.”
By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interesting. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line but for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scientific theories and experimentation.
Cialdini began to create mysteries in his own classroom, and the power of the approach quickly became clear. He would introduce the mystery at the start of class, return to it during the lecture, and reveal the answer at the end. In one lecture, though, the end-of-class bell rang before he had time to reveal the solution. He says, “Normally five to ten minutes before the scheduled end time, some students start preparing to leave. You know the signals—pencils are put away, notebooks folded, backpacks zipped up.” This time, though, the class was silent. “After the bell rang, no one moved. In fact, when I tried to end the lecture without revealing the mystery, I was pelted with protests.” He said he felt as if he’d discovered dynamite.
Cialdini believes that a major benefit of teaching using mysteries is that “the process of resolving mysteries is remarkably similar to the process of science.” So, by using mysteries, teachers don’t just heighten students’ interest in the day’s material; they train them to think like scientists.
Science doesn’t have a monopoly on mysteries. Mysteries exist wherever there are questions without obvious answers. Why is it so hard to get pandas at the zoo to breed? Why don’t customers like our new product? What’s the best way to teach kids about fractions?
Notice what is happening here: We have now moved to a higher level of unexpectedness. In the Nordstrom example, the Nordie stories had a punchy immediacy: Nordies warm up customers’ cars! When you hear this, your past schema of customer service is called up, contradicted, and refined, all in a short period of time. Mysteries act differently. Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment but from an unexpected journey. We know where we’re headed—we want to solve the mystery—but we’re not sure how we’ll get there.
A schema violation is a onetime transac
tion. Boom, something has changed. If we were told that the rings of Saturn were made of dryer lint, a schema would be violated. We could call it “first-level” unexpectedness. But the actual “rings of Saturn mystery” is more extended and subtle. We are told that scientists do not know what Saturn’s rings are made of, and we’re asked to follow on a journey whose ending is unpredictable. That’s second-level unexpectedness. In this way, we jump from fleeting surprise to enduring interest.
Curiosity in Hollywood Screenplays
Early in the movie Trading Places, Billy Ray Valentine (played by Eddie Murphy), an apparently legless beggar, is using his arms to push himself around on a skateboardish contraption in a public park. He begs for money from passersby and harasses an attractive woman for a date. A couple of cops approach. As they jerk him up, his legs—perfectly normal legs—are exposed. Valentine is a con artist.
Later in the movie, the Duke brothers—two elderly businessmen—intervene to get Valentine out of jail, persuading the cops to release him into their custody. A couple of scenes later, Valentine appears, dressed in a three-piece suit, in a wood-paneled office. The Duke brothers have turned him into a commodities trader.
Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, uses this example to illustrate the concept of a “Turning Point.” McKee knows something about how to hold an audience’s attention. His screenwriting seminars play to packed auditoriums of aspiring screenwriters, who pay five hundred dollars a head to listen to his thoughts. The Village Voice described his course as “damned near indispensable not only for writers, but also for actors, directors, reviewers, and garden-variety cinephiles.” His students have written, directed, or produced television shows such as E.R., Hill Street Blues, and The X-Files, and movies ranging from The Color Purple to Forrest Gump and Friday the 13th.