by Dan Heath
McDonough’s new process wasn’t just safer, it was cheaper. Manufacturing costs shrank 20 percent. The savings came, in part, from the reduced hassle and expense of dealing with toxic chemicals. Workers no longer had to wear protective clothing. And the scraps—instead of being shipped off to Spain for burial—were converted into felt, which was sold to Swiss farmers and gardeners for crop insulation.
This story is remarkable. Think about all the memorable elements: The impossible mission. The elimination of all but 38 of 8,000 chemicals. The factory’s water turned so clean that Swiss inspectors thought their instruments were broken. The scraps were transformed from hazardous waste into crop insulation. The idea that this fabric was “safe enough to eat.” And the happy business result—workers made safer and costs down 20 percent.
If McDonough approaches any business, in any industry, with a suggestion for a more environment-friendly process, this story will give him enormous credibility. It easily clears the bar set by the Sinatra Test.
So far we’ve talked about creating credibility by drawing on external sources—authorities and antiauthorities. And we’ve talked about creating credibility by drawing on sources inside the message itself—by using details and statistics and examples that pass the Sinatra Test. But there’s one remaining source of credibility that we haven’t discussed. And it may be the most powerful source of all.
Where’s the Beef?
One of the most brilliant television ad campaigns of all time was launched by Wendy’s in 1984. The first commercial opens on three elderly women standing together at a counter. On the counter there’s a hamburger on a plate, and they’re gawking at it, because it’s huge—about a foot in diameter.
“It certainly is a big bun,” says the woman on the left.
“A very big bun,” echoes the one in the center.
“A big, fluffy bun,” says the first.
“A very big fluffy …”
There’s a pause as the woman in the middle lifts the top half of the bun and reveals a meager, overcooked beef patty and a single pickle. The patty is dwarfed by the bun.
For the first time, we hear from the woman on the right, played by eighty-year-old Clara Peller. She squints through her glasses and says, cantankerously, “Where’s the beef?”
The announcer says, “Some hamburger places give you a lot less beef on a fluffy bun….”
Peller: “Where’s the beef?”
Announcer: “The Wendy’s Single has more beef than the Whopper or the Big Mac. At Wendy’s you get more beef and less bun.”
Peller: “Hey! Where’s the beef?” She peers over the counter. “I don’t think there’s anybody back there.”
There’s a lot to love about these commercials. They’re funny and well produced. Clara Peller became a minor celebrity. More remarkably, the ads highlighted a true advantage of Wendy’s hamburgers: They really did have more beef. The ads were a refreshing departure from the standard advertiser tool kit that attempts to paint powerful but irrelevant emotions on consumer goods—for instance, associating a mother’s love of her children with a particular brand of fabric softener. Wendy’s did something more admirable: It highlighted a genuine advantage of its product and presented it in an enjoyable way.
The ads had a big impact. According to polls taken by Wendy’s, the number of customers who believed that Wendy’s Single was larger than the Whopper or the Big Mac increased by 47 percent in the two months after the commercial aired. During the first full year after the ads ran, Wendy’s revenues rose 31 percent.
The claim Wendy’s had made was that its burgers had more beef. This information was probably not something most people would have given much thought to before. Certainly it was not common sense at the time. So how did Wendy’s make this claim credible?
Notice that something different is going on here. This message doesn’t draw on external credibility—Wendy’s didn’t invite Larry Bird to weigh in on burger sizes. (Nor did it use an antiauthority, like an obese burger-eating giant.) It doesn’t draw on internal credibility, either, quoting a statistic like “11 percent more beef!” Instead, the commercials developed a brand-new source of credibility: the audience. Wendy’s outsourced its credibility to its customers.
The spots implicitly challenged customers to verify Wendy’s claims: See for yourself—look at our burgers versus McDonald’s burgers. You’ll notice the size difference! To use scientific language, Wendy’s made a falsifiable claim. Any customer with a ruler and a scale could have verified the claim’s truth value. (Though Wendy’s advantage was sufficiently substantial that just eyeballing the difference was enough.)
This challenge—asking customers to test a claim for them-selves—is a “testable credential.” Testable credentials can provide an enormous credibility boost, since they essentially allow your audience members to “try before they buy.”
Testable Credentials
Testable credentials have a colorful history in urban legends. In the 1990s, Snapple struggled to shake rumors that it supported the Ku Klux Klan. Rumormongers thought they had a few pieces of “evidence” on their side: “Look on any bottle of Snapple—there’s a picture of a slave ship on the front!” Doubters were also encouraged to look for the strange symbol showing a K inside a circle—allegedly, evidence of the Klan’s ownership.
Sure enough, Snapple’s labels did feature a picture of a ship and a K in a circle. They just had nothing to do with the Klan. The ship was from an engraving of the Boston Tea Party. The circled K is a symbol for “kosher.” But some uninformed people saw these symbols and bought into the rumors.
Notice that the Snapple rumor provides a kind of bait-and-switch version of “Where’s the Beef?” Wendy’s says, “See for yourself—our burgers have more beef.” The Rumormongers say, “See for yourself—there’s a circled K. Therefore Snapple supports the Ku Klux Klan.” The validity of the see-for-yourself claim causes some people to leap, illogically, to the rumormongers’ conclusion. This is how testable credentials can backfire—the “see for yourself” step can be valid, while the resulting conclusion can be entirely invalid.
Testable credentials are useful in many domains. For example, take the question “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Ronald Reagan famously posed this question to the audience during his 1980 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter. Reagan could have focused on statistics—the high inflation rate, the loss of jobs, the rising interest rates. But instead of selling his case he deferred to his audience.
Another example of testable credentials comes from Jim Thompson, the founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA). The mission of the PCA is to emphasize that youth sports should not be about winning at all costs; it should be about learning life lessons.
The PCA holds positive-coaching seminars for youth sports coaches. At the seminars, trainers use the analogy of an “Emotional Tank” to get coaches to think about the right ratio of praise, support, and critical feedback. “The Emotional Tank is like the gas tank of an automobile. If your car’s tank is empty, you can’t drive very far. If your Emotional Tank is empty, you are not going to be able to perform at your best.”
After the Emotional Tank analogy is introduced, the trainers begin an exercise. First, they ask the coaches to imagine that the person next to them has just flubbed a key play in the game. The coaches are challenged to say something to the person to drain his Emotional Tank. Since clever put-downs are a staple of many sports interactions, this exercise is embraced with noticeable enthusiasm. Thompson says, “The room fills with laughter as coaches get into the exercise, sometimes with great creativity.”
Then the coaches are asked to imagine that someone else has made the same mistake, but now they’re in charge of filling that person’s Emotional Tank instead of draining it. This generates a more muted response. Thompson says, “The room often gets very quiet, and you finally hear a feeble, ‘Nice try!’”
Observing their own behavior, the coaches learn the lesso
n—how they found it easier to criticize than to support, to think of ten clever insults rather than a single consolation. Thompson found a way to transform his point into a testable credential, something the coaches could experience for themselves.
CLINIC
Our Intuition Is Flawed,
but Who Wants to Believe That?
THE SITUATION: People often trust their intuition, but our intuition is flawed by identifiable biases. Still, most people feel pretty good about their intuition, and it’s hard to convince them otherwise. This is the uphill battle faced by psychologists who study decision-making. Pretend that you’re the editor of an introductory psychology textbook, and you’re looking at two competing ways of explaining the concept of “availability bias.”
• • •
MESSAGE 1: Get ready to make a few predictions. Which of the following events kill more people: Homicide or suicide? Floods or tuberculosis? Tornadoes or asthma? Take a second to think about your answers.
You might have thought that homicide, floods, and tornadoes are more common. People generally do. But in the United States there are 50 percent more deaths from suicide than from homicide, nine times more deaths from tuberculosis than from floods, and eighty times more deaths from asthma than from tornadoes.
So why do people predict badly? Because of the availability bias. The availability bias is a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event’s probability by its availability in our memory. We intuitively think that events are more likely when they are easier to remember. But often the things we remember are not an accurate summary of the world.
We may remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent. We may remember things better because the media spend more time covering them (perhaps because they provide more vivid images), not because they are more common. The availability bias may lead our intuition astray, prompting us to treat unusual things as common and unlikely things as probable.
• • •
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1: This passage uses a simple but effective testable credential: Which problem do you think kills more people? With any luck, readers will botch at least one of the predictions, thus illustrating for themselves the reality of the availability bias.
MESSAGE 2: Here’s an alternative passage illustrating the availability bias that is more typical of introductory textbooks:
The availability bias is a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event’s probability by its availability in our memory. We intuitively think that events are more likely when they’re easier to remember. But often the things we remember are not an accurate summary of the world. For example, in a study by decision researchers at the University of Oregon, experimental participants thought that 20 percent more people died in homicides than in suicides, when the truth is that there are 50 percent more deaths from suicides. Subjects thought that more people were killed by floods than tuberculosis, but nine times more people are killed by tuberculosis. Subjects believed that approximately as many people were killed by tornadoes as by asthma, but there are eighty times more deaths from asthma.
People remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent. People remember things better because the media spend more time covering them (perhaps because they provide more vivid images), not because they are more common. The availability bias may lead our intuition astray, prompting us to treat unusual things as common and unlikely things as probable.
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2: This is less involving. You could imagine a student reading the second paragraph—which gives away the punch line that asthma kills eighty times more people than tornadoes—and thinking, Wow, those research participants were dumb. It’s much more powerful to experience the effect for yourself.
SCORECARD
Checklist Message 1 Message 2
Simple
Unexpected -
Concrete
Credible
Emotional - -
Story - -
PUNCH LINE: Using testable credentials allows people to try out an idea for themselves.
Rookie Orientation
Let’s shift to a different sports domain: the National Basketball Association. Imagine that it’s your job to educate incoming NBA rookies about the danger of AIDS. NBA players are young men—rookies are often under twenty-one. And they are sudden celebrities, with all the attention that goes with this new fame. They’ve heard about AIDS their entire lives, so the risk is not that they’re unaware of AIDS; the risk is that the circumstances of their lives prompt them to drop their guard for a night.
How do you make the threat of AIDS credible and immediate? Think through the possible sources of credibility. You could draw on external credibility—a celebrity/expert like Magic Johnson, or an antiauthority, such as an athlete in the terminal stages of AIDS. You could use statistics on a human scale (perhaps the odds of contracting AIDS from a single encounter with a stranger). You could use vivid details—an athlete could recount how his normal safe-sex vigilance was eroded by a particularly wild night of partying. Any of these could be quite effective. But what if you wanted to move the source of credibility inward, inside the heads of the players? The NBA came up with an ingenious way to do just that.
A few weeks before the NBA season begins, all the rookie players are required to meet in Tarrytown, New York, for a mandatory orientation session. They’re essentially locked in a hotel for six days: no pagers, no cell phones. The rookies are taught about life in the big leagues—everything from how to deal with the media to how to make sensible investments with their new riches.
One year, despite the secrecy surrounding the orientation, a group of female fans staked out the location. On the first night of the orientation, they were hanging out in the hotel bar and restaurant, dressed to be noticed. The players were pleased by the attention. There was a lot of flirting, and the players made plans to meet up with some of the women later in the orientation.
The next morning, the rookies dutifully showed up for their session. They were surprised to see the female fans in front of the room. The women introduced themselves again, one by one. “Hi, I’m Sheila and I’m HIV positive.” “Hi, I’m Donna and I’m HIV positive.”
Suddenly the talk about AIDS clicked for the rookies. They saw how life could get out of control, how a single night could cause a lifetime of regret.
Contrast the NBA’s approach with the NFL’s approach. At the NFL’s orientation one year, league personnel had every rookie put a condom on a banana. No doubt eye-rolling was epidemic. Later, two women—former football groupies—talked about how they would try to seduce players, hoping to get pregnant. The women’s session was powerful—it was a well-designed message. But what’s more likely to stick with someone: hearing about someone who fooled someone else, or being fooled yourself?
How do we get people to believe our ideas? We’ve got to find a source of credibility to draw on. Sometimes the wellsprings are dry, as Barry Marshall discovered in his quest to cure the ulcer. Drawing on external credibility didn’t work—the endorsement of his supervisors and his institution in Perth didn’t seem to be enough. Drawing on internal credibility didn’t work—his careful marshaling of data and detail still didn’t help him clear the bar. In the end, what he did was draw on the audience’s credibility—he essentially “modeled” a testable credential by gulping a glass of bacteria. The implicit challenge was: See for yourself—if you drink this gunk, you’ll get an ulcer, just like I did.
It’s not always obvious which wellspring of credibility we should draw from. What Marshall showed so brilliantly was perseverance—knowing when it was time to draw on a different well. In this chapter we’ve seen that the most obvious sources of credibility—external validation and statistics—aren’t always the best. A few vivid details might be more persua
sive than a barrage of statistics. An antiauthority might work better than an authority. A single story that passes the Sinatra Test might overcome a mountain of skepticism. It’s inspirational to know that a medical genius like Marshall had to climb over the same hurdles with his idea as we’ll have to climb with ours—and to see that he eventually prevailed, to the benefit of us all.
EMOTIONAL
Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” In 2004, some researchers at Carnegie Mellon University decided to see whether most people act like Mother Teresa.
The researchers wanted to see how people responded to an opportunity to make a charitable contribution to an abstract cause versus a charitable contribution to a single person. They offered participants five dollars to complete a survey about their usage of various technology products. (The survey was irrelevant; the point was to ensure that the participants would have some cash on hand to consider donating to charity.)
When people finished the survey, they received their payment in five one-dollar bills. They also received, unexpectedly, an envelope and a charity-request letter giving them an opportunity to donate some of their money to Save the Children, a charity that focuses on the well-being of children worldwide.
The researchers tested two versions of the request letter. The first version featured statistics about the magnitude of the problems facing children in Africa, such as the following:
Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than 3 million children.
In Zambia, severe rainfall deficits have resulted in a 42 percent drop in maize production from 2000. As a result, an estimated 3 million Zambians face hunger.