by Dan Heath
“Sportsmanship” had been stretched too far. Like “relativity,” it had migrated far afield from its original meaning. It used to refer to the kind of behavior that Lance Armstrong showed Jan Ullrich. But over time the term was stretched to include unimpressive, nonchivalrous behavior, like losing without whining too much or making it through an entire game without assaulting a referee.
Thompson and the PCA needed a different way of encouraging people, not just to avoid bad behavior but to embrace good behavior.
They called it Honoring the Game. People care about sports, they care about the Game. It’s a way of making the point that the Game and its integrity are larger than the individual participants. “Honoring the Game” is a kind of sports patriotism. It implies that you owe your sport basic respect. Armstrong wasn’t being a “good sport;” he was Honoring the Game. And Honoring the Game also works for people other than players. It reminds anyone that sports is a civic institution. It’s unseemly to mess with an institution. It’s dishonorable.
Is there any proof that Honoring the Game works? Consider the data gathered by a basketball league in Dallas, Texas: “In the 2002 basketball season, on average there was a technical foul called every fifteen games. Since that time, we’ve conducted six Double-Goal Coach workshops. In the 2004 basketball season, there was a technical foul called every fifty-two games.” A baseball league in Northern California found that after Positive Coaching training, there was a dramatic reduction (90 percent!) in the number of people who were ejected from games for bad behavior. Team morale improved so much that the number of players enrolling in the league increased by 20 percent. The only complaint was that they were running out of fields.
Thompson doesn’t want to change just the culture of youth sports. He wants to change the culture of all sports: “I have a fantasy. I’m watching the World Series and a manager comes rushing onto the field to berate an umpire who made a call he disagrees with. On national TV, Bob Costas says, ‘That’s really too bad to see the manager dishonoring the game of baseball that way.’” (As a side note, notice how wonderfully concrete this vision is.)
Youth sports hasn’t been purged of discourtesy, but Thompson is making a tangible difference in the places he’s reached. And, with Honoring the Game, he has managed to sidestep semantic stretch and peg an idea that makes people care.
The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we’ve either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.
Appealing to Self-Interest
We’re searching for ways to make people care about our ideas—to make them care about the African child Rokia, about smoking, about charity, about sportsmanship. We make people care by appealing to the things that matter to them.
And what matters to people? So far, we’ve dealt with associations, but there’s a more direct answer. In fact, it might be the most obvious answer of all. What matters to people? People matter to themselves. It will come as no surprise that one reliable way of making people care is by invoking self-interest.
In 1925, John Caples was assigned to write a headline for an advertisement promoting the correspondence music course offered by the U.S. School of Music. Caples had no advertising experience, but he was a natural. He sat at his typewriter and pecked out the most famous headline in print-advertising history: “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano … But When I Started to Play!”
This is a classic underdog story in fifteen words. People laughed at him! And he shut them up through his playing! (The headline is enthralling enough that it makes us overlook commonsense reactions like, Um, why would anyone laugh at someone sitting down at a piano? When was the last time you laughed at someone who sat down at a piano?)
The headline was so successful at selling correspondence courses that it’s still being ripped off by copywriters decades later. Sixty years later, the following knockoff headline increased sales by 26 percent over the previous year: “My Husband Laughed When I Ordered Our Carpet Through the Mail. But When I Saved 50% …” (Our publisher rejected the following subtitle for this book: “They Laughed When We Wrote This Book. But When They Woke Up in an Ice-Filled Bathtub …”)
Caples helped establish mail-order advertising, the forerunner of the modern infomercial. In mail-order advertising, unlike most other forms of advertising, advertisers know exactly how well an ad works. Say there’s an ad for a “stock-picking guide” in a newspaper or a magazine. If you want to order the stock-picking guide, you send off a check to the address listed in the ad. But each version of an ad lists a slightly different address, so when your order shows up at a particular address the marketer knows precisely which ad generated the sale.
Contrast mail-order ads with a classic consumer product like Crest. Why does someone buy a tube of Crest? Is it because of the new TV ads? Or was it the discount price at retail? Or the fancy new package design? Or the fact that Mom always used Crest? Or that it was the only brand in stock that day? Marketers have surprisingly little ability to tell.
Because mail-order advertising is so transparent, it’s essentially a laboratory for assessing motivational appeals. What makes people care? Ask a direct-mail copywriter. And John Caples is often cited as the greatest copywriter of all time. He says, “First and foremost, try to get self-interest into every headline you write. Make your headline suggest to readers that here is something they want. This rule is so fundamental that it would seem obvious. Yet the rule is violated every day by scores of writers.”
Caples’s ads get self-interest into their headlines by promising huge benefits for trivial costs:
You Can Laugh at Money Worries if You Follow This Simple Plan
Give Me 5 Days and I’ll Give You a Magnetic Personality … Let Me Prove It—Free
The Secret of How to Be Taller
How You Can Improve Your Memory in One Evening
Retire at 55
Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. “The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world’s best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world’s best lawn!).” An old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.
We get uncomfortable looking at Caples’s handiwork: Many of his ads are shady. Deceptive. The manufacturers of the Magnetic Personality Kit may enjoy a conscience-free existence, but most of us aspire to a working relationship with the truth.
So what’s the nonadvertising, nonschlocky takeaway from the Caples techniques? The first lesson is not to overlook self-interest. Jerry Weissman, a former TV producer and screenwriter who now coaches CEOs in how to deliver speeches, says that you shouldn’t dance around the appeal to self-interest. He says that the WIIFY—“what’s in it for you,” pronounced whiff-y—should be a central aspect of every speech.
Weissman notes that some people resist spelling out the message. “But my audiences aren’t stupid,” he quotes the resisters. “They might even feel insulted if I spell it out for them!” For an audience that may be distracted, though, spelling it out has value: “Even if it takes them just a few seconds to connect the dots between the feature you describe and the implied benefit, by the time they catch up, you will have moved on to your next point, and they probably won’t have time to absorb the benefit … or the next point.”
Teachers are all too familiar with the student refrain “How are we ever going to use this?” In other words, what’s in it for me? If the WIIFY was that algebra made students better at video games, would any teacher hesitate to say so? Does any teacher doubt that students would pay more attention?
If you’ve got self-interest
on your side, don’t bury it. Don’t talk around it. Even subtle tweaks can make a difference. It’s important, Caples says, to keep the self in self-interest: “Don’t say, ‘People will enjoy a sense of security when they use Goodyear Tires.’ Say, ‘You enjoy a sense of security when you use Goodyear Tires.’”
Of course, there are less obnoxious, less overt ways to appeal to self-interest than those promoted by mail-order ads. To explore this, we’ll start with a rather odd study conducted in Tempe, Arizona.
Cable TV in Tempe
In 1982, psychologists conducted a study on persuasion with a group of homeowners in Tempe, Arizona. The homeowners were visited by student volunteers who asked them to fill out surveys for a class project.
At the time, cable TV was just starting to appear—it was still unfamiliar to most people. The research study was designed to compare the success of two different approaches to educating the homeowners about the potential benefits of cable TV.
One group of homeowners was presented with some information about why cable might be worthwhile:
CATV will provide a broader entertainment and informational service to its subscribers. Used properly, a person can plan in advance to enjoy events offered. Instead of spending money on the babysitter and gas, and putting up with the hassles of going out, more time can be spent at home with family, alone, or with friends.
The second group of homeowners was asked to imagine themselves in a detailed scenario:
Take a moment and imagine how CATV will provide you with a broader entertainment and informational service. When you use it properly, you will be able to plan in advance which of the events offered you wish to enjoy. Take a moment and think of how, instead of spending money on the babysitter and gas, and then having to put up with the hassles of going out, you will be able to spend your time at home, with your family, alone, or with your friends.
Some readers have said that at first they didn’t see any difference between the two appeals. The difference is subtle. But go back and count up the number of times the word “you” appears in each appeal.
In a sense, the study was a more elaborate version of Caples’s advice to avoid talking about abstract benefits (“People will enjoy a sense of security when they use Goodyear Tires”) and focus on personal benefits (“You enjoy a sense of security when you use Goodyear Tires”). The Arizona study, though, took it a step further. It asked people to visualize the feeling of security they would get by using Goodyear tires.
The homeowners filled out a questionnaire for the students and said goodbye. They thought they were finished with the research project, but the researchers still had another stage to complete. A month after the survey was conducted, cable TV arrived in Tempe. The local cable company approached the homeowners for subscriptions. The university researchers managed to get subscriber data from the cable company. They then analyzed which homeowners had subscribed and which hadn’t.
The homeowners who got information about cable subscribed at a rate of 20 percent, which was about the same as the rest of the neighborhood. But the homeowners who imagined themselves subscribing to cable subscribed at a rate of 47 percent. The research paper, when it was published, was subtitled “Does Imagining Make It So?” The answer was yes.
Compared with a typical mail-order ad, the “imagine cable television” appeal is a much more subtle appeal to self-interest. Note that the benefits offered were not fantastic in a Caples-esque way. The gist was that you could avoid the hassle of leaving home (!) by ordering cable. Indeed, just hearing about the benefits, in the abstract, wasn’t enough to lure additional subscribers. It was only when people put themselves in the starring role—I can see myself watching a good movie at home with my hubby, and I can get up and check on the kids in the next room whenever I like … and think of all that babysitting money I’d save!—that their interest grew.
This finding suggests that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care. You don’t have to promise riches and sex appeal and magnetic personalities. It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.
Imagine that Save the Children incorporated this idea into its pitches for sponsorship. Right now the pitch is “You can sponsor Rokia, a little girl in Mali, for $30 per month”—a pitch that is already successful. But what if the pitch was expanded? “Imagine yourself as the sponsor of Rokia, a little girl in Mali. You’ve got a picture of her on your desk at work, next to your kids’ pictures. During the past year you’ve traded letters with her three times, and you know from the letters that she loves to read and frequently gets annoyed by her little brother. She is excited that next year she’ll get to play on the soccer team.” That’s powerful. (And it’s not crass.)
Maslow
Self-interest isn’t the whole story, of course—especially if we define “self-interest” narrowly, as we often do, in terms of wealth and security. If it were the whole story, no one would ever serve in the armed forces. There are things people care about that would never appear in a Caples ad.
In 1954, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow surveyed the research in psychology about what motivates people. He boiled down volumes of existing research to a list of needs and desires that people try to fulfill:
Transcendence: help others realize their potential
Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences
Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance
Learning: know, understand, mentally connect
Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status
Belonging: love, family, friends, affection
Security: protection, safety, stability
Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort
You may remember this list as Maslow’s Pyramid, or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow’s list of needs was incredibly insightful, but he was wrong to describe it as a “hierarchy.” Maslow saw the hierarchy as a ladder—to be climbed rung by rung from the bottom up. You couldn’t fill your longing for Esteem until you satisfied your longing for Security. You couldn’t fill your Aesthetic needs until your Physical needs were taken care of. (In Maslow’s world, there were no starving artists.)
Subsequent research suggests that the hierarchical aspect of Maslow’s theory is bogus—people pursue all of these needs pretty much simultaneously. There’s no question that most starving men would rather eat than transcend, but there’s an awful lot of overlap in the middle.
When people talk about “self-interest,” they’re typically invoking the Physical, Security, and Esteem layers. Sometimes Belonging gets acknowledged if the speaker is touchy-feely. Not many marketers or managers venture far beyond these categories. Even appeals that seem to fall under the Aesthetic category are often really Esteem-related, but in disguise (e.g., a luxury-auto ad).
There could be a very good reason that people focus on those particular categories. Maybe those are the ones that truly matter. The rest of them—Self-actualization, Transcendence, and so on—do seem a bit academic. Recent research has explored this question, helping to shed light on which of Maslow’s categories made people care.
Imagine that a company offers its employees a $1,000 bonus if they meet certain performance targets. There are three different ways of presenting the bonus to the employees:
Think of what that $1,000 means: a down payment on a new car or that new home improvement you’ve been wanting to make.
Think of the increased security of having that $1,000 in your bank account for a rainy day.
Think of what the $1,000 means: the company recognizes how important you are to its overall performance. It doesn’t spend money for nothing.
When people are asked which positioning would appeal to them personally, most of them say No. 3. It’s good for the self-esteem—and, as for No. 1 and No. 2, isn’t it kind of obvious that $1,000 can be spent or saved? Most of us have no trouble at all vis
ualizing ourselves spending $1,000. (It’s a bit less common to find people who like to visualize themselves saving.)
Here’s the twist, though: When people are asked which is the best positioning for other people (not them), they rank No. 1 most fulfilling, followed by No. 2. That is, we are motivated by self-esteem, but others are motivated by down payments. This single insight explains almost everything about the way incentives are structured in most large organizations.
Or consider another version of the same task. Let’s say you’re trying to persuade someone to take a new job in a department that’s crucial to the company’s success. Here are three possible pitches for the new job:
Think about how much security this job provides. It’s so important that the company will always need someone in this job.
Think about the visibility provided by this job. Because the job is so important, a lot of people will be watching your performance.
Think about how rewarding it will be to work in such a central job. It offers a unique opportunity to learn how the company really works.
The chasm between ourselves and others opens again. Most people say No. 3—an appeal to Learning—would be most motivating for them. Those same people predict that others would be most motivated by No. 1 (Security) and No. 2 (Esteem).
In other words, a lot of us think everyone else is living in Maslow’s basement—we may have a penthouse apartment, but everyone else is living below. The result of spending too much time in Maslow’s basement is that we may overlook lots of opportunities to motivate people. It’s not that the “bottom floors”—or the more tangible, physical needs, to avoid the hierarchy metaphor—aren’t motivational. Of course they are. We all like to get bonuses and to have job security and to feel like we fit in. But to focus on these needs exclusively robs us of the chance to tap more profound motivations.