particularly good thing to link the brand to because it is a frequent stimulus
in the environment. A huge number of people drink coffee. Many drink it a
number of times throughout the day. And so by linking Kit Kat to coffee,
Colleen created a frequent trigger to remind people of the brand.
—————
Biologists often talk about plants and animals as having habitats, natural
environments that contain all necessary elements for sustaining an
organism’s life. Ducks need water and grasses to eat. Deer thrive in areas
that contain open spaces for grazing.
Products and ideas also have habitats, or sets of triggers that cause people
to think about them.
Take hot dogs. Barbecues, summertime, baseball games, and even wiener
dogs (dachshunds) are just a few of the triggers that make up the habitat for
hot dogs.
Compare that with the habitat for Ethiopian food. What triggers most
people to think of Ethiopian food? Ethiopian food is certainly delicious, but
its habitat is not as prevalent.
Most products or ideas have a number of natural triggers. Mars bars and
Mars the planet are already naturally connected. The Mars company didn’t
need to do anything to create that link. Likewise, French music is a natural
trigger for French wine, and the last day of the workweek is a natural trigger
for Rebecca Black’s song “Friday.”
But it’s also possible to grow an idea’s habitat by creating new links to
stimuli in the environment. Kit Kat wouldn’t normally be associated with
coffee, but through repeated pairing, Colleen Chorak was able to link the
two. Similarly, our trays experiment created a link between dining-room
trays and a message to eat fruits and vegetables by repeatedly pairing the
two ideas together. And by increasing the habitat for the message, these
newly formed links helped the desired behavior catch on.
Consider an experiment we conducted with BzzAgent and Boston Market.
This fast-casual restaurant is best known for home-style comfort food
(rotisserie chicken and mashed potatoes) and was primarily viewed as a
lunch place. Management wanted to generate more buzz. We thought we
could help by growing Boston Market’s habitat.
During a six-week campaign, some people were exposed to messages that
repeatedly paired the restaurant with dinner. “Thinking about dinner? Think
about Boston Market!”. Other people received a similar advertising
campaign that contained a more generic message: “Thinking about a place to
eat? Think about Boston Market!” We then measured how often the
respective groups talked about the restaurant.
The results were dramatic. Compared to the generic message, the message
that grew the habitat (by associating Boston Market with dinner) increased
word of mouth by 20 percent among people who previously had associated
the brand only with lunch. Growing the habitat boosted buzz.
—————
Competitors can even be used as a trigger.
How can public health organizations compete against the marketing
strength of better-funded rivals like cigarette companies? One way to combat
this inequality is to transform a weakness into a strength: by making a rival’s
message act as a trigger for your own.
A famous antismoking campaign, for example, spoofed Marlboro’s iconic
ads by captioning a picture of one Marlboro cowboy talking to another with
the words: “Bob, I’ve got emphysema.” So now whenever people see a
Marlboro ad, it triggers them to think about the antismoking message.
Researchers call this strategy the poison parasite because it slyly injects
“poison” (your message) into a rival’s message by making it a trigger for
your own.
WHAT MAKES FOR AN EFFECTIVE TRIGGER?
Triggers can help products and ideas catch on, but some stimuli are better
triggers than others.
As we discussed, one key factor is how frequently the stimulus occurs.
Hot chocolate would also have fitted really well with Kit Kat, and the sweet
beverage might have even complemented the chocolate bar’s flavor better
than coffee. But coffee is a more effective trigger because people think about
and see it much more frequently. Most people drink hot chocolate only in the
winter, while coffee is consumed year-round.
Similarly, Michelob ran a successful campaign in the 1970s that linked
weekends with the beer brand (“Weekends are made for Michelob”).
However, that wasn’t the slogan when the campaign started out. Originally
the slogan was “Holidays are made for Michelob.” But this proved
ineffective because the chosen stimuli—holidays—don’t happen that often.
So Anheuser-Busch revised the slogan to “Weekends are made for
Michelob,” which was much more successful.
Frequency, however, must also be balanced with the strength of the link.
The more things a given cue is associated with, the weaker any given
association. It’s like poking a hole in the bottom of a paper cup filled with
water. If you poke just one hole, a strong stream of water will gush out. But
poke more holes, and the pressure of the stream from each opening lessens.
Poke too many holes and you’ll get barely a trickle from each.
Triggers work the same way. The color red, for example, is associated
with many things: roses, love, Coca-Cola, and fast cars, to name just a few.
As a result of being ubiquitous, it’s not a particularly strong trigger for any
of these ideas. Ask different people to say the word that first comes to their
mind when they think of red and you’ll see what I mean.
Compare that with how many people think “jelly” when you say “peanut
butter” and it will be clear why stronger, more unusual links are better.
Linking a product or idea with a stimulus that is already associated with
many things isn’t as effective as forging a fresher, more original link.
It is also important to pick triggers that happen near where the desired
behavior is taking place. Consider a clever but ultimately ineffective public
service ad from New Zealand. A handsome, muscular man is taking a
shower. In the background you hear a catchy jingle about HeatFlow, a new
temperature-control system that ensures you’ll always have sufficient hot
water for long, luxurious showers. The man turns off the water. When he
opens the shower door, an attractive woman tosses him a towel. He smiles.
She smiles. He begins to step out of the shower stall.
Suddenly, he slips. Falling, he cracks his head on the tile floor. As he lies
there, motionless, his arm twitches slightly. A voice-over somberly intones:
“Preventing slips around your home can be as easy as using a bath mat.”
Wow. Definitely surprising. Extremely memorable. So memorable, I think
about it every time I take a shower in a bathroom that doesn’t have a mat on
the floor.
But there’s only one problem.
I can’t buy a bath mat in a bathroom. The message is physically removed
from the desired behavior. Unless I leave the bathroom, turn on my laptop,
and buy a mat online, I have to remember the message until I get to a store.
Contrast that with a New York City Department of Health (DOH) antisoda
campaign. While soda might seem like a relatively low-calorie item
compared to all the food we eat during the course of a day, drinking sugary
beverages actually has a big impact on weight gain. But the DOH didn’t just
want to tell people how much sugar was in soda, it wanted to make sure
people would remember to change their behavior and spread the message to
others.
So the DOH made a video showing someone opening what seems like a
normal soda can. But when he starts to pour it into a glass, out spills fat.
Blob after blob of white, chunky fat. The guy picks the glass up and knocks
the fat back just as one would a regular soda—chunks and all.
The “Man Drinks Fat” clip closes with a huge congealed chunk of fat
being dropped on a dinner plate. It oozes over the table as a message flashes
up on the screen: “Drinking one can of soda a day can make you 10 pounds
fatter a year. So don’t drink yourself fat.”
The video is clever. But by showing fat pouring out of a can, the DOH
also nicely leveraged triggers. Unlike the bath mat ad, its video triggered the
message (don’t consume sugary drinks) at precisely the right time: when
people are thinking of drinking a soda.
CONSIDER THE CONTEXT
These campaigns underscore how important it is to consider the context: to
think about the environments of the people a message or idea is trying to
trigger. Different environments contain different stimuli. Arizona is
surrounded by desert. Floridians see lots of palm trees. Consequently,
different triggers will be more or less effective depending on where people
live.
Similarly, the effectiveness of the hundred-dollar cheesesteak that we
talked about in the introduction depends on the city where it is introduced.
A hundred-dollar sandwich is pretty remarkable, wherever you are. But
how frequently people will be triggered to think about it depends on
geography. In places where people eat lots of cheesesteaks (Philadelphia),
people would be triggered often, but in other places (such as Chicago) not so
much.
Even within a given city or geographic region, people experience different
triggers based on the time of day or year. One study we conducted around
Halloween, for example, found that people were much more likely to think
about products associated with the color orange (such as orange soda or
Reese’s Pieces) the day before Halloween than a week later. Before
Halloween, all the orange stimuli in the environment (pumpkins and orange
displays) triggered thoughts of orange products. But as soon as the holiday
was over, those triggers disappeared, and so did thoughts of orange products.
People moved on to thinking about Christmas or whatever holiday came
next.
So when thinking about, say, how to remember to take your reusable
grocery bags to the grocery store, think about what will trigger you at
exactly the right time. Using reusable grocery bags is like eating more
vegetables. We know we should do it. We even want to do it (most of us
have bought the bags). But when it comes time to take action, we forget.
Then, right as we pull into the grocery store parking lot, we remember.
Argh, I forgot the reusable grocery bags! But by then it’s too late. We’re at
the store and the grocery bags are at home in the closet.
It’s no accident that we think about reusable bags right when we get to the
store. The grocery is a strong trigger for the bags. But unfortunately it is a
badly timed one. Just as with the bath mat public service announcement, the
idea is coming to mind, but at the wrong time. To solve this problem, we
need to be reminded to bring the bags right when we are leaving the house.
What’s a good trigger in this instance? Anything you have to take with
you to buy groceries. Your shopping list, for example, is a great one.
Imagine if every time you saw your shopping list, it made you think of your
reusable bags. It would be much harder to leave the bags at home.
WHY CHEERIOS GETS MORE WORD OF MOUTH THAN
DISNEY WORLD
To return to the example that started the chapter, triggers help explain why
Cheerios get more word of mouth than Disney World. True, Disney World is
interesting and exciting. To use the language of other chapters in the book, it
has high Social Currency and evokes lots of Emotion (next chapter). But the
problem is that people don’t think about it very frequently. Most people
don’t go to Disney World unless they have kids. Even those who do go don’t
go that often. Once a year if that. And there are few triggers to remind them
about the experience after the initial excitement evaporates.
But hundreds of thousands of people eat Cheerios for breakfast every day.
Still more see the bright orange boxes every time they push their shopping
carts down the supermarket cereal aisle. And these triggers make Cheerios
more accessible, increasing the chance that people will talk about the
product.
The number of times Cheerios and Disney are mentioned on Twitter
illustrates this nicely. Cheerios are mentioned more frequently than Disney
World. But examine the data closely and you’ll notice a neat pattern.
Mention of Cheerios on Twitter
Mentions of Cheerios spike every day at approximately the same time.
The first references occur at 5:00 a.m. They peak between 7:30 a.m. and
8:00 a.m. And they diminish around 11:00 a.m. This sharp increase and
corresponding decline align precisely with the traditional time for breakfast.
The pattern even shifts slightly on weekends when people eat breakfast later.
Triggers drive talking.
—————
Triggers are the foundation of word of mouth and contagiousness. To use
an analogy, think of most rock bands. Social Currency is the front man or
woman. It’s exciting, fun, and gets lots of attention. Triggers could be the
drummer or bassist. It’s not as sexy a concept as Social Currency, but it’s an
important workhorse that gets the job done. People may not pay as much
attention to it, but it lays the groundwork that drives success. The more
something is triggered, the more it will be top of mind, and the more
successful it will become.
So we need to consider the context. Like Budweiser’s “wassup” or
Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” our products and ideas need to take advantage of
existing triggers. We also need to grow the habitat. Like Colleen Chorak’s
Kit Kat and coffee, we need to create new links to prevalent triggers.
Triggers and cues lead people to talk, choose, and use. Social currency
gets people talking, but Triggers keep them talking. Top of mind means tip
of tongue.
3. Emotion
By October 27, 2008, Denise Grady had been writing about science for
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