If you have not seen it, go now.
(A spoiler alert: Several of your days will be made if you go to www.ted.com and enter “polar bear” and “Stuart Brown” in its search box. So go there now and return, or continue, knowing that the spoiler follows.)
On the video, you see a photo of a polar bear approaching a Siberian husky in Manitoba, Canada. The 1,200-pound bear’s predatory stare makes it clear: The husky is lunch. Then you notice the husky’s body language, which tells you he sees a different opportunity. The dog is bowing, with his tail wagging, sending a message that every dog owner recognizes: Let’s play!
The bear rises up, its claws retracted, opening itself to the husky. The two then come together and begin an unforgettable ballet. They nuzzle and wrestle like mother and puppy; they play. In one particularly endearing photo, you see in the barely open eyes of the bear its bliss and a reminder of why we play: for the sheer delight.
Dr. Stuart Brown, who presented these photos at the May 2008 Art Center Design Conference in Pasadena, California, is among the researchers who have concluded that animals, including us, are programmed to play; we need it to develop normally. Play-deprived adults often develop antisocial personalities, and play-deprived rats die.
Puppies and dogs, bears and cubs, babies and adults—play is basic to us.
Years ago, this discovery led a historian named Johan Huizinga to offer that we should not be called Homo sapiens, literally “wise men,” after all. We should be called Homo ludens: man the player.
Our enterprises regularly overlook this. They treat us like their vision of polar bears: serious, acquisitive, predatory. As we will see in what follows, today’s shrewdest marketers see us as the bears and huskies that we really are: animals enchanted by play.
Just watch everyone and anyone, all day long.
Before work each day, most men read news about play: the sports page. (Most younger men read it online the night before.) Well before lunch, millions recheck the performance of their fantasy teams or post on Internet fan boards about their Lions, Tigers, or Bears.
At breaks in office halls, they replay Saturday’s and Sunday’s games and second-guess the coaches. Not long afterwards, they close their office doors to search for tickets for the next weekend’s game. When they succeed, they don’t say that they “got” tickets or “found” them. No, they “scored” some tickets. They won.
Of course they did; in America, even getting tickets to the game is a game.
When we finally get down to work, we play. We don’t add a client; we “win” the account. Or we won it while fishing for it, as our language suggests again: We “landed” the account.
Asked about their apparent lust for business, the very successful insist that it’s not about money. “Money,” they assure us and remind themselves, “is just a way of keeping score.” Money is the trophy; work is the game.
On our way home, we stop at a store, decide we feel lucky, and buy lottery tickets; we buy them in numbers beyond comprehension. In 2008, Target, State Farm Insurance, and Microsoft each earned more than $60 billion in revenue, but their successes paled in comparison to state lotteries, which swallowed over $77 billion. If these lotteries merged tonight into a corporation, tomorrow they’d be America’s twenty-second-largest company and the world’s seventy-first-largest company.
Sex, another of our favorite activities, is all play. That thinking starts from the day we start thinking about sex. Boys “get to second base,” then third. Then, like the football player racing to the end zone, they “go all the way” or “score.” How does all this fun begin? With play, of course: foreplay.
Later in life, we call the sexually active man, whom we once called a playboy, a player. Sex is play.
The player marries and settles down. Too often, after kids and seven-year itches come and counseling fails, the marriage implodes. If the man has scored well in business, he goes trolling for his next wife and finds one. But the new young blonde isn’t merely a new wife; she’s a medal. She’s a “trophy” wife.
Of course, men don’t pursue sex constantly, but tens of millions still are in their bedrooms right now, as parents know too well. When these young men are not sleeping, often until well after lunch, they are entranced by their aptly named closest friend: a PlayStation.
Even renting hotel rooms and purchasing airplane tickets have become games, as Priceline has cleverly recognized. We go on Priceline and enter an auction to score the best price. Priceline lets us know we won; it even announces our victory with exclamation points.
All work and no play? Does that person exist? We play all day. And the best marketers recognize the depth of our desire and answer it, in everything from cell phones to investment firms.
Consider the phone that changed the mobile device business, Apple’s iPhone. Study its screen for five seconds, and then ask, “Where have I seen those colors before?”
It’s hard to miss what those colors are telling us. They’re the bright primary colors of our childhood toys.
The iPhone screen uses the same colors used by the Fisher-Price toys of our childhoods: lime green, aqua, Trix cereal red, Cheerios box yellow, Kix box orange. The symbols in the icons? Simple and playful.
Look at the iPhone icon for “Messages” as one example. What is that and where did you first see it?
Of course: you saw it in the comic books you first read as a child. The “Message” symbol is a word balloon, white on Trix cereal’s lime green.
Look at the color of the phone’s iPod symbol, then at the Fisher-Price website, and you’ll see it: the cheery orange color for Fisher-Price Babygear. The purple used for the iTunes symbol and the blue for its email symbol? That’s the Fisher-Price “Shop” purple and “Games & Activities” blue.
“All that distinguishes men from boys,” we’ve heard, “is the price of their toys.” The iPod shouts this, with the colors that call us back to our childhood: I am a toy.
Apple promised that from its inception. It told us that it wasn’t a computer, but an Apple, like the one we once tried to bribe our teachers with.
Ben & Jerry play with us, wrapping their ice cream cartons in cartoons and their ice cream names in puns, like Cherry Garcia. The next time you pass by a Jamba Juice, stop in and look at the signs: cartoon oranges, cartoon typography, Fisher-Price toy colors. Jamba Juice gets us: We are kids who love to play. The cartoon logo beckoning us in to the playfully named Noodles & Company and T.G.I. Friday’s and its waitstaff wearing their “flair” promise the same thing. We play with our food.
The Mini Cooper keeps alive the tradition started by the Volkswagen bug: car as toy. The animation wizards at Pixar studios saw this, too: Their Luigi character in their movie Cars looks like the Mini Cooper’s sillier brother. But dozens of cars appeal to our love of play, as their category makes clear: they’re sports cars.
Costco’s appeal is to our love of play; its strategy actually borrows the name of a 1950’s children’s board game, Treasure Hunt. A trip to Costco is an adult Where’s Waldo? adventure: Might we find fine French Bordeaux for $12 a bottle? Cashmere scarves for $10? Just what might be around the next corner?
Costco is shopping as play.
Venture onto eBay, and you see a button that reads “Buy It Now.” A true bargain seeker always would hit this button, because it guarantees the item’s relatively low price. But in 2007, a University of California, Berkeley, economist named Ulrike M. Malmendier started studying eBay customers and found something unexpected: Most of them ignored the Buy It Now option. They chose to enter the auction instead, where they ended up paying more. They wanted more than the item; they wanted the game of the auction.
For a reverse auction, there’s BoltBus. Play its game right, and you can be the first to book the March 1 trip from New York to Boston for their starting price: $1. “Bolt for a Buck” works, backed by little conventional advertising.
eBay and Bolt are play.
The name Yahoo promises us play. It proclaims it is not a search engine or directory but a toy so fun it will make us shout, “Yahoo!”
Google says that to us, too, partly by stealing Yahoo’s clever use of the beloved-from-childhood double-o sound. Consider all these “oo” words and their playfulness: kaboom, boob, kook, boonies, goofy, doofus, kazoo, Goonies, Goofy, Kool-Aid, Froot Loops, Looney Tunes, Dr. Seuss and his Cindy Lou Who, Yogi Bear’s sidekick Boo-Boo, Scooby-Doo, and, not incidentally or accidentally, YouTube, a double-double “oo” sound meant to suggest to us “really fun to watch videos.”
Then there’s Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor. In 1996, they started a line of women’s clothes with a name that manages to rhyme the playful “oo” sounds while playing on sex as play: Juicy Couture, most famous for its velour sweatpants with “Juicy” scrawled across the butt.
In 2010, BMW called out to our playful inner child. “Joy seeks out the kid in all of us,” the ad for its sporty 3 Series car assures us, below the photo of a khakis-and-polo-clad, gray-haired man. You’re never too old to be young, they assure us. “At BMW, we don’t make cars. We make joy.”
Our kitchens call out to the kids in us, too. Specialty shops like Williams-Sonoma look more and more like toy shops. With Cuisinart and Le Creuset leading the way, you can choose pots, spatulas, whisks, pastry brushes, ice cream makers, immersion blenders, and hand mixers in an assortment of toy colors, including Cuisinart’s Fisher-Price palette with iMac names: Pomegranate, Parsley, Tangerine, Buttercup, and a playful purple called Crush. Nearby, the playfully named Pop Ware offers cooking’s most mundane items, strainers and colanders, in toy colors: Bright Red, Bright Blue, and Lime Green. Today, we can feel playful while draining water off our spaghetti noodles.
In 2010, a huge buzz and over $8 million in venture capital funding surrounded the website Polyvore. The bright idea behind it was that women would welcome the mix-and-match clothes and accessories from different sites and create new looks from them. It’s easy to understand the site’s appeal. Isn’t it simply an electronic version of a favorite girls’ play activity of decades ago—paper dolls—and a grownup version of dressing Barbie?
Today’s great marketers ask the question: “Should we add an element of play here—and if not, why not?” Several manufacturers are asking that right now. They looked at their iPhones and asked, “What if our washing machine looked and felt like that and made doing laundry more fun?”
Let’s play, we say, and generations of us make it into a cult a film about never growing up, The Big Lebowski. The hero, known as “The Dude”—naturally capturing that “oo” sound of play—refuses to grow up, and audiences love him.
And he’s not alone, as we will see next.
Drive east from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to a remarkable monument to the role of play in our culture: the home football field of the Maine South Hawks, regularly among Illinois’ best high school teams and many times its state champion. The school is also the alma mater of Hillary Clinton.
The playing field itself testifies to the central role of play in twenty-first-century American culture: It cost $1.2 million to install in 2008 and looks every penny of it, with an enormous red hawk artfully rendered in the middle of the field and the school name and nickname rendered in massive red letters in each end zone.
We live in a country so devoted to play—some might argue obsessed—that our high school football fields cost over $1 million, and Park Ridge’s elected officials worry very little that the outlay will cost them the next election.
But there’s more testament to our childlike love of play than the Maine South field and the play on it. Look into the stands, and notice how the girls are dressed. They sport the Park Ridge uniform: tight blue jeans, snug sweaters, lots of eye makeup, and what appears to be a Maine South dress code mandate: a pair of Uggs in any of many colors.
But look again.
Sometimes that was a Maine South student who walked by you. But if you had looked closer, you would have noticed far more wrinkles than you see on teenage girls, although the wrinkles are well concealed. That wasn’t a student you noticed. It was a student’s mom.
At Maine South on a Friday night, as at other schools on other Friday nights all across America, you cannot tell the mothers from the daughters by their clothing. The adults copy the children, right down to dieting to maintain the illusion of youth and the white blouses peeking out from bottoms of sweaters. Obviously, the moms’ efforts sometimes work; they got at least one author’s attention.
But it’s hard to escape another conclusion while watching boys play this night in October just north of Chicago: We are still children, craving to be children, buying the more expensive toys that allow us to play and even remind us, as an iPhone does, of the colors of childhood while we sport the clothes that make us feel—as expressed in the words of the Boomers’ poet laureate, Bob Dylan—that we can stay forever young.