As the primary drafter of our Declaration of Independence, thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson could have set as America’s goal “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” the words the French chose for their declaration thirteen years later, but he chose “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” instead. The French seemed to declare, “We’re all in this together”; Jefferson seemed to declare, “We’re all in this for ourselves.”
Have Jefferson’s famous seven words told generations of us to look out for ourselves?
It certainly seems that way in 2011. Scan a bookshelf today, and you will see that our pursuit of happiness has become a daylong sprint. In 2000, publishers issued forty books on the subject. Eight years later, they released an average of fifteen new books on happiness every day.
Curtis James Jackson III began pursuing wealth when he was twelve years old by selling cocaine in his home neighborhood of Queens, New York. He’s succeeded. One of his homes recently was valued at $24 million, thanks in major part to the popularity of his CD Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Now famous under the name 50 Cent, Curtis might seem the embodiment of American materialism and the perfect person to answer the question, “What is the meaning of money?”
We might expect him to answer, “Bling, Benzes, and booty.” But we hear from him something truly American instead. “Money,” he says, “is freedom.”
True materialists crave things. Americans don’t; we merely stockpile them. The Midwest auto dealer Denny Hecker declared bankruptcy and was found to own nine Rolex watches. If Hecker valued a Rolex watch, he would own one, but he doesn’t. He owns nine. It’s not his Rolexes; they satisfy no Hecker urge.
Buying things is only sometimes about owning the things. Buying often is simply about what 50 Cent observed: being able to buy. Having less means hearing, “No, you cannot have that,” and we loathe being told what we can and cannot do.
Being able to buy is an expression of our deepest value, the one we would die for: our freedom.
There’s a perfect subject for testing this hypothesis, the icon who once personified the accumulation of wealth in America: Howard Hughes. Hughes tried to acquire everything; he even acquired a barber.
For seventeen years, Hughes paid Eddie Alexander generously—$7,000 in today’s dollars for a single hair cut—to do nothing except be on permanent call for Hughes, day and night. At 2 a.m. one night, Hughes decided to test Alexander’s devotion. He dialed his number and heard only one ring.
“That you, Howard?” Eddie answered, his clipper and shears nearby him.
“Just checking, Eddie, just checking.”
The best words anyone could write about Hughes’s apparent materialism have been written, crafted by Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in an entry titled “7700 Romaine”:
That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves… that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake… but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
Our ancestors’ passions to be utterly free brought them here, and our Statue of Liberty beckoned to them, the masses “yearning to breathe free.” Patrick Henry repeated the passion in famous form, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and in 1971, the state of New Hampshire took up this cause and inscribed on every state license plate four famous words: Live Free or Die.
Like 50 Cent and Hughes and Henry, we crave the idea of freedom. Harley-Davidson knows this; its core message forever has been freedom: It’s the American motorcycle that lets you feel free. Motorcyclists themselves vividly illustrate this when they rebel against helmet laws. We should be able to kill ourselves, they argue, a risk worth bearing so that we can feel the rush of air on our faces as we ride.
Our seemingly ludicrous proliferation of choices—eighty-five kinds of snack crackers and entire racks full only of toothpaste—is our marketers’ answer to the plea that we have freedom of choice. The more choices we have, the more American we feel.
In comparative political science, we learn about deferential cultures. Citizens in these cultures are inclined to follow rules and obey authority. Ours isn’t one of them; we loathe being told what to do, and we are quick to justify our actions with a favorite American expression: “Hey, it’s a free country.”
This makes a particular form of behavior, which you can find in all cultures, particularly common in ours. Psychologists call it reactance, one of our cognitive biases that leads us to make bad decisions. It’s our tendency to resist not just orders but also suggestions, because we dislike giving up our freedom.
Reactance explains why Valentine’s retailers get disappointing results when they post banners like “Don’t forget her flowers for Valentine’s Day.” Millions of men who see that message react by going to buy candy instead—unless the local candy retailer has a similar banner, “Don’t forget her candy this Valentine’s Day.” In that case, they just take her out for an expensive dinner.
Can you find more reactant people than Americans? Rather than obey laws, we for decades have celebrated the men and women who break them. We cheered John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, celebrating them in movies and literature. We love a good criminal.
(To those who suggest Americans liked those three people because they robbed banks, and bankers were often the scapegoats for the Great Depression, it’s worth noting that Americans also celebrated Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid—and those three men robbed anything that jingled.)
Americans love what producers call heist movies—Reservoir Dogs, Heat, Mission: Impossible, The Heist, The Italian Job, and, as perhaps the most vivid reminder, the parade of Ocean’s films of the past decade: Ocean’s 11, 12, and now 13. ABC television, for years the most conservative purveyor of television shows, created a hit in 1968 by portraying Robert Wagner as a lovable thief, burglar, and pickpocket in the show It Takes a Thief, inspired by the 1955 hit Cary Grant movie To Catch a Thief.
In 2002, Steven Spielberg’s casting left little doubt for whom we should root in Catch Me If You Can. So we cheered the handsome Leonardo DiCaprio playing the gifted con man Frank Abagnale as he eluded the cop played by the dogged and doughty Tom Hanks.
Everyone reading this must admit: We root for the thieves, not the cops. The mafia titans portrayed in the Godfather series acted murderously, but as Don Corleone said, “It’s just business.” American audiences laughed at Corleone’s remark, then booed the two biggest villains of the saga: the brutal Irish cop whom Al Pacino dispatches in The Godfather and the oily U.S. senator in The Godfather: Part II. In each case, we rooted for the crooks and against a character who enforced the laws and another character who made them.
We’re outlaws at heart, are we not?
For years, state governments, legitimately concerned about the losses of life attributable to drivers not wearing seat belts, waged earnest campaigns to get people to change. Nothing seemed to work. An extreme example of Americans’ apparent indifference was a test performed on moviegoers.
Researchers put cameras in the parking lot of a theater to record how many people attending the movie had their seat belts fastened when they arrived. Once inside, the audience members were shown a film that graphically portrayed what had happened to several auto-crash victims who had not fastened their seat belts.
When the audience members left the theater and entered their cars, the same cameras ran. Like everyone reading this, the researchers assumed that many people who had arrived with their seat belts detached would attach them when they left, having seen the gory consequences of not buckling up.
But they didn’t.
Not only did the nonbucklers stick to their apparent death wishes, but several bucklers did, too; several who arrived wearing their seat belts left without buckling up. “Try to trick me into fastening my belt—the hell with them!” they appeared to say with their acts of defiance.
These failed efforts led several state departments of public safety to try a new strategy. Instead of using the threat of death, they would remind drivers that the law requires them to wear their seat belts. Thus was born a series of campaigns with the simple theme “Buckle Up. It’s the Law.”
This didn’t work, either. We want to be free.
What to do to get us to buckle up? Because we all pay dearly for traffic fatalities just in our added insurance premiums, the states could not afford to give up, and from their persistence emerged what seems an identical campaign, which the state of North Carolina initiated in 1993.
Their new message was “Click it or ticket,” and at long last, it worked. Ten years later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which adopted the North Carolina plan, reported a greater than 10 percent increase in seat belt use by adults ages eighteen to twenty-four.
Why did that work when everything else failed?
Some of that increase can be traced to the memorableness of the theme itself. The two words “click it” give the theme three of the elements of memorable messages: brevity, rhyme, and surprise; few of us had heard the expression “click it” before.
But North Carolina’s history-making message also delivers another implicit message that resonates in a nation of outlaws. It gives us a choice. We can buckle up or not. If we don’t, we get a ticket. Our choice.
It’s a free country. The message worked spectacularly where so many other messages failed. The others told us what do or tried to make us afraid. The state of North Carolina, however, gave us what we love most: freedom, in this case the freedom of choice.
And like Patrick Henry and 50 Cent, we responded.
We are so obsessed with fairness that we will sacrifice for it in at least one unusual way.
It requires little effort to go online today and download free music. Sources such as Gnutella and Kazaa flourish, safe havens for music pirates. None of us needs to pay for music today.
But we do. Despite the music industry’s desire to shut down these services that would seem to threaten the industry’s survival, no one in that industry has proved that these pirate sites have resulted in fewer CDs being sold, and there is some evidence that these pirate sites have boosted interest in music and performers by letting fans sample the work. We keep paying for music.
There’s probably something else at work here. We willingly pay 99 cents for “Sex on Fire,” for example, because that price seems fair at least, perhaps even a steal, and because to pay Kings of Leon nothing might feel to us, quite reasonably, like theft. We are obsessed with fairness—for everyone. For years, we heard “Do unto others.” In the case of music, at least, we willingly do just that.
This brings us nicely to a puzzle that for years has puzzled some scholars.
Here it is. You go to Target to buy a Casio watch and find one you want. It’s listed at $70. Just as you pull out your credit card, a friend spots you and taps your shoulder. “They have that exact watch—the exact same—just three blocks away. And it’s $40!”
Do you walk the three blocks to save the $30 on the Casio?
Now, part two: You go to Target to buy a Samsung DVD player, receiver, and set of speakers. It’s $800. Just as you pull out your credit card, a friend notices you and taps your shoulder. “They have that same system—the exact same—just three blocks away. And it’s $770!”
Do you walk the three blocks to save the $30—the same amount you’d save by walking three blocks for the watch?
To many people, these two questions seem similar, so our answer should be, too. If we’d walk three blocks to save $30, we should do it, whether it’s for a $40 watch or a $770 stereo. And perhaps we would.
But millions of our fellow Americans wouldn’t.
In these tests, great numbers of people who say they’d walk three blocks for the cheaper watch say they wouldn’t walk three blocks for the cheaper stereo.
To many people, this behavior sounds inconsistent and foolish. To many students of American behavior, it seems utterly American.
Consider our origins. When the Pilgrims alit on Plymouth Rock, they were fleeing a country where they felt unfree, particularly to practice the religion of their choice. England was, then and now, a class system. If you were born right, life was good; if not, life seemed unfair.
Once in America, we drafted a constitution, then a bill of rights that later included the Equal Protection Clause, a provision unique to American law. When the Senate passed the amendment, the intent was to prevent discrimination against African Americans. But a nation obsessed with fairness for everyone soon saw the clause extended, among other things, to white applicants to law schools and, at one famous extreme, to small-town liquor-store owners in New Jersey who are treated differently than other New Jersey liquor-store owners.
We say life is unfair but then rebel against it; we think unfairness should be illegal. Often, our courts agree.
But what does this have to do with $30? To answer that, consider what goes through the heads of the shoppers in each of these hypotheticals.
If a watch costs $70 in Target and $40 three blocks away, we conceive of two possible explanations: The store just blocks away is offering an incredible deal, or Target is gouging us. It’s charging 75 percent more for that watch.
We don’t apply this same thinking to the Samsung stereo. We decide that $800 is a fair price, just a couple percentage points higher than the other store’s price. That marginally higher price may reflect Target’s added overhead costs of more lighting, wider aisles, and sixteen checkout lanes and clerks. It’s a fair price.
Something else works on our minds here: our sense of self. We’d feel foolish to avoid saving 75 percent on a single item; we’d be wasting money and cheating ourselves and our families not to take it. On top of that, a 75-percent savings represents treasure in the game of treasure hunt; we have to win that game.
But by contrast, is it imprudent for us to resist the 3.7-percent savings on the stereo? Is 3.7 percent off a treasure? Over the course of a year, if we spent $5,000 on discretionary purchases like the stereo, a 3.7-percent savings would equal $185—for which we’d have to walk several miles. If we spent $5,000 in discretionary purchases like the watch, however, over a year we’d save $3,750—2,000 percent more.
We have to take the watch deal—just like we have to give Kings of Leon a dollar for that song.
When Burger King, which opened in 1954, begat McDonald’s in 1955, we might have assumed there was little room left in the American drive-up burger business. But a company started even before them, in 1948, maintains a fanatical following in the West, partly by making each of its patrons feel like part of a special club.
The restaurants, In-N-Out Burger, claim distinction with their famous secret menu. Naturally, it’s not printed but passed on by word of mouth from patron to devoted patron: the Flying Dutchman, the X times Y, the Fries American Style, for example. The founders of this quirky chain—the cups and burger wrappers are inscribed with citations to Bible passages—never discussed creating a secret menu. Their simple idea was to list on the menu only three burgers—the Double-Double, Hamburger, and Cheeseburger—but allow guests to have their burgers prepared any way they wished. It was the guests who coined the “secret menu” term, for the obvious reason that it made those who knew the details of it feel special.
Or perhaps we should say fanatical. When a new In-N-Out opened in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2002, local news helicopters hovered over the parking lot and captured a remarkable image: the lines. At one point, the wait for food was four hours.
Starting after the Second World War, tattoos were regarded as the signal of a former Navy man who one night had been mightily overserved in a bar next to a tattoo parlor. Soon thereafter, tattoos also became identified with the Hells Angels and other rebel gangs, and later with gangstas and NBA basketball players, who without them would all be uniformly attired, literally; their tattoos alone set them apart.
Today, you see tattoos everywhere. (This writer’s four-leaf clover, with his children’s initials, HWCC, is on the inside of his left bicep, nearest his heart.) Thirty-six percent of Americans between ages eighteen and twenty-nine—more than one in three—wears at least one. A typical Barnes & Noble displays more tattoo publications (eleven) than parenting magazines. Two networks currently feature tattoo programs: A&E’s Inked and The Learning Channel’s Miami Ink and LA Ink.
Tattoos are us.
What does a tattoo say? A tattoo is a logo, except that the logo we wear—Polos or Abercrombies—tells us what group we belong to and perhaps signals our disposable income.
A tattoo is a logo for a person. It brands us unlike any other person, and yet, being relatively common, also conveys that we are a part, too, of the huge community of fellow wearers. Perhaps more important, it tells the wearer something every day, too: In this incredibly crowded world, it assures the wearer, “You are special.”
Today, we can set ourselves apart by designing what we own.
At NikeiD, a vivid example of one shrewd marketer’s recognition of Apart, we can click on a basic Nike shoe style and then make it our own.
Take, for one entertaining example, the $102 Nike Zoom T-5 iD Boot. (For added entertainment, enter “harryb” in the search box, check “Catsup, meet mustard,” then redesign that red and yellow iD Boot so it looks much better to your eye—and sets you apart.)
We can choose either a flat-bottomed sole or a rubber-studded sole for more traction; we can choose five colors for the outside base, five for the inside base, and five others for the inside eye stay; we can choose three colors for the tip, nine for the collar around the ankle, and nine others for the heel. When we’re done, we can add words, say, our name, in any of eleven colors, one word on the tongue, and a different one at the top of each of the arches.
Doing the math, we learn we can make 6,743,250 versions of the iD Boot even before we inscribe it with any words we choose. Nike gets it: We want to set ourselves apart.
Harley-Davidson understands our desire to feel apart, too. For years, a motorcycle was a motorcycle, to which you could later add accessories, such as leather saddlebags.
But the people at Harley soon realized that most Harley owners wanted unique motorcycles, and the way to provide them was not with options but accessories: not just one or two saddlebags but perhaps a hundred, and not just saddlebags but different bars and grips, foot pegs and floorboards, exhausts, seats, sissy bars, luggage racks, windshields, body parts, wheels and tires.
Buy a Harley, then design the Harley: Set yourself apart.
In 2007, Harley-Davidson introduced a new version of its Nightster. Fans immediately sensed something different about it, but few of them could figure it out. What was it?
The license plate was hung to the left of the rear fender, not in the center. Why? “I wanted people to wonder if it was legal,” says designer Rich Christoph. He wanted Nightster drivers to have that feeling of pushing the limits, of Easy Riding with Fonda and Hopper to Mardi Gras, or of being Brando in The Wild One. Rich Christoph knows we rooted for Bonnie and Clyde. And that we want to stand apart.
Public and private companies weren’t the first marketers to recognize that vehicle owners could use license plates to set themselves apart. Almost seventy years ago, the state of Pennsylvania introduced America’s first vanity plates, on which drivers could inscribe whatever inoffensive combination of seven letters and numbers they wished.
Today we see vanity plates everywhere, sometimes an unusual one that merely repeats what we already know: the brand of the car. A few others might be considered unsafe, however, because our spasms of laughter might cause us to veer off the road. These include the white Ford Bronco plate that reads “Not OJ,” the Hummer with the plate “1 MPG,” and the Acura NSX—a car that can reach 165 miles per hour—with the plate “NVR L8.”
And there’s the one that stops traffic daily. Imagine yourself in downtown Lexington, Kentucky, pulling up behind a black hearse, looking down to its license plate, and reading this: “U R NXT.”
On June 10, 2002, The New York Times reported that Krispy Kreme doughnuts had earned “a fan following to make any corporate branding agent proud.” That following and the brand looked so strong that a year later, on April 11, 2003, the stock ended the day trading for almost $489 a share. A person who had bought Krispy Kreme stock exactly three years earlier had watched it soar almost 480 percent.
Krispy Kreme was rocketing.
But let’s say you decided on that same day, April 11, 2003, that Krispy Kreme was rocketing, that its fans were so loyal and its brand so compelling that you had to buy the stock. What if on that rollicking day you had bought $10,000 in Krispy Kreme stock?
Be glad you didn’t.
Today as this is being written, your $10,000 investment in Krispy Kreme stock would be worth $620. Six hundred and twenty dollars.
We might assume Krispy Kreme merely fell with the market. That’s not the explanation. The Dow Jones Industrial Average since the day you made your hypothetical $10,000 investment has risen 8 percent.
What happened here? Any steep fall takes several pushes. Most analysts agree the company got too ambitious, perhaps even greedy, as CFO magazine suggested in 2005. They agree that the company managed its franchisees poorly, as one might expect from a company with no experience in franchising.
We may also speculate that Americans had become more health and calorie conscious, and that low-carb diets like the Atkins Diet helped kill Krispy Kreme. But that cannot be the explanation, even though Krispy Kreme executives offered that excuse when the nosedive began. The Atkins Diet was introduced thirty years earlier, and in the year Krispy Kreme’s stock started free-falling, Dr. Atkins died, which set off rumors that his low-carb diet had contributed to his death.
So where should we look for the fall of these yeast-raised doughnuts? Let’s start with that New York Times article and that “fan following.”
Krispy Kreme’s executives made a critical error. They assumed that what people loved about Krispy Kreme was its “sweet and impossibly fluffy” doughnuts, as the company proudly describes them. There was much more to its appeal.
Consider this common street scene in 2003, near Central Park in New York City.
Man spots two twentysomethings munching doughnuts ecstatically. The girl is holding a white, red, and green Krispy Kreme bag.
“Hey, sorry, but where’d you get those Krispy Kremes?”
“Over near Penn Station, around Thirty-Second.”
“Hey, are they as delicious as everybody says?”
“Oh man, yes, it was so worth the walk! Head down there!”
In the man’s position, you would have done what he did: Hike twenty-five blocks, stand in line, and buy six doughnuts that were gone by the next morning.
That was 2003. Then Krispy Kreme decided to make doughnut lovers’ lives easier by distributing their treats everywhere. Soon, we could find Krispy Kremes at Target and at convenience stores like SuperAmerica. At long last, we could get Krispy Kremes in the same places we could score a 99-cent shrink-wrapped ham-and-cheese sandwich!
Krispy Kreme’s appeal when it was small and hard to find was just that: the doughnuts were hard to get, which made them a cult item. A search for Krispy Kremes was a treasure hunt, like finding the super deals at Costco and knowing where to find them was like knowing the secret menu at In-N-Out Burger.
We value things that are hard to find; they strike us as special and seem more valuable. As Tom Vanderbilt points out in Traffic, we leave great parking spots slowly for that reason; the spot was hard to find, so we are slower to give it up. We coveted James Bond’s girls for the same reason; they always played hard to get.
And Krispy Kreme’s game had been hard to get.
The company thought we loved Krispy Kreme doughnuts, but we didn’t. We loved the idea of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. We weren’t buying a snack; we were buying a find, a cult item, a treasure hunt, the pleasure of appearing to be in-the-know. Hard-to-get Krispy Kremes tasted great; Krispy Kremes from a store where we could get shrink-wrapped ham-and-cheese sandwiches represented another idea entirely.
And we didn’t buy that idea.
Seeing our self-absorption has led American marketers to an obvious tactic right out of Brian Epstein’s playbook: Enough about our products! Let’s talk about you.
Try this: Visit Nike.com. Scan down to the first row of images. At this writing, they are for NikeStore, and what words immediately follow that? “Gear Up for Your Sport.” Scan over to the third item in the top row, and you see “Nike+.” And what appears next in that box? “Run for Your Sport.”
Nike captured its essence by not talking about itself at all, nor even its products. Instead, it merely talked to us and our desires. It encouraged us to “Just do it.” It was talking to each of us.
Very soon, the You wave turned into a tsunami.
In August 2003, several Californians captured the You spirit with a social networking site aptly called MySpace. By 2006 it had become the world’s most popular networking site. In February 2005, three former employees of PayPal launched a site to host videos online: YouTube.
Always alert to trends, the editors of Time magazine were then considering naming their Person of the Year. Months later, the magazine, which in past years had given that honor three times to Franklin D. Roosevelt and twice to Winston Churchill, made a fitting choice for the Me Century.
They named each of us the 2006 Person of the Year. They chose “You.”
As with most things, if some is good, lots is better. Now everyone talks just to us, as if we’re the only people in the room. It’s typified in the best-selling success of You: The Owner’s Manual, a book just about each of us. The winter of the year that You first appeared, fans of then Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre received a treat when ABC’s Monday Night Football aired a short tribute film. It concluded with his wife’s memorable words: “My Brett. Our Favre.”
Brett Favre was ours, too.
In 2009, motorists in Minnesota were treated to the Me Century’s most extreme manifestation, a billboard fourteen steps east of the entrance to the Minikahda Club. It captured the Me Century perfectly, showing a woman apparently uttering the words: MY CANCER. MY WORKOUTS. MY FAIRVIEW.
In the first weeks of February of the very next year, Minnesotans driving west on that road experienced profound déjà vu when they sensed that the billboard had been replaced, as they read this new one: MY POP CULTURE. MY MUSIC. MY RADIO STATION. MY TALK 107.1.
Today, what do we have? We have My FootJoys, My Excite, My Flickr, My T-Mobile, My Yahoo!, My Coke Rewards, My Starbucks Idea, My MSN, MyTV (anticipated by MTV’s perceptive slogan, “I Want My MTV”). We have My after My after My. Everyone is talking just to us and making everything just for each of us alone.
The wonderfully popular American writer Malcolm Gladwell understands our self-preoccupation, too. Check out these excerpts from his fine book Outliers and see what you see.
“Over the course of the chapters ahead, I’m going to introduce you to one kind of outlier….”
“What is the question we always ask about the successful?”
“Look back at the Medicine Hat roster. Do you see it now?”
As Gladwell himself would now write: What did you just notice?
He is writing to each of us, even asking us questions not just like a good writer but like something we treasure far more: a good listener. (The wit Fran Lebowitz once captured our preoccupation with talking by noting, “The opposite of talking isn’t listening. It’s waiting.”)
Gladwell talks to us and seems to listen to us. He knows this is the Me Century, when everyone who passes by a television camera waves in the hope of being noticed. Gladwell crafts his books with that knowledge, and we buy them by the millions.
We want everything—our golf shoes, our running shoes, our coffee shops, our TV shows—to be about us. The best marketers, including many of our most popular authors, make sure that it is.