One sunny afternoon in 1930, a painter driving through Eldon, Iowa, spotted a house that appealed to him. He pictured who might live in the house and, after imagining them, sought out two models to portray them.
He knew the perfect woman. His thirty-year-old sister, Nan, looked just like the woman the painter had imagined. To pose as her husband, the painter made the unusual choice of a man more than twice Nan’s age: Byron McKeeby, a sixty-three-year-old from Cedar Rapids who for years had been the painter’s dentist.
The painting that resulted, showing a somber, bald farmer holding a pitchfork while the farmer’s wife stares vacantly to her left, became Grant Wood’s iconic American painting American Gothic.
Almost sixty years before, James Whistler had painted what became our country’s first iconic painting. It portrays a white-haired mother staring grimly to our left as we view it, a vision so cold and spare that its original title, Study in Black and White, seems apt. We know this classic painting well, however, by its other title: Whistler’s Mother.
Eighteen years after American Gothic was created, Andrew Wyeth painted what became our country’s third iconic work. It depicts a woman lying in a vast field of wispy golden grass, staring toward a weathered farmhouse in the distant background. Her slumped body suggests that she may be too weak to walk to the farmhouse and whatever comfort it might offer. This painting, Christina’s World, is the second-most reproduced American painting of all time and helped make Wyeth among our richest painters. In 2006, another austere Wyeth painting, this of the interior of a farmhouse living room, fetched $4.4 million at an auction.
Is it the artistry that makes these three paintings iconic? It doesn’t appear that way. In a recent New York Times poll of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, two hundred men and women, including twenty-five Americans, earned votes, but neither Wood nor Wyeth was among them.
So if it’s not the artistry of these three works, why have we embraced them as our icons? Look long at the three—of Christina, of the couple in American Gothic, and of Whistler’s mother—and you will feel it: These four people look utterly alone.
The bald farmer stands by his wife but looks miles away emotionally; she cannot look at the person painting her. Christina sits far from the farmhouse, seemingly unable to rise to walk to the house, and it appears the house would offer her no comfort once she got there: It looks deserted. Whistler’s mother looks frozen in her chair, deserted and solemn.
What might these paintings say about us? Researchers of phobias have learned that Americans do not list snakes, spiders, or the dark as their fears. They say one thing scares us most: the thought of being alone.
In the weeks following Michael Jackson’s death in June 2009, few commentators mentioned, and few fans remembered, that Jackson’s most phenomenal success was a song that expressed his view: We are all in this together.
“We Are the World,” which Jackson cowrote with Quincy Jones to raise money for African famine relief, was the fastest-selling pop single in American history, the country’s first multiplatinum single, and a winner of three Grammy Awards. (It’s possible that so many forget the song because so few singers liked it. At one point in rehearsals, Cyndi Lauper leaned forward and whispered to Bruce Springsteen, “It sounds like a Pepsi commercial.” The Boss whispered back, “I can’t disagree.”)
We hear it in our music: We want to be a part and dread being alone.
In 2004, the editors of Rolling Stone polled Slash, k.d. lang, members of the Ramones and No Doubt, and more than one hundred other insiders for their year-end issue on the five hundred greatest songs of all time. The voters’ top choice was Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” about a character called Miss Lonely and with a title derived from the Hank Williams verse. “I’m a rolling stone, I’m lost and alone”:
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown?
Rolling Stone’s voters had dozens of classic lonely songs to choose from: Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”; Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely”; Jackie Wilson’s “Lonely Teardrops”; Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”; the Beatles’ “Help!” (the number-one song when Dylan’s song reached its peak at number two) and “all the lonely people” in “Eleanor Rigby”; Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” on “Lonesome Street,” covered later by Lynyrd Skynyrd and Guns N’ Roses; and the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody,” covered by U2 and LeAnn Rimes.
The singer Chris Isaak actually made a career obsessing on this subject: “Seven Lonely Nights,” “Only the Lonely,” “Lonely with a Broken Heart,” and “The Lonely Ones,” plus “The Blue Hotel” and “Nothing to Say.”
Our three iconic paintings and numerous popular songs seem to express our greatest dread and strongest need: We dread loneliness and want to be a part.
We see this in our movies, too. In 2007’s Lars and the Real Girl, Lars lives in a garage and emerges from his loneliness only for work and the rare nights when his brother succeeds in persuading Lars to come for dinner.
On one of those days, Lars accepts the invitation and adds that he will be bringing a friend. His brother looks thrilled.
That night, Lars appears and introduces the friend, Bianca. She is confined to a wheelchair but has a more conspicuous handicap: She’s a plastic sex doll.
The two fall in love, and others come to love the couple, too. This story sounds silly at best, revolting at worst, and impossible to turn into a movie that people could tolerate, much less enjoy. But among other enthusiastic critics, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called it “the sweetest, most innocent, most completely enjoyable movie around,” as it traces Lars’s escape from loneliness.
The romance of Lars and Bianca resembles another memorable screen friendship. In Cast Away, a FedEx plane crashes and strands a Wilson volleyball and a character played by Tom Hanks on an island. The two become friends; Hanks calls him Wilson.
In their weeks together, Hanks’s affection for Wilson deepens so much that at a climactic point, he risks his life swimming through rough surf to rescue his round friend. Again, what happened to the audiences? They were touched.
We dread being alone; we want to be a part.
We started out that way, it appears. Check briefly this observation by one of America’s best-known early authors, James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote Leatherstocking Tales:
In England a man dines by himself in a room filled with other hermits, he eats at his leisure, drinks his wine in silence, reads the paper by the hour; the American is compelled to submit to a common rule; he eats when others eat, sleeps when others sleep, and he is lucky, indeed, if he can read a paper in a tavern without having a stranger looking over each shoulder.
Less than 59 minutes after midnight on Christmas 2004, the longest-lasting and second-largest earthquake ever recorded occurred off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Its most memorable and devastating effect was to produce a series of tsunamis, some with waves that reached 100 feet high. When these waves touched land, they shredded it. Nearly 230,000 people in fourteen countries died as a result.
The impact was felt in America; the entire planet actually shook. And in the days and months that followed, we watched for hours on television, grieved the losses, sent money, and even flew to countries affected to help them rebuild.
The actor George Clooney immediately went to work, too. Inspired by the many aid events, beginning with the famous 1985 Live Aid concert that raised $284 million for famine relief in Ethiopia, Clooney in just two weeks arranged Tsunami Aid: A Concert of Hope, which aired on NBC and its affiliated networks and raised $5 million for the relief effort. Americans gave an estimated $13 million more, and the U.S. government gave countries in the region over $350 million, plus military and logistical help with rebuilding.
When outsiders criticize Americans, they regularly note that we seem self-centered, which we are. But few contend we are selfish, and with good reason; we are not. Every international need organization knows that to market its cause—cleft palates, tsunamis in Indonesia, or needy Romanian orphans, to name three—they need to go to America first.
One could argue that there was little need to call on many Americans after the tsunami, because many of us would not answer; we already had booked our tickets to Indonesia.
We are compassionate, and it ties strongly to this theme: our striving for community and our need of others. You see this in the words “compassion” and “community.” They share the root com, which comes from the Latin word for “together.” When you think about the word “passion,” you may immediately think of a favorite image of romantic passion, but surprise: “passion” comes from the Latin pati and means “to suffer.” “Compassion” literally means “suffering with.” And as exemplified by our Marshall Plan to restore Europe after World War II and our Peace Corps to restore much of the world during the Kennedy administration, no one “suffers with” others like Americans.
This helps explain the effectiveness of cause-based marketing in America, reflected in the decades-long cause advertising of Kenneth Cole, the Red promotion by the Gap and others in the mid-2000s, the “share good fortune” cause promoted by Tazo on all its tea packages, and the bandwagon that is the green movement today.
At its root, might our wanting to be a part be the force at work? To take part in a cause is to be a part of something bigger, and fortunately for unfortunate people here and everywhere else in the world, no people suffer with others as passionately as we do.
Scan this list of the ten highest-earning actors of 2008. Then ask, “What do these men have in common?”
To make the list comprise all the leading actors of our decade, let’s add the 2008 Academy Award winner for best actor, Sean Penn; plus Matt Damon, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and America’s two hottest actors, Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp.
Now, let’s step back briefly.
Whenever we hear the expression “leading man,” we probably think of that classic description: “tall, dark, and handsome.”
But who among those actors fits that description? Sandler, Murphy, and Carrey perform in comedies and not as standard dramatic leading men. Harrison Ford comes closest to TD&H, but he’s not dark. While undeniably dark and handsome, Clooney stands barely 5 feet 10 inches, eye level with Depp and Richard Gere—and with Sandler and Murphy.
The only actor on our seventeen-man list over 6 feet tall is Cage, who few would call dark or handsome, even during the years when he sported more hair. Pitt barely hits 6 feet, above average but only arguably tall—and definitely not dark.
America’s leading men are not tall. They’re short. DeNiro stands 5 feet 9 inches, Pacino 5 feet 8 inches, and the great American actor of his generation, Marlon Brando, topped out at 5 feet 9 inches. Yet that’s a full inch taller than Mel Gibson and two inches taller than the 5-feet-7-inch Sylvester Stallone.
Michael Douglas, Paul Newman, James Dean? 5 feet 9 inches. Damon? An eyebrow taller. Penn? 5 feet 8 inches. The undeniably dark and handsome Tom Cruise? He’s 5 feet 8 inches, too.
What might account for this “fairly short, often dark, mostly handsome” trend? Does it suggest that we prefer our movie stars to be like us and that we don’t want to be looked down on, literally or figuratively?
Consider how television shows have been cast. The classic popular quiz shows hosts Bill Cullen, Garry Moore, and Allen Ludden worked constantly. Moore and Cullen sported goofy crew cuts, Ludden and Cullen wore thick glasses, and Moore wore bow ties at a time when the cooler guys didn’t.
Move on to John Goodman, Jerry Seinfeld and Kramer and George, Larry David, Drew Carey, and on and on. The classic TV show of our decade may be Survivor, now in its twenty-second season, each hosted by the dark and undeniably handsome Jeff Probst—all 5 feet 9 inches of him. He’s the same height as Howie Mandel, host of the once-popular quiz show Deal or No Deal, and an inch taller than Alex Trebek of the classic quiz show Jeopardy! now in its forty-seventh year.
What television star has been on camera more than any other? At 16,400 hours and counting—the Guinness Book of World Records did the counting—it’s Regis Philbin, host of Live with Regis and Kelly and former host of the hit Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, who has the record. He’s 5 feet 7 inches.
Look again at the Apple computer ads and the likable but not tall, dark, or handsome chill kid played by Justin Long.
The often-repeated old compliment “You look like a movie star” seems bizarre today. If you want to be in movies, the person you really should look like is the friendly Joe next door. Just ask superstar actor next door Tom Hanks, who admits to being the nerd of his Oakland, California, high school class.
Contrast our popular actors with England’s: Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Alec Guinness. Each projected a quality that doesn’t work on American audiences, who believe all of us are equal. These Brits oozed self-regard—conceit, really. Gielgud was so skilled at condescension that director Steve Gordon cast him as Dudley Moore’s snooty butler in Arthur, and Guinness projected the needed air of superiority required for the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. The very un-American air of these Brits is suggested by their titles: Each is a sir, a title bestowed by the British Crown.
Could the contrast between us and the English be greater? British actors belong to royalty; our actors belong to us. They make us feel a part of them.
Americans love celebrity gossip. Gossip brings hot shots down to our level, even tosses them below it. We hear that these mortals abuse drugs (Robert Downey, Jr.), stalk other stars (Sean Young), punch out photographers (Sean Penn), punch out everyone (model Naomi Campbell), or do all of this (Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan). We read that they cheat on lovers and spouses with pathological frequency. The famous act just like us, only worse.
America’s agents work overtime bringing their clients down to us. That’s almost certainly why Pitt dresses down, affecting goofy porkpie hats and a wardrobe that suggests his total unawareness of the merits of color draping. Cage and Kevin Spacey seem to lose more hair with every film. Jack Nicholson goes bald and fat and does nothing to hide it.
Our stars are just like us.
Which raises the question: Whatever happened to toupees? Sean Connery sported one for years, faded from view, then resurrected his post–James Bond career after he ditched his hairpiece. You could argue he did this for a simple reason: he had to. At 6 feet 2 inches, Connery was the last truly tall, dark, and handsome popular actor of the last thirty years. He had to knock himself down a few notches, down here with us. So he did.
Yes, we like tall, dark, and handsome presidents. But our presidents are, among other things, the commanders in chief of our armed forces. So we want people who fit that description: commanding. That means big, forceful, someone who could stare down Nikita Khrushchev, Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden. That’s why Michael Dukakis’s operatives stuck him in a tank for a famous photo-op and George Bush’s showed him off in fighter-pilot garb for yet another one. We want our actors to make us feel good; we want our presidents to make us feel safe.
“I’m one of you,” our actors assure us. “I may look handsome, but I’m short. I am not Will Ferrell but a guy who removes his shirt to show off my 40-inch paunch hanging over badly fitting shorts.” Ferrell and Vince Vaughn win huge audiences by making fun of themselves, a solution to their acting handicaps: Ferrell is 6 feet 3 inches, and Vaughn is 6 feet 5 inches. If they didn’t put themselves down, we’d feel dwarfed by them. Hence the expression “put oneself down,” back here with us.
“Don’t take us seriously,” our tallest actors tell us. “We may be bigger, but we’re just like you—and all those not-tall actors you love so much.”
We’re one of you.
A visitor to America today could not be here long without recognizing an American obsession: best-seller lists.
Every week, USA Today and other publications alert Americans to which movies attracted the most viewers, all the way down to movie number ten. Each week, it lists not just the ten best-selling books but the top one hundred. Meanwhile, newspapers each week inform us of the most popular television shows, CDs, country music songs. Amazon provides constantly updated lists of its best-selling books, right down to number 3,500,000.
But of course we care about this. We badly want to know what everyone else is doing and to feel a part of it.
Perhaps we are wise to think this way, to watch what others are doing and thinking. As James Surowiecki pointed out in his 2003 book The Wisdom of Crowds, the masses often act intelligently.
When contestants on the television program Who Wants to Be a Millionaire asked for help from the “smartest person” they knew, those smart people provided the right answer almost 65 percent of the time. That was a strong performance, but far less impressive than the people in the audience; they picked the right answer 91 percent of the time; the consensus of the audience proved almost 40-percent smarter than the smartest person each contestant knew.
Standing by itself, the Millionaire example doesn’t prove Surowiecki’s theory, well expressed in his book’s subtitle, Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few. But he assembles several other examples to suggest how often experts are wrong—we will see many examples in the pages ahead—and crowds are right.
Which raises the possibility: Do we follow the crowd because we have learned that crowds know something? Is there simply something about that number-one movie, book, or television show that truly recommends it?
We trust the common view; no, we are obsessed with it. USA Today constantly publicizes its surveys, under headlines like “We Love Country Music” and “We’re Watching More Television.” We poll and poll and poll. One of our country’s most popular sets of business books, Marcus Buckingham’s, claims to be the product of Gallup polls of more than 1.7 million people. Implicitly, this assures us that his books offer the “wisdom of crowds.”
We want to know what people are reading and watching because we want to participate in the dialogue about those shows and books. Just as significant, we do not want to feel left out of those conversations. We want to be a part.
Great marketers tap into this tendency, too. Consider Roger Horchow, who for years has engineered one of the world’s most successful catalog businesses, the Horchow Catalog. A reader browsing his catalog would soon be attracted to a teak desk set and a Danish brass kitchen clock. Very often, the reason for her interest is that she’s discovered that other people like those two items, too. How does she know? Roger told her. He used his three magic words, which appear throughout his catalog: “Our most popular.”
“This is what others are buying,” Horchow tells a reader with those three words, and the reader reacts like Americans so often do: “I’d better buy it, too.”
Beginning just after Thanksgiving Day in 1995, when it first surpassed the 5,000 mark, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which tracks the stock performance of thirty blue-chip companies, more than doubled in just over three years. In March 1999, it reached 11,000. By 2000, the market’s performance had been gasp-inducing: a 315-percent increase in just ten years, almost triple its average increase.
After some notable drops, including a 1,360-point drop in the week following September 11, stocks broke the 11,000 level again on January 9, 2006, then started rising almost vertically. In less than seven months, the Dow hit 14,164.
Everyone recognized this was extraordinary, but too few people recognized it could not last. American stocks had increased an average of just over 10 percent per year for the previous one hundred years. A 125-percent increase in a decade would fit that norm; this 315-percent burst did not.
Each day, CNN and others offered reasons for the surge: strong performance from the tech sector, continued good news on inflation, and investor confidence in Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. They never offered another explanation, which seems far more plausible now: People were buying stocks because people were buying stocks.
Jon and Dawn bought stocks because Kim and Cliff and Kevin and Julie and everyone else seemed to be buying stocks, and they wanted to be a part. Consider what Jon and Dawn had been enduring. For weeks, they’d indulged several friends who raved about their brokers and their own investing acumen, which had helped steer their portfolio up 40 percent. Like most of us, Jon and Dawn can endure one of these conversations, but few among us can endure three—and at various times between 1996 and 2001, most investors had.
America’s financial advisors constantly heard this. “My friend David has made a real killing in Pfizer,” Jon would tell them. “The Browns made so much last year that Eva quit her job,” Dawn would chime in. And on and on. Everyone was looking at everyone.
This was their problem. David, Eva, and everyone else seemed to be making huge sums of money. Jon and Dawn didn’t want to get further ahead; they simply did not want to fall behind. They did not want to lose their place.
When the market and economy reversed, they still showed the passion; they just moved to another venue. In the middle of June 2009 and a hideous recession, we could head for the nearest mall and detect a pleasant feeling. We knew we would get a great parking spot, right near the entrance, because surely people weren’t shopping.
We drove in. Not an empty slot. We decided it was an odd day, perhaps a huge sale.
But it wasn’t. Mall traffic throughout the summer of 2009 was virtually unchanged from traffic levels of the peak years.
We really were still shopping.
If we weren’t at the mall, we were communing with crowds at another venue. Despite the bleak economy in 2009, four teams—Michigan, Penn State, Tennessee, and Texas—once again attracted more than 100,000 fans to each of its home games, and the average Division I team attracted over 42,000.
We can see the communal nature of these sports when we watch how they are televised. Watch when one team makes a big play; the camera almost instantly goes to the crowd to watch its joyous reaction, en masse. The camera watches the game; but like us, it watches the crowd to see if it’s cheering, shopping, or buying stock.
We want to be a part.
In 1973, Harley-Davidson claimed near-monopoly status in the United States, a phenomenal 77.5 percent of the motorcycle market. The brand was iconic and was made even more so by the classic 1969 movie Easy Rider, which launched the celebrated careers of Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, showcasing Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Bill (Hopper) on two Harley choppers, going from Los Angeles to Mardi Gras in search of America.
But in 1973, from its stronghold in Milwaukee, Harley came under attack from Japan: from Yamaha, Honda, Suzuki, and the other manufacturers of much lighter, hyperpowered motorcycles. Owners of aptly named Hogs—a Harley weighed far more than a comparable Yamaha—stayed famously true to their enormous bikes, but young American men gravitated to these Japanese crotch rockets, partly because they were bikes young men could afford.
The lower-cost Japanese bikes dramatically altered the market by dramatically expanding it. As a result, Harley started bleeding. Ten years later, its market share had plummeted to just one bike in four on America’s roads. Almost half of the bikes on the road, an amazing 44 percent, were Hondas.
Honda did it, some might argue, through sheer bitchiness manifested in shrewd marketing. Honda decided to make Harley look bad, and it had plenty of ammunition, thanks to a series of unfortunate events.
Early in 1969, seeing the enormous success of the famous Woodstock concert, the group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young decided they wanted to create a West Coast version to celebrate the end of the year. They quickly signed two of the era’s most famous rock groups: Santana and Jefferson Airplane. They then guaranteed a massive crowd. They signed the Rolling Stones.
But the Rolling Stones could not appear in the proposed setting without first enlisting heavy security. In what seemed a fortunate coincidence, they learned that the concert site was near the birthplace of a perfect security organization: the Hells Angels. The Stones’ leader, Mick Jagger, had earlier hired some London-based Angels to provide security for a concert in London and was happy with their performance.
But the English Angels, he would later learn, were a more angelic band than the Americans he approached.
A small group of motorcycle-riding outlaws that officially started in 1948 near Oakland, California, the Angels had a violent image in America that dated to the previous summer and a famous event: the Fourth of July riot in Hollister, California. The riot immediately became known for the headline it inspired in the San Francisco Chronicle the following morning: “70 Motorcyclists Take Over Town.”
Always eager for sensational stories that photographed well, Life magazine photographers got to the scene, gathered dozens of beer bottles, and asked one of the riders still in Hollister to pose on his motorcycle in the midst of bottles while holding another bottle to his mouth. To take full advantage of readers’ interest, Life’s story ran over 1,500 words.
That vivid photo and lengthy coverage branded in Americans’ minds the image of motorcyclists as deviant, drunken outlaws. Less than four years later, Harper’s ran a story called “Cyclists Raid” based on the Life story. Reading the story and immediately seeing its cinematic potential, Harper’s subscriber and movie director Stanley Kramer set into motion the steps that two years later produced the classic movie The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando.
Kramer’s movie started a cult of motorcycle gang films. Life’s editors years later admitted they had created the image of outlaw motorcyclists that motorcyclists had been trying to live down ever since. And the group most associated with that outlaw image was the Hells Angels.
Mick Jagger, however, did not subscribe to Life or Harper’s. He knew nothing about Hollister; when the riot occurred, he was three weeks shy of five years old and living in London. Jagger simply assumed—once again, a triumph of assuming over thinking—that America’s Angels were like the English Angels he’d liked and trusted. They weren’t. The British Angels looked remarkably like Jagger: thin, long-haired, often androgynous, and nonviolent.
So a deal was struck to have the Angels provide security: They’d do it for $500 worth of beer.
Everything now seemed in place to make Altamont the next Woodstock, a festival salute to peace, love, and rock and roll.
But from the beginning, it wasn’t. The day, December 6, 1969, started ominously. Two people died after being struck by a hit-and-run driver, and a third person drowned in a puddle of water, which caused some audience members to challenge the fitness of the Angels as guards.
In midafternoon, a helicopter hovered dramatically over the Altamont Speedway before fluttering down. The Stones broke out the helicopter’s door and rushed to the stage. By that point, everyone could feel the tension between the Angels and the crowd. To make matters worse, someone knocked over one of the Angels’ bikes. Soon after, one of the Angels knocked out Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin with a punch, the last straw for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The group that created the concert left the speedway.
Unfortunately, bad got worse. The Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman had missed the helicopter ride, so the Stones had to wait to perform. It was dark before they finally started, and Jagger’s justifiable edginess is vivid in the footage in the documentary Gimme Shelter. It is hard not to notice something else that was contributing to the tension: The Angels were well through their $500 cache of beer.
About twenty minutes later, as the Stones performed their classic “Under My Thumb,” an eighteen-year-old man near the front of the stage pulled out a gun and what some thought was a knife. He approached the stage, wild-eyed and barely able to walk.
Spotting the man and his gun, several Angels surged into the crowd. One Angel, Alan Passaro, fended off the gunman with his left hand and stabbed him with a knife he held in his right. Jagger stopped singing and watched anxiously, a moment powerfully captured in Gimme Shelter, which was released just months later.
The Stones continued and finished the set, unaware of the news: Meredith Hunter had died from the wounds inflicted by the Angels. Passaro later would be charged with murder but then acquitted after lawyers successfully argued that he had acted in self-defense.
But after that December and the release of the documentary, the Angels’ devotion to Harley made them the most vivid image of the Harley brand, which at that point was equated with Altamont and its horror. To make the connection even worse was something viewers realize when they see Gimme Shelter: All of the performers and the Angels were white. Meredith Hunter was black.
Honda’s marketing executives spotted this monumental event—it is popular to call Woodstock the high point of “the culture of love” and Altamont its violent end—as an opportunity. They could turn Harley’s new problem into Harley’s new catastrophe and a launchpad for Honda. Honda’s advertising agency, Daly and Associates, went to work and soon made a weapon.
They crafted a velvet hammer.
Their weapon was eight words, of such apparent innocence that they might have been used in a Pepsi commercial. The message sounded so sweet, so like “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” that most people who saw the commercial completely missed its intended meaning. What Honda and its agency wanted Americans to hear beneath these words’ veneer was, “Don’t buy a Harley, because a Harley rider might invade your hometown, pee on your jacket, and beat you to death with a pool cue.”
That was what Honda’s executives and ad agency hoped Americans would hear. What they said, however, was, “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.”
And, by implication, you meet the biggest, scariest, pool-cue-wielding dudes on a Harley.
The message and Honda’s dramatic rise forced the already-wounded Harley folks in Milwaukee to go on the defensive. Harley could not pretend there were no Hells Angels, in part because too many men found Harley’s outlaw image attractive, in part because so many women did. Outlaws we like; cold-blooded, pool-cue-wielding killers we don’t.
Realizing its motorcycles weren’t as fast, agile, or affordable as the Japanese bikes, afraid to kill the Hog by making it into something smaller and less masculine, and forced into what seemed a brand hole, Harley had to respond. Rather than escape the tattooed Angels image, Harley embraced it, cleaned it up, and turned it—and Harley’s uniquely passionate brand loyalty—into an asset.
Harley owners so loved their Harleys that tens of thousands had the Harley logo tattooed on their arms. That image became an inspiration, but one the company took years to recognize. Once it did, however, the effect was memorable.
In 1985, Harley’s top creative team at Carmichael Lynch in Minneapolis, copywriter Ron Sackett and art director Dan Krumwiede, met and began to think about all those tattooed biceps.
Krumwiede envisioned the photo: a gorgeous close-up of a thick, bronzed bicep, popping out from below a spotless new white shirt, emblazoned with the Harley logo. Sackett thought about just what that meant, to love a brand so much you branded yourself with it, and crafted his “think about this, all you guys on those Japanese crotch rockets” headline: “When is the last time you felt this passionately about anything?”
But Harley’s strongest rejoinder actually started two years before, when the Harley marketing teams recognized that great American trait: We want to be a part. This spurred the Milwaukee-Minneapolis team to come up with an audacious idea: What if we start a new motorcycle gang?
What if we created an even bigger gang and became more than just a motorcycle company but a collection of companions?
From that insight was born one of the most successful marketing tactics in the history of wheeled products: the 1983 creation of the brilliantly named H.O.G., the Harley Owner’s Group. Within four years, 73,000 members were registered. Today, the number is almost half a million.
Today, if you buy a Harley, you receive a free one-year membership to H.O.G. with access to any of over nine hundred local chapters—the world’s largest company-sponsored motorcycle enthusiast group. They conduct several national rallies and rallies in almost every state.
The group both reinforces each member’s devotion to Harley and serves as Harley’s most effective promotional vehicle. It also allows Harley executives to practice what the Japanese call genchi genbutsu: Go to the scene and learn what is happening, what you might call “marketing by walking around.” Harley’s executives and employees do this by attending H.O.G. events almost every weekend between Easter and Halloween, where they learn what bike owners love.
The authors of the H.O.G. website could have written a paragraph of this section, as you see in this excerpt:
There’s a basic human longing to be a part of something greater than yourself. We like to think of Harley-Davidson—from the top corporate officer to the newest Harley owner and rider—as one big, happy family…. Does that sound like something you want to be a part of? Then join H.O.G. today.
H.O.G. illustrates a key trend: community as a service (CAAS). Good marketers always ask, “How can we bind our users together?” Nike does it by forming Nike running clubs at Nike stores nationwide.
Sony did it right inside its PlayStation, which uses the Internet to allow players all over the world to play together while they converse with each other over microphones and headsets.
Tazo promotes its teas as more than refreshments; they’re a way to meet others. Tazo makes this clear with the printed messages on its store shelves: “Brew some tea. Enjoy good conversation. That’s how friends are made.”
American Express leverages CAAS, too. For years, it sold the security of its card—“Don’t leave home without it”—and the card’s prestige. Then the company decided it needed to sell a club instead and started calling its users “members,” not “cardholders”; every American Express card says that.
In case we missed this point, American Express in 2007 decided to ensure that we wouldn’t. No longer did it deliver messages like “Do you know me?” and “My life. My card,” as it did in two very effective campaigns. It made sure people knew it was a club, not a card, by asking, “Are you a card member?”
But we save the biggest for last. In July 2010, when over 200 million people were playing online social games each month, Disney signaled its faith in an even bigger future by unloading $563 million to buy Playdom, a social game developer. The most popular of these online games are not one-on-one, but collaborative. It takes a village on phones and computers to play FarmVille, for example, where teams work together to raise barns and plow wheat fields. FarmVille’s developer and the overwhelming leader in social game development, Zygna, signals its CAAS purpose in its motto: What could be clearer than its five words, “Connecting the world through games”?
“Why don’t you eat at Ruggeri’s anymore?”
That was a reasonable question to ask the former Ruggeri’s waiter, because it often seemed that everyone in St. Louis was there, in the classic Italian restaurant in the heart of the city’s Italian neighborhood, the Hill. The former waiter was Yogi Berra, who less than ten years later became famous as the catcher for the New York Yankees, and he responded to that question with an answer that became almost as famous as Yogi: “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
To restaurateurs today, Yogi’s days look like the good old ones. Tonight, you can walk into a restaurant where you once waited forty-five minutes to be seated and hear your request for a table echo off the walls.
But there’s been one notable exception.
Despite a declining economy, Panera Bread’s same-store sales increased 10.3 percent in the first quarter of 2010, after 3 percent increases in 2008 and 2009. Investors noticed; from 1999 to 2009, Panera was America’s hottest restaurant stock, soaring 315 percent.
Panera builds off a strong concept—fast, healthy food—but few restaurants triumph from their food alone. McDonald’s, for example, took over the world not because of its burgers but because in a world of “hamburger joints” and all that phrase implies—greasy spoons, old gum stuck under the tables, and restrooms few dared to enter—McDonald’s burger restaurants were scrubbed spotless.
Panera’s success rests on something beyond its speedy food, too.
If at almost any hour you peek through the intentionally large windows of your nearest Panera, you will notice lots of people. You assume they came for the food, and your confidence in the crowd draws you in. To enhance that feeling of welcome homeyness, every Panera is filled with a fragrance that has enchanted most of us since childhood: the smell of fresh-baked bread.
That aroma is one trick in cofounder Ron Shaich’s bag of them that has made Panera thrive. But there’s one more: a truly invisible example of understanding our wish to be a part that almost everyone advised Shaich against.
In January 2005, Shaich began installing in Panera what is now the largest free WiFi network in the world. He was convinced that offering free WiFi would accomplish just what it has: turn his restaurants into gathering places. And how many people might Panera hope to gather there, at least now and then? Start with 22 million; that’s the current number of officeless workers in America. For those 22 million, every Panera represents a possible office, complete with fresh coffee, warm smells, and the company of others.
Yes, Starbucks had the idea of being “America’s third place,” the place you went when you weren’t in your other two places: your home and your office. But Starbucks, until it realized its mistake in June 2010, required you to buy a loyalty card and limited you to two hours of WiFi service. By charging nothing for unlimited service, Panera looks more like home; your mom and dad wouldn’t charge you for Internet access, would they?
So Panera—coincidentally headquartered in Berra’s and Ruggeri’s hometown—seems to reverse Berra’s famous quotation. People go to Panera because people go there, drawn partly by the daylong crowds they notice inside—and by the clever network they do not.