At least once each year, a major American magazine decides to update its design to appear more current. Every time this happens, the magazine’s editors brace themselves for what they know will follow: a flood of emails and letters from upset readers.
“Why fix what wasn’t broken?” several subscribers will write. Whatever words they choose, these critics repeat one theme: We preferred the old look.
We keep seeing this; we strongly prefer the familiar, as the remarkable cases that follow suggest.
Within days after September 9, 2006, thousands of Chicagoans simply stopped going to the iconic Marshall Field’s department store on State Street.
For years, that idea sounded unthinkable to native Chicagoans, because for most of its 125 years, Marshall Field’s had served as Chicago’s town square. Whenever two people visiting downtown wanted to meet, they usually followed the great Chicago tradition: “Let’s meet under the clock at Marshall Field’s.”
In the fall of 2006, many stopped.
They weren’t responding to a weak economy. That fall, America’s economy reached fifth gear. It wasn’t the store, either; it was the same store with the same merchandise—except one thing: the name.
Marshall Field’s was now Macy’s.
This was not the first time that Marshall Field’s had stopped being the original Marshall Field’s. Twenty-four years earlier, a British-based company, British and American Tobacco, had acquired it. Years later, Dayton Hudson of Minneapolis acquired it, which eventually led to Marshall Field’s being owned and operated by Target. That changed yet again just years later, when Target sold Marshall Field’s to the May Company.
Marshall Field’s had not really been the classic Marshall Field’s for decades. But until that fall and despite all those changes in ownership, Marshall Field’s had continued to use the Marshall Field’s name.
In changing the name to Macy’s, it appeared to be swapping one iconic retailing name for an even bigger one. Macy’s stores are immortalized in the movie Miracle on 34th Street, the site of midtown Manhattan’s Macy’s, and have been spectacularly branded into our American brains by Macy’s famous annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, watched by an estimated 44 million viewers each year.
But when the change to the Macy’s name was announced, crowds of protesters assembled—under the clock, of course—and gathered again to protest exactly one year later.
They wanted their Marshall Field’s; they wanted that name and all that it evoked: shopping trips with best friends, Christmas displays and Christmas carols, Dad returning home with a Marshall Field’s bag and a surprise inside. That the store was the same meant nothing; the name meant something. Without the name, the store was not the same—even though it was.
They wanted the familiar, and they wanted what Marshall Field’s meant to them and had meant all their Chicagoland lives. They craved Marshall Field’s the idea, and when the name was gone, that idea went with it.
We love the familiar, particularly one rich with meaning, and Marshall Field’s meant presents, shopping, Christmas, and meeting best friends under the clock. We can tire of the familiar, but we never tire of great memories and the great brands that created them—as Macy’s learned that day in September 2006.
From the beginning of television and for over twenty years after, the situation portrayed in every American situation comedy was the same, from Father Knows Best and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis to My Three Sons and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Dads did not work, it appeared, but merely came home from work. When they opened the front door, they cried out, “Honey, I’m home!”
The adoring family rushed to meet the dad, and he tossed down his homburg hat, grabbed Mom around the waist of her just-pressed cotton dress, and said, “Hi, Little Rickie/Beaver/kids!”
Women were moms, usually in aprons, just coming from or returning to the kitchen. Moms and dads doted, never yelled, and offered wisdom. Sex had not been invented.
Fred MacMurray, the classic sitcom dad from My Three Sons, so illustrated this virginal perfection of parents that seeing Double Indemnity for the first time can be shocking. How could America’s nicest dad possibly turn into Walter Neff? How could he smoke cigarettes and sneer, “Hey, baby”—and to a married woman? How could he covet that married barracuda Barbara Stanwyck and help murder her husband so that he and Black Widow could live happily ever after off the insurance settlement? That was television for over two decades: seventy different versions of Father Knows Best But Doesn’t Yell at, or Sleep with, Mom.
Then came 1970.
Through most of 1969, James L. Brooks had been working on a pilot television show built around Rob Petrie’s wife from The Dick Van Dyke Show, the actress Mary Tyler Moore. Because these were the years right after Woodstock, and of the pill, bra burning, Ms. magazine, and Playboy, Brooks envisioned a different sort of sitcom. The central woman wouldn’t be a dutiful wife cooking all day but a single woman who pursued both a career and men.
Brooks also did not want to surround Mary with Ozzies, Beavers, and Wallys. Instead, he wanted people with edges and neuroses. So he created Ted Baxter, a pompous dimwit who believes himself the world’s best broadcaster and a lady’s man; Rhoda, Mary’s loud, whiny, and promiscuous neighbor; and Lou, the gruff boss who yells.
Brooks’s characters were people we could dislike, and test audiences did. Intensely.
The test audiences hated the show. We love smooth, and Rhoda wasn’t. The audience members called her the opposite of smooth: “abrasive.” Ted Baxter behaved too much like the employees too many of the testers knew from work: the inept narcissist and braggart.
They also loathed Phyllis, Mary’s self-centered and self-important landlord, played perfectly by Cloris Leachman. Americans hate snobs, those who pretend not to know that all of us are created equal.
The audiences also struggled with Mary. She’d been married to that wonderful Rob Petrie for years, and now she was single and dating. How could she? Where was Rob?
The test audiences hated the show because it seemed so new and different. Like the songs on the CD we hate the first time, barely endure the second, and end up loving, our first exposure to something unfamiliar makes us uneasy, and we interpret unease like disease: something to be avoided.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show felt unfamiliar, and we love the familiar.
The tests nearly produced what now seems like a ridiculous result; The Mary Tyler Moore Show might never have aired. But by the time Brooks had finished this testing, it was too late for CBS to cancel the first airing. So episode one, “Love Is in the Air,” ran.
Fortunately, people at home liked the show more than the testers had, but Brooks was still millions of watchers short of a hit. By season’s end, the show gained some traction but still ranked only twenty-second of all shows on television.
The show rolled into year two, and roll it did. It shot up to tenth in the 1971–1972 season, then up again to seventh in 1972–1973. It was a hit, en route to becoming a legend, the program often called the best comedy in television history.
What happened? Why did Mary fail in testing and thrive on television?
It’s because the unfamiliar became familiar.
Like the song on the CD that finally gets us singing along on the fourth listening, people finally got comfortable with Ted, Phyllis, Rhoda, and Mary. Americans liked that these people were like each of us: flawed. Lou raged, Ted connived, Phyllis preened, Rhoda pouted. It was a show where fathers didn’t know best; Ted Baxter didn’t know anything. That seemed familiar.
Then what happened?
Over the next two years, Mary’s show slipped slightly, ranking ninth and then eleventh. And then came 1975–1976.
In that season, the show dropped to number nineteen: a warning flare. In 1976–1977, it plummeted to thirty-ninth, and on March 19, 1977, in perhaps one of the most memorable endings to any TV show ever, Mary walked out of the WJM newsroom and turned out the lights. Screens across America went black for several seconds.
Then that door creaked open. Mary peeked back into the room, then closed the door again for the last time.
Why did Mary’s star burn so bright yet fall so fast? It’s because the familiar always becomes too familiar. Mary’s writers ran out of new twists and characters. The addition of Betty White as Sue Ann Nivens, the “Happy Homemaker” and television’s first cougar, helped in 1974, and adding sweet but clueless Georgette two years earlier may have, too. Ultimately, however, new always gets old.
To complicate Mary’s problem, what had made the show so unfamiliar at first—its abrasive characters—worked so well that every network started casting abrasives. A season after Mary appeared, NBC gave us perhaps the most abrasive character in television history: Archie Bunker of All in the Family, which became America’s most-watched program in Mary’s second season.
Wow! Producers decided, if this gruff, homophobic, racist, flag-waving and hippie-hating Archie could work, why not an abrasive black man who seemed to hate everyone and every thing, a man who in the spirit of the Me Century was a classic narcissist? Thus was born George Jefferson of The Jeffersons, which reached number four in Mary’s fifth season. George and his family might have climbed even higher in the ratings had it not been for a competing abrasive black man: Sanford, played by Redd Foxx on Sanford and Son. That show ranked second that year.
Two producers in Los Angeles then made an obvious choice. If two insufferable black men and an insufferable right-wing male bigot could work, what about creating a program featuring an insufferable and abrasive liberal woman?
Voilà! The world flocked to watch Bea Arthur in Maude, the ninth-most-watched show of that same year.
What about Mary’s “abrasive” friend Rhoda and her egomaniacal landlady Phyllis, whom The Mary Tyler Moore Show testers hated? Well, of course: They got their own shows. The next year, Phyllis ranked sixth, Rhoda finished ninth.
You can guess what happened next.
The familiar became tedious. A year later, Phyllis and Rhoda dove out of the top twenty. The networks canceled Phyllis at the end of the season and Rhoda at the end of the next.
If anyone wonders why car makers change cars every year and software companies introduce new versions within what seems like eight weeks of the previous release; if people wonder why Madonna keeps morphing into new versions that barely resemble her previous one, just as Christina Aguilera does; or why Monday Night Football introduces new stars, new music, new promos every season, despite their enormous cost; if anyone wonders about any of these phenomena and many others, the history of the 1970s sitcom provides the answer:
We want the familiar. Until it becomes too familiar.
On February 9, 1964, minutes after 8 p.m. eastern time, America’s crime rate dropped dramatically for twenty minutes, and the American barbering industry fell into a recession that would last almost twenty years.
That was the night the Beatles first appeared on American television, on CBS’s The Ed Sullivan Show, and launched America into Beatlemania. Over 73 million Americans watched, an astonishing one of every three American men, women, and children. Our streets were empty.
Now, more than forty years later, we assume that the four fellows’ talent made it inevitable that Rolling Stone one day would name them the number-one singing group of all time and that Time magazine would name them among the 100 Most Influential People of the Century. But the four Brits’ triumph, it turns out, involved something more. It involved a fifth Brit, one with a clever insight into Americans and a pioneer in the art of what today is a marketing mantra, “engaging the customer.”
We begin with a fact that will shock many people: The Beatles initially appeared doomed in America. Just months after they emerged as a phenomenon in their native England, EMI offered Capitol Records the rights to release the group’s single “Please Please Me” in the United States; Capitol refused. EMI then turned to Atlantic Records and offered it the same opportunity.
Atlantic refused, too.
Finally, EMI convinced a small label called Vee-Jay to take on the single, which it eventually released on February 7, 1963—what turned out to be a year to the day before the Beatles landed in America for the first time. But their single didn’t please Americans at all; it sold only 7,310 copies.
The failure of “Please Please Me” seemed to prove that the executives at Capitol and Atlantic had been right for passing on the Beatles and for recognizing a pattern in American music. On the date of the single’s release, only one British act had ever reached the American top ten: Frankie Ifield’s “I Remember You,” which turned out to be Ifield’s only American hit. American record executives decided there was a law at work: British acts don’t work here.
On September 28, these executives looked astute. That was the night that the era’s most famous disc jockey, Murray the K, played the Beatles’ “She Loves You” on New York’s monster rock and roll station, 1010 WINS. If any DJ could make a record move in those days, it was Murray the K. But no one seemed to be listening that night; Murray’s phones went silent.
A month later, those executives looked even more astute. That was the October afternoon that Dick Clark debuted “She Loves You” on the Rate-A-Record segment of his popular Saturday-afternoon rock and roll show, American Bandstand.
Clark’s teenage panelists gave the song a barely passing grade: 71 of a possible 98 points. That wasn’t the worst news for the boys, however. When Clark showed a photo of the foursome to some audience members, they laughed. They giggled over the Beatles’ haircuts, which quickly earned the name “mop tops” because they looked like mops on the fellows’ heads. And it didn’t help that the four Brits wore collarless jackets and high-heeled Italian leather boots with long pointed toes, wardrobe choices that in 1963 would have gotten them rolled in half of America’s bars.
Clark had aired the song only as a favor. His friend Bernie Binnick had acquired the song’s American rights earlier that summer and, knowing the impact of a Bandstand appearance, approached Clark. Binnick insisted that the Beatles’ mix of the familiar—an American sound that was part Buddy Holly, part Chuck Berry—and the new—their “mod” look—could combine to produce a hit.
Clark’s reply would be historic: “You’re absolutely insane. It’ll never fly.”
“Please Please Me” had failed; Capital and Atlantic had passed. “She Loves You” had failed; Clark’s audience had laughed, and Clark was recommending therapy for anyone who thought the Beatles could succeed. The song never reached the Billboard charts.
Worried but undeterred, a fifth man went to work: Brian Epstein, the band’s manager. On November 5, the day after the group’s command performance before the British royal family, he flew to New York on a trip he had planned to promote another British singer, Billy J. Kramer. Just days before, Epstein’s friend and Ed Sullivan’s European talent coordinator, Peter Prichard, called Epstein. Having recently seen the Beatles perform, Prichard encouraged Epstein to coax Sullivan to host the Beatles on his show. While Epstein was en route to New York, Prichard called Sullivan and told him of the group’s command performance, impressing Sullivan with the fact that the Beatles were the first “long-haired boys” ever invited to appear before the queen of England.
Here, too, luck intervened.
Just twelve days earlier, Sullivan and his wife Sylvia had been delayed at London’s Heathrow Airport. Looking through a pouring rain outside, Sullivan and Sylvia could not miss the spectacle: over 1,500 anxious and sopping-wet young Brits lining the rooftop of the Queen’s Building and the grounds. For what? Sullivan asked a passerby, and learned they were there to see the Beatles.
“Who the hell are they?” he asked.
“A huge pop group here. Returning from a tour of Sweden.”
Sullivan’s immediate thought: Elvis Presley. Only Elvis had ever inspired a mania like the one that he and Sylvia were seeing outside that Heathrow Airport window. So when Epstein approached him about the Beatles twelve days later, Sullivan was primed.
Ultimately the two agreed to a contract that few people can hear about today without gasping. For three performances, the foursome and Epstein would divide up $10,000, just over $650 per person per appearance. Perhaps sensing he’d done too well in the negotiations, Sullivan agreed to throw in the group’s transportation and lodging.
The Sullivan deal opened the American pipeline from England. When Capitol Records executives learned about it, they recognized that the exposure on Sullivan’s show would produce record sales that at least covered their costs and finally signed a deal with Epstein.
But Epstein still agonized.
The Dick Clark and Murray the K experiences troubled him. He had difficulty disregarding the views of Clark, who was America’s leading tastemaker and talent spotter in rock and roll. Epstein reasonably feared that the Beatles would not be accepted; they were too unfamiliar, too odd-looking, too feminine.
So Epstein set to work.
Fearing that the Beatles would look too unfamiliar to American audiences, he decided he had to make us feel comfortable with them and to welcome to America what soon would be called “The British Invasion.” To complicate his task, however, these working lads from Liverpool had spent their formative years playing in Hamburg’s red-light district, and they did not always wear well.
John was prickly and abrasive; Ringo fidgeted in front of cameras and microphones, had a face made for radio, and looked awkward (playing a right-handed drum set left handed may have added to Ringo’s apparent problem). George’s face exuded bottomless vacancy and detachment. Paul looked cute, but so did Natalie Wood, to whom he bore too close a resemblance for some American men.
So for the album that would break the ice in America, to be released twenty days before the first Sullivan appearance, Epstein ignored the common practice of naming the album after the title of its biggest hit. Instead, Epstein wanted to make a connection between his alien band and the American audience. So he gave the album a title that invited us to become friends of his foreign invaders. He called it Meet the Beatles!
Epstein was inviting us in. If we doubt this ploy, we should go online and read the playlist on the album’s back cover: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “Till There Was You.” “I Wanna Be Your Man.” His boys were talking to each of us.
Now look at the very first lyrics of some of the songs on the album:
“Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you”
“It won’t be long, yeh, yeh, yeh… ’til I belong to you.”
“Whenever I want you around…”
“Little child, little child, won’t you dance with me?”
“You know you made me cry…”
Meet the Beatles! invited us to meet them, to be a part of them. Having invited you in on its cover, the Beatles did not sing about Maybelline or Runaround Sue. They sang about each of us, soon to be the centerpieces of the Me Decade. The Beatles serenaded us, just as advertising copywriters do when they repeatedly use the word “you” in ads and commercials, even though they are writing to everyone. The songs on Meet the Beatles! are not just songs but conversations with us set to 4/4 time, Paul’s German guitar, and Ringo’s black Ludwig drums.
To make sure the boys connected with the Americans, Epstein stage-managed Sullivan’s brief interviews with the foursome: Be upbeat, he insisted, be one of them. (“John, be sweet for six seconds.”) Epstein understood our wish to feel a part, our discomfort with the unfamiliar, and our dislike of those who “put on airs.” Like many Brits, he also understood both our optimism and our unusual need for a major dose of it that night in February. Just seventy-eight days earlier, we had suffered one of the great traumas of our century: the assassination of President Kennedy.
Fortunately for Epstein, the boys were at their upbeat best—so much so that at the conclusion of their third and final appearance, on February 23, Sullivan thanked them, memorably referring to them as “four of the nicest youngsters.”
Today, few people question the group’s claim to be history’s greatest recording group. But Epstein knew what we loved; like children, we are self-centered. We want even our songs to be about us and our entertainers to talk to us.
Epstein got us, and that helped the Beatles make history. The following August, they were movie stars, too, with the U.S. release of A Hard Day’s Night, which Time magazine years later named one of the one hundred greatest movies of all time. (Remarkably, Dick Clark still wasn’t convinced. He told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, “Beatlemania is fading. Their music is kid stuff.”)
Once Epstein made the Fab Four familiar to us, he refused to let them become too familiar. From the sweet and innocent rock of Meet the Beatles!, Epstein and Lennon-McCartney shifted gears, releasing their folk-rockish Rubber Soul just two years later.
Less than a year after that, they released their guitar-driven Revolver, followed by their masterpiece, the psychedelic-rock Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, famously packaged to suggest that the band included heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston, Marilyn Monroe, W. C. Fields, Bob Dylan, and a particular band favorite, Marlon Brando. The Lonely Hearts Club Band was one of us, the all-American band, the album cover told us.
And wouldn’t you know, the boys had learned that we needed to feel familiar with this new group, too, just as we had back in 1964. Within seconds of Sgt. Pepper’s first chord, they ask us,
So may I introduce to you
The act you’ve known for all these years,
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
See what they just said again? We’re new, but we’re familiar. You’ve known us all this time; meet us once again.
After they first heard the song on July 25, 1965, music legends Carole King and Frank Zappa separately told friends they were considering quitting music. Across the country in Seattle at the same time, another legend heard the song on the radio and reached a slightly different decision: Jimi Hendrix told himself he was still a guitarist but no longer a singer.
The wonder was that these three legends ever heard the song “Like a Rolling Stone” at all.
Five weeks earlier, Columbia Records’ marketing executives first heard the song and, like Dick Clark hearing the Beatles, insisted the song would never fly. It was 6:09 long, and only two six-minute songs had ever reached the Billboard Top 100. The song was an unfamiliar fusion: folk-music lyrics, electronic rock guitars, and classic piano and organ. The organist himself was a twenty-one-year-old session guitarist named Al Kooper who had never played the organ before, and it showed: He played an eighth-note behind the other instruments.
The song might never have been released had it not been for two Dylan fans at Columbia Records. They snuck copies of the track to Terry Noel, America’s first celebrity deejay, who was working Manhattan’s hottest disco, Arthur. Noel liked it, played it, and reported back that his celebrity audience did, too.
But even after hearing this, Columbia’s executives still feared the song would never fly, that the celebrities at Arthur were chasms apart from the typical American record buyer. But they finally caved and on July 20 released “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Within days it reached Billboard’s number two. It stayed in the top ten for sixteen weeks, an impressive tenure then and now. Forty years later, the British rock magazine Mojo named it the greatest single in rock music history, an honor bestowed on it by Rolling Stone a year later.
Like Dick Clark contemplating the Beatles and CBS executives considering the pilot for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Columbia’s executives’ handling of Dylan’s song reminds us how inexpert expert opinion can be. As important, it underscores how quickly we reject the unfamiliar. Six minutes of dense and not always comprehensible metaphors (“Napoleon in rags, and the language that he used”), an off-beat organ, a folk singer with a gravelly voice playing an electric guitar—it sounded like nothing they’d heard before.
It was a classic human error: concluding too much from too little. Six-minute songs routinely failed, but then studios had decided that quickly and stopped releasing those songs. So the executives’ sample of long songs was too small. Their bigger error, however, was that Columbia’s thirty-five-year-old executives thought they knew what twenty-year-olds loved. But in the 1960s, the answer to the question “What do kids love?” was “Whatever adults don’t.” A catchphrase of 1960s youth captures this perfectly: “Never trust anyone over thirty.”
Incomprehensible lyrics? If anything, that was the appeal of the classic “Louie Louie” just years before and of Nirvana’s classic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” many years later.
The executives also failed to realize that after a week at a beach, you stop noticing the ocean’s roar at night. The radio plays a song several times, and with each playing the listener adapts: the unfamiliar becomes just familiar enough. And sometimes, like Mary Tyler Moore, 60 Minutes, the Beatles, and the greatest song in rock history, the unfamiliar becomes a classic.
Just before 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning in February 2000, we are driving south in Beverly Hills en route to a celebrated church.
My friend has breathlessly told me three times that the church’s leader is renowned in New Age circles, a circle which, from my visits to her San Diego church, seemed to have as its first commandment “Whatever Works.” (Because her church seemed so forgiving that it had banished the very idea of sin, I had started calling it “The Church of the Holy Go-For-It.”)
Two blocks from the church, the backed-up traffic signaled that my companion was right: The New Age was descending on this Beverly Hills church. We finally found a vacant parking spot far from the entrance, made the trek, and found an eighth-row seat.
Seconds later, two women sat down in the two aisle seats on our right.
Over the next seventy-five minutes, I glanced at these women several times. I wasn’t drawn by their faces but by the palpable warmth between them, and I deduced they were mother and daughter. Nothing else about them caught my attention.
After the ceremony, my friend and I inched from our seats into the 1,100 people squeezing out the doors. I noticed that fair-haired mother and daughter immediately in front of us.
Halfway to the door, my companion leaned in toward me.
“Do you recognize her?” she whispered in a tone that suggested I should.
“Should I?” I replied.
“Oh, yes! That’s Christina Applegate. The TV star. Married with Children.”
“She’s a TV star? Her?” I said.
I responded that way because in real life, or at least on that Sunday of my real life, Christina Applegate looked like a girl we might run into on almost any block of Ames, Iowa, or Spokane, Washington. Christina Applegate, by all accounts, is a pretty woman. And like almost every pretty woman, her face displays one signal trait: It is remarkably average.
Christina Applegate has an average nose; it’s not big, it’s not little. Her eyes are a fraction bigger than average, and her eyes look slightly grayer than the average brown eyes. She has nice skin, a shade lighter than average, certainly not more luminous than average. With the help of Hollywood makeup artists, Applegate’s generally average features become very attractive to most people.
Interestingly, we also find most attractive the things that look familiar—including faces. (Not surprising, considering that in our distant past, an unfamiliar face could belong to an enemy or intruder.) We like eyes that are the average distance apart and average-size noses that are the average distance from the top and bottom lips. Cameron Diaz, as one useful example, possesses an almost perfectly symmetrical face, an average nose, attractive but not unusual eyes, attractive but not memorable hair, a light but familiar tone of skin. Interestingly, most people do not describe Diaz as uniquely attractive, almost certainly because of her one far-from-average feature: her mouth. It seems to begin at her left ear and end at her right.
We are more tolerant of a larger-than-average mouth, however, because it facilitates something else Cameron Diaz has: an enormous smile that makes the Cheshire Cat look gloomy by comparison. Smiles comfort us; they signal, “I am a blessing, not a danger,” and they radiate optimism, something to which we are uniquely attracted.
At this point at least one reader has rebelled, having had a sudden vision of one startling beauty: the actress Penelope Cruz. Cruz has unusually dark skin, unusually large and seemingly black eyes, almost black hair, and a much longer than average nose with an unusually prominent tip that is very close to her top lip. Nothing is average, and Cruz looks dazzling.
But are we truly and totally attracted to faces like hers? Woody Allen, who directed Cruz’s Oscar-winning performance in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, told a Vanity Fair reporter something that echoes what many people feel in Cruz’s presence: uncomfortable.
“I cannot take her face in all at once,” Allen said. “It’s too overwhelming.”
Just days after I first wrote this, I walked to check out some apple fritters from my Lunds grocery stores and was stopped cold. Right in front of the checkout I spied the cover of the new issue of People and its annual announcement of the Most Beautiful Person in the World. Their choice? Christina Applegate.
Why? It’s because she’s a perfect combination of remarkably average features, and a face filled with average features, the most familiar ones, looks beautiful to us. Her face is simple, smooth, easy on the eyes—a collection of average features, symmetrically assembled on a face we might see one day in Ames or Spokane.
This preference of ours for the average and familiar is so strong and common that scholars have given it a name: koinophilia. That word derives from the Greek koinos, which means “usual,” and philos, which means “love,” so koinophilia literally means “love of the usual.”
Might this explain the enthuasism over Apple’s 2010 introduction of Flipboard? The genius of Flipboard is that it takes a person’s collections of their friends’ Facebook and Twitter updates and turns them into something very familiar looking: a magazine.
So it is true in our preferences for beauty, too: We love the familiar.
On the evening of Friday, January 26, 1968, Jeff Greendorfer and his college roommate arrived at his roommate’s home on a cliff on the northern Oregon Coast. It was Jeff’s first visit to Oregon’s coast, but he knew the Pacific Ocean well, having grown up minutes from it in San Francisco. To give Jeff the full benefit of his visit, his hosts assigned him the green bedroom, from which he was able to look out its floor-to-ceiling window and see thirty miles out to sea.
That night was Jeff’s last in the room.
The next morning at breakfast, Jeff apologized to three hosts. He felt grateful for being given the room with the best view in the house but couldn’t sleep there again. “The waves sound so loud, they kind of scare me.”
Jeff’s announcement startled his hosts. They’d lived alongside the ocean for decades, so the ocean sounded different to them; it did not sound at all.
Jeff’s hosts had experienced what psychologists call perceptual adaptation: they’d adapted to what they heard to the point where they no longer heard it. That is why advertisers change ads often. We become so accustomed to ads that we cease to notice them, just like Jeff’s hosts no longer noticed the crash of the waves on the rocks below.
Familiarity breeds numbness. This is why we often struggle with marriage. Each partner becomes habituated; we notice less, which causes us to appreciate less. This also explains why receiving a gift at an unexpected time makes us smile for several days, but a birthday gift—being expected—usually touches us less.
We love what is familiar, and then we don’t.
Familiarity eventually breeds fatigue, but until that occurs, we crave what is familiar and recoil at what is not, as Mary Tyler Moore discovered in the middle of the 1970s.
And it’s the tightrope several American companies are now walking.
It is August 9, 2009. The wires release a report from Howard Schultz in Seattle: Starbucks is closing three hundred stores and laying off workers. Experienced readers of these cutback press releases brace for what they know will come next: the addendum “We believe these changes will prepare us for the success we project as economic conditions improve.”
Commentators quickly pointed to an explanation for Starbucks’ struggles: McDonald’s. McDonald’s had invested multimillions in promoting its McCafé, so surely its gain explained Starbucks’ loss. Or was Starbucks simply experiencing what Mary, Rhoda, and Phyllis experienced? One day you seem fresh, and the next day you taste stale.
Starbucks may be reenacting the Gap saga. That’s where one day you are the store everyone drives blocks for, the next day you are the store on every block, and the day after that you are on the block for sale, for anyone willing to buy something that has become too familiar.
Gap, however, looks vibrant to the people working at Home Office, 6301 Fitch Path, in New Albany, Ohio, today.
That’s the campus office headquarters of Abercrombie & Fitch, whose sales in June 2009 free-fell an alarming 28 percent. It is too early to predict the Mary Tyler Moore fate for the retailer, and it’s risky, because A&F has proven its special insight into its tightly defined, eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-old market. Its design and concept are brilliant enough. Among other benefits, its 90-decibel electronic dance music discourages anyone over forty from entering an A&F, as does that scent wafting through every row; it’s A&F’s own Fierce, a phenomenal fragrance that shouts teenage hormones.
A&F also smartly diversified. It introduced Hollister to combat A&F brand fatigue and Gilly Hicks to trade on the company’s sexualized image by moving into women’s underwear and loungewear. But the risks to the core Abercrombie & Fitch brand are there; its challenge is to be just fresh enough, to be familiar without being too familiar.
That’s the challenge of every marketer today: How do we avoid becoming Mary Tyler Moore—old news just months after being America’s favorite show?
In 1958, a physician practicing in Wheeler, Oregon, on the northern Oregon coast splurged on a new car to replace his beloved 1949 Packard. It was a beige 1958 Mercedes-Benz 190, with its signature red leather upholstery and wooden window frames and door trim. No one in tiny Tillamook County had ever seen a Mercedes. Almost every day someone asked him, “Just what kinda car is that?”
Fourteen years later, his son, living in what soon would be called the Silicon Valley, bought a 1972 BMW 2002. Despite the affluence of that area south of San Francisco, BMWs were so uncommon in 1972 that BMW owners comprised a cult, complete with a club signal. Every time a BMW owner spotted another BMW approaching, he would flash his headlights on and off.
Today, BMW and Mercedes, along with their fellow German carmakers Porsche and Audi, dominate the higher end of the American car market, while the Japanese, comparatively recent arrivals in our country, threaten to dominate the lower and middle, and together, they help explain the problems of Ford and General Motors, which came to a head when our economy nearly collapsed in 2008.
But as you consider that many imports are relatively new to this country, and Ford and Chevrolet are so relatively old, it seems worth asking: Is that part of the problem of America’s car manufacturers? Have American cars become like Gap stores and Krispy Kremes, just too common and too familiar?
Toyota must think so; it must sense how easily we tire of the familiar. When Toyota decided to grab more of the high and low ends of the car markets, it created Lexus and Scion.
The first breakout Japanese brand, Datsun, which captivated American car buyers with its iconic 240Z in 1972, abandoned the Datsun name in 1981 for a new one, Nissan. Then, as Japanese and German cars began to become almost too familiar to us, that created an opening for another new brand. Cooper seized that opportunity with its unconventional Mini Cooper and equally unconventional advertising.
We love the familiar, but then it becomes too familiar. We are known for tiring of the old.
We regularly destroy our great old buildings, as one sad example. The two great buildings of the beginning of the last century in Minneapolis—the West Hotel and the fabulous Metropolitan Building, which Harper’s once featured on its cover—were demolished less than forty years after they were built. Sociologists routinely observe that people of most countries venerate their old, look to them for wisdom, and live under the same roofs, but Americans discard their old. Our work policies treat men and women over sixty-four as apparent liabilities and wrinkled skin as a fate to be avoided at billions in annual costs.
Are Ford and Chevrolet poorly managed and hopelessly handicapped by their health care and labor costs? Perhaps. But these companies could solve those problems and still have this one: They are old and too familiar. To thrive, Ford and GM may have to become new again, or we will continue to treat them as we treat our aging buildings and aging people: Out with the old and too familiar, and in with the new.
The opportunity is there; the Fords of this world have an enormous advantage that appears to be growing with every decade: the unique power and influence of brands. Brands derive their power from the Rule of Familiarity. Brands are familiar and proven to us, which reassures us. Genuine innovations, by contrast, are neither familiar nor proven, which makes us uneasy. But when a branded company like Ford introduces an innovative product, its brand makes the product both familiar and new—intriguing and reassuring to us at the same time. So whatever else we come across in our road ahead, we will see brands in the drivers’ seats.
Our era’s most successful investor agrees. Look at Warren Buffett’s seven largest holdings: Coca-Cola (almost 20 percent of his portfolio), Wells Fargo, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Procter & Gamble, American Express, Kraft Foods, and Wal-Mart: a brand hall of fame. With that fame has come wealth; over the last ten years, Buffett’s stocks have outperformed the market average by over 7 percent annually, a signal that brands are only increasing their unique influence over the products and services that we choose—and even the investments that we make.