In the fall of 1953, Californian Denny Hansen arrived on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. His blond buzz cut, broad shoulders, and bright white smile made him the Sun God of gray New Haven.
By Denny’s junior year, almost everyone who knew Denny assumed he would one day be president. His classmates often played a favorite game: Which man would serve which cabinet post in the Hansen administration? They agreed that Denny’s worst career case would be as secretary of state, a step down but an accomplishment.
That was the least Denny could expect, particularly after he was chosen for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Yet that Rhodes announcement wasn’t even the highlight of Denny’s senior year. That came weeks later, when Denny Hansen’s name and face became known to over ten million Americans.
In the spring, two editors at Life magazine, one of America’s most popular publications, decided to cover Yale’s graduation. Hearing about Denny’s “golden boy” angle, they decided to focus on him.
Reading the article that sprawled over several pages, with stunning Albert Eisenstadt photos, Life’s readers soon learned that Denny was a young man of “astonishing completeness.” They were reminded of that just five months later when, seeing a “Where Are They Now?” angle, the magazine dispatched a team to Oxford to see how Denny was doing.
He was doing great. Ever the all-American boy, he asked the dons not to assign him texts written in German and Latin. At night, his fellow Oxonians’ favorite outing was to Oxford’s seven-hundred-year-old tavern, The Bear Inn, where they downed ale and bitter. Denny ordered Ovaltine and orangeade. His new classmates found him as radiant, too; they called him “ebullient.”
And then… Like many great stories, Denny’s takes a twist. Thirty-four years later, in the coastal town of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, neighbors of a home owned by Scott Thompson called the police. “Something strange next door,” they said. Two officers immediately drove to Thompson’s house and noticed smoke coming from the garage. They broke in.
They found a Honda with its engine running. One officer rushed to open the driver-side door and immediately noticed a body lying on the passenger-side floor, then spotted a frying pan and hardback book propped on the accelerator.
The Golden Boy’s body was blue.
This was a tragedy that only Denny’s friends ever would have heard were it not for another former Yale student and estranged friend of Denny’s: the author Calvin Trillin.
Almost everything about Calvin Trillin looks rumpled. His shoulders are rumpled, his walk is rumpled, his brow and chin are rumpled. Even his rare Mona Lisa smile looks rumpled. It is as rumpled as his frown, which, judging from Google images of Trillin, represents his favorite pose. There is no photographic evidence that Calvin Trillin has teeth.
What Trillin does have, despite his rumpledness and perhaps augmented by it, is wit. Trillin makes people laugh for the same reasons that Jackie Mason once did and Steven Wright still does. These men look dour. Their moods are so gloomy and rumpled—Wright’s hair looks to have been groomed by electricity—that their wit works on one of our great pleasures: the power of surprise. As when we see a sad clown face, we are surprised when sad-looking men do or say funny things, and Trillin says funny things often.
Hansen’s death startled Trillin. He had not heard from or about Denny for years but often noted his surprise after another year passed without hearing something of Denny’s fame, somewhere. So after the small memorial ceremony for Hansen, Trillin began writing Denny’s poignant story.
On April 1, 1993, the result, Remembering Denny, appeared. This turns out to be yet another story, not of dashed expectations but of expectations generally, and how they distort the lenses through which we see. It begins in the American Midwest, days after Trillin’s book was released.
Trillin’s publishers had arranged for a book tour, with one of his first stops in Minneapolis. On a Tuesday afternoon just days after April Fool’s Day, a large crowd—at least seventy—squeezed into a musty-smelling room on the University of Minnesota campus. Minnesotans love to read, partly because their long, cold winters coop them up indoors, so most of those seventy eager people knew Trillin from his witty contributions to the New Yorker and thirty years of articles in the Nation.
Trillin entered the door and walked to the oak podium. The Minnesotans clapped enthusiastically while they noted that, as usual, he looked rumpled. He began to tell Denny’s story. Like that story, the story of Trillin’s presentation has a surprise ending.
Trillin read a brief passage. There were giggles. He read another poignant passage. More giggles, again and again for twenty minutes. The Minnesotans loved the gifted humorist, his dry wit brilliantly on display. But there was a problem.
Trillin was not trying to be funny. He was not even being funny by accident; he was saddened and mystified by the death of his friend. But the audience clearly found Trillin very amusing. Why?
Remembering Denny was so new that few audience members had seen it, much less read their copy. So when they heard Trillin read from his new book, they laughed for one reason. They laughed because they expected they would.
The man speaking was Calvin Trillin, after all, and Trillin is funny, and so he was funny—even though he wasn’t. As we’ve heard all our lives, “His reputation preceded him.”
Everything has a reputation that precedes it. But Trillin’s experience suggests that reputations do more than set our expectations. Reputations change the entire experience. They perform like the reputation of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. As people around Jobs often say, his aura sets off a “massive reality-distortion field.”
We experience what we expect. If we see a van Gogh for the first time, we are stunned by the force of Starry Night—unless we are from a circle that regards van Gogh as a kook who chopped off his ear and painted works with a perspective that was warped, literally and figuratively.
We think heavily footnoted books by professors sound thoughtful, well-reasoned, and correct. We expect a movie with Will Ferrell or Matthew McConaughey to include a scene where the actor appears without a shirt. Years later, we recall that he appeared shirtless in that movie, even though he didn’t. We remember what we expected to happen, even if it didn’t.
Psychologists refer to this under the heading expectancy theory, which in turn relates to the better-known idea of placebo effects. Repeatedly, we taste what we expect, see what we expect, experience what we expect to experience.
But it gets even stranger than this. If we think something will do something, it often does. If we think it makes our hair grow or our teeth white, our hair sprouts and our teeth whiten. Many products and services have the effects they promise—perhaps even before we actually use them.
Dr. Ellen Langer has broken ground in the world of psychology, the first female tenured professor of psychology at Harvard. Her work has deeply influenced our understanding of how we make decisions, and among her many interesting discoveries was one she made in 2006.
Langer wanted to discover how much of the benefits of exercise might simply be in our heads. To accomplish that, she solicited the help of eighty-four Boston women between eighteen and fifty-five who worked as housekeepers in seven Boston hotels.
Langer told the workers at four of the hotels that their housekeeping work was good exercise and “met the guidelines for a healthy, active lifestyle.” She told the other housekeepers nothing.
Then she asked all eighty-four workers to record their daily activities, which later allowed Langer to see that the housekeepers’ work activities didn’t change during the four weeks she observed them. They cleaned fifteen rooms a day, up to thirty minutes for a single room.
So we had two identical groups but for one difference: One group was told that its work was good exercise and the other group wasn’t.
What happened? The housekeepers in the informed group reported their lives were healthier than those in the uninformed group. But it wasn’t just what they said; they were healthier.
The members of the informed group lost an average of two pounds and 0.5 percent of their body fat and saw their systolic blood pressure drop 10 percent. The other women showed no such changes.
Doesn’t this strongly suggest that if we think it is, it becomes? That if our minds decide our work will make us healthier, that thought alone makes us healthier?
Our expectations change us, inside out.
Late in the fall of 2008, some lovers of Italian food arrived at the Provence Restaurant on Bleecker Street in the West Village section of New York City. Surrounded by symbols of Tuscany (curious, considering that Provence is in France, almost 1,000 miles from Tuscany), the diners were treated to the chef’s latest creation, a pasta called Tuscani.
As foodies like Calvin Trillin know, better restaurants make their pastas from scratch, use only breast meat, and grate the Parmesan cheese at the diner’s table to ensure the freshest taste. Knowing this instinctively at least, the diners at Provence braced for a delicious dinner.
The Tuscani came and dazzled the diners. “Marvelous!” one proclaimed, and others joined in. They found that the ingredients and presentation were worthy of this fine Italian restaurant.
There was a problem, as some of you know. The Culinary Institute of America–trained chef at Provence had not prepared the pasta; the minimum-wage cooks at Pizza Hut had.
Pizza Hut’s chef popped out a Tuscani Pasta with Meaty Marinara Sauce (another mistake; by definition, marinara sauce has no meat). Its key ingredients were egg yolk powder, “cheese flavor,” xanthan gum, meat from chicken ribs, and preservatives. The reality—these ingredients—should have disturbed the diners, but we often cannot see, taste, feel, or hear reality.
The diners’ experience, captured on thirty hidden cameras and edited into a Pizza Hut commercial that began airing in March 2008, was—well, they tasted exactly what they expected to taste in this chic New York eatery.
Pizza Hut was recycling an old idea. Decades earlier, Folgers had tried to coax Americans into drinking its freeze-dried instant coffee with a similar ad, filmed in famous American restaurants, including the Blue Fox in San Francisco and New York’s Tavern on the Green. Just as the Tuscani Pasta samplers would decades later, the diners at these famous restaurants pronounced their test-tube coffee “marvelous.” It tasted as if the beans had just arrived from Colombia.
The two ads worked in one sense: They demonstrated that over the course of forty years, we have not changed. We experience what we expect to experience. We expect Calvin Trillin to sound witty and the Blue Fox’s coffee and Provence’s pasta to taste delicious. And they do—even when they don’t.
Our expectation, shaped by our entire view of a brand, doesn’t merely influence our experience. It is the experience.
Our expectations, many of them arising from the “brand” we have in our mind, alter our experiences. But just how much?
Incredibly. We can reach this conclusion by starting with another famous ad campaign: The Pepsi Challenge. These commercials were based on a sensible proposition. Whenever researchers at Pepsi conducted blind taste tests with unmarked cups of soda, almost two-thirds of the tasters preferred their cola to Coca-Cola’s. Voilà! A great idea for an advertising campaign!
Why not just film these taste tests so that people everywhere will see that Pepsi tastes better?
So they did. Millions saw the ads. And afterwards, those same millions kept right on drinking their beloved Coca-Cola.
Somewhat curiously, the Coca-Cola people in Atlanta knew that the Pepsi people in upstate New York were right. In Coke’s blind tests, people preferred Pepsi’s taste, too, but still chose Coke.
Voilà! Another great marketing idea!
What would happen, the Coke folks reasonably wondered, if we made Coca-Cola taste even better? What if we made it so that people in blind taste tests would like us even more than Pepsi? We will flatten Pepsi!
Thus was born the Seward’s Folly of modern marketing, the new Edsel: New Coke. Reconstituted, more delicious than old Coke, more delicious than old and new Pepsi, New Coke won blind taste test after blind taste test.
The people at Coca-Cola were merely repeating the mistake of the Pepsi folks, a mistake that rested on what now looks like a comically glaring error: In real life, there are no blind taste tests. We do not drink just any cola; we know what we are drinking.
There is even more to it than that, as a fellow from Dr Pepper country would soon demonstrate.
In Waco, Texas, Dr Pepper’s home, we find the Baylor College of Medicine and its Human Neuroimaging Lab. The lab’s director, Read Montague, had become intrigued with the phenomenon of the mind’s influence on the body. He started to ponder the Pepsi paradox: Why do people say they prefer Pepsi’s taste when they don’t know what they are drinking, yet still prefer Coca-Cola’s taste when they do? Does the mere knowledge in our brain—“This is Coca-Cola”—actually change how we experience it? Does the very idea of Coca-Cola affect our sense of taste?
Montague decided to find out. He performed a new Pepsi Challenge while he scanned the brain activity of the tasters. Once again, more tasters preferred the unmarked cup that held the Pepsi. One part of the tasters’ brains especially loved Pepsi: their ventral putamens, one of the brain’s reward centers. This part of the tasters’ brains fired five times stronger when they tasted the Pepsi but didn’t know it was Pepsi.
So The Pepsi Challenge was right. Our brains really do like Pepsi’s taste more—when it doesn’t know what we are drinking.
So Montague added another twist. Before each taster took a sip, Montague told him which brand he was tasting. Guess what happened? Now the tasters overwhelmingly preferred Coke.
We say, that’s no surprise; we love what we love. Tell us that something is our beloved Coke, and we will tell you we love Coke.
But there was more to it than that. It wasn’t just that the taste testers preferred their old favorite, Coke. Their brains acted differently, too. Their medial prefrontal cortices, the portion of the brain strongly involved with our sense of self, fired crazily. The word and idea of Coke apparently strongly links to our sense of ourselves. It appears that we like Coke because it makes us feel better about ourselves. It’s not just our taste buds that like Coke. Our brains like it, and our brains change what we taste, see, feel, and hear.
Montague’s discovery did not surprise people who had been involved in the testing of hair-restoration products. In controlled tests, 40 percent of Group A reported that Extra Strength Rogaine had produced for them “significant hair gain.” Group B had even better luck, with 60 percent reporting hair gain. There was a small problem, however.
Group A had not been given a hair-restoration product. They were a control group! They’d been handed a vial of oil and water. Yet they saw hair! The Rogaine brand name attached to their vial convinced them that it would grow hair, and so that “Rogaine” grew hair. The idea of Rogaine made them see hair.
And then there’s the oddest case of all: the case of the six-inch nail.
Just after New Year’s Day 2010, a twenty-nine-year-old British builder working at a building site west of London jumped from a landing and landed on a six-inch nail with such force that the nail penetrated his boot and nearly came out the top. Seeing his extreme pain, his coworkers called emergency services, and a car soon rushed the young man to an emergency room.
Because moving the nail even slightly caused the man enormous pain, the ER doctors quickly sedated him with midazolam, which is used before surgery to induce drowsiness or unconsciousness. It illustrates the severity of the young man’s pain that the doctors also administered fentanyl, a painkiller often prescribed for terminal cancer patients that is one hundred times more powerful than morphine. (Fentanyl had earned some notoriety just months earlier when investigators found bottles of it in Michael Jackson’s home after the singer’s death.)
With the patient sedated and his pain controlled, the doctors then proceeded to carefully remove his work boot. When they finally were able to remove it, they discovered something startling: The nail had passed cleanly between the builder’s toes. There was no injury at all.
What happened there? An example of the nocebo effect, one of the more bizarre examples of how our expectations change our perceptions and feelings. If we think we have a nail in our foot, it can hurt so much we need a near-lethal drug to reduce our agony.
Repeatedly we see it: What we expect changes what we feel. We taste a Provence pasta or a Coca-Cola, or sense a nail in our work boot, and we experience what we expect to. We experience not things but our ideas of those things. Our brains fool our bodies, just as our bodies often trick our brains.
So better or worst aren’t qualities that exist in the world; they are in our brains—our bewildering, erratic, more-complex-than-the-entire-universe brains.
This in turn dictates the first principle of marketing in the twenty-first century. Marketers cannot merely develop great products and services; they must develop, nurture, and manage great expectations.
There is mounting evidence that for all the expectations that they create, superior brands, far from delivering superior results, deliver only average results. The latest evidence comes from financial services, the beleaguered whipping boys and girls of the recession.
Assigned the task of taking public her new software company, Blue Mongoose, Emily Peters immediately makes a short list of three banks to help manage the IPO: JP Morgan, Citigroup, Wells Fargo. She lists these three banks because they are banks almost every CFO lists: They dominate American finance. If she chooses a less-reputed investment bank and her IPO fails to achieve its target price, Emily’s next act as Blue Mongoose’s CFO may be the swift updating of her résumé. Just as for years executives have learned the old business saw “No one ever gets fired for choosing IBM,” no one second-guesses a CFO who chooses one of these firms.
Emily assumes, as most readers do, that these companies represent the best and the brightest in banking. She assumes that each of these banks is most likely to get Blue Mongoose the best target price for the IPO, the ultimate measure of going-public success.
Does she assume right? The data suggests she doesn’t. As James Surowiecki pointed out in a recent Wall Street Journal article, the big banks have proven no more successful at managing IPOs than the comparatively tiny banks whom the Emilys of America overlook—indeed, whom the Emilys never call on. These big banks are the great brands of their industry, but in managing IPOs, their performance falls billions short of their reputations. Their brands act as false indicators.
Perhaps there is an explanation. Companies looking to go public are relatively small ones eager for the public offering that will generate the cash to turn them into large companies. Perhaps there is a mismatch here: the mammoth banks and the five-hundred-person Blue Mongoose almost hidden in an industrial park in Sunnyvale, California. Huge banks are better able to manage the financial needs of huge corporations like them, the Procter & Gambles, Microsofts, and Coca-Colas.
So let’s imagine a better match. If Coca-Cola wants to acquire Jamba Juice or Evian, should it choose one of these huge firms?
Again, the latest data says no. The four big banks do not perform demonstrably better at managing mergers and acquisitions. What they do well is convince us they should manage these transactions, because they are the biggest and best known, and presumably able to attract the best employees to manage both IPOs and M&As. The biggest banks are best at creating the expectation that they will be the best. And so we think they are.
Will examples like these cause Americans to reassess the meaning of brands? It’s unlikely. That’s because none of us has a reliable method for comparing banks—or running shoes, toothpastes, shampoos, conditioners, or hundreds of other products and services. We trust brands because we cannot devise a more reliable test.
As a test, go to a Target and find the cheapest-branded shampoo you can find: Pantene. Take it home, take it to your shower, and wash your hair. Does your hair feel 80 percent less clean, shiny, and manageable?
To the contrary, it probably feels better. There’s a compelling argument that Pantene causes fewer bad hair days than any shampoo you can find, including those costing eight times more. Ask the person who cuts and shampoos your hair some time; just preface it, “Please, tell me the truth. I won’t tell anyone.”
To each of us, reality rarely is what is, or what is really happening, at any given moment. It is what we think it is and often merely what we think it must be. The Wizard of Oz is all powerful not because he is—he’s a little old wild-haired man behind a curtain—but because Dorothy and her friends have heard that he is. Paris is magically romantic not because it is but because of all the stories we have heard for years that tell us, “Paris is magically romantic.” Southerners are friendly, Volvos are safe, Six Sigma is genius and virtually indispensable, Maytag washers are indestructible. Or are they?
With all that said—that most trends are not trends and that expectations continue their incredible influence over everything we experience—we turn to two events that deserve attention as we try to understand this new century.