(with Help from Fast Food, a Middle Eastern Movie Theater and a Hotel Lap Pool)
At our core, we’re all members of a tribe, or a series of tribes, starting with our nationalities and families, and extending to the towns or cities where we live. Our tribal membership and loyalties include where we went to school; the clubs, if any, of which we’re members; our neighborhoods; and the region of a country we call home. Gender is tribal. Profession is tribal. Political affiliation is tribal. Religious belief is tribal. Our friend groups are tribal, as is our age and even our appearance.
Friendship may be tribal, but it works the other way around, too. The bodies of our friends can affect our own physical appearance. A nearly ten-year-old study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that “obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus . . . When one person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight too.”1 Explains Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis, a principal investigator in the new study, “One explanation is that friends affect each others’ perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.” In short, the New York Times article on the study concludes that we alter our concept of what an acceptable body type is on the basis of the people surrounding us.2
As everybody knows, the obesity epidemic is increasing worldwide. A decade ago, according to statistics published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average American woman weighed 166.2 pounds, which is only slightly less than the average American man weighed in the 1960s. During this same period from 1960 to 2002, the average American male put on 30 pounds on his own.3 Popular reasons include that Americans are exercising less, and also consuming more cheap, higher-calorie foods; often a single meal contains as many calories as most of us need in a day. Still, in spite of widespread media attention around childhood obesity, a recent New York Times article about overweight children noted that, in the United States at least, “Parents increasingly seem to be turning a blind eye as their children put on pounds,” adding that around 70 percent of parents of obese daughters “described their children as ‘about the right weight,’” a phenomenon that Dr. David Katz, the director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, dubbed “oblivobesity.”4
Americans spend more than $100 billion annually on fast food, and fast-food chains have become a big part of everyday life in Europe and the Far East. On my frequent visits to Japan, I’ve begun seeing a striking number of overweight children, which would have been unheard of 20 years ago. The popularity of McDonald’s in Japan, where it has over 3,000 franchises, is likely its affordable “100-yen menu”—US$0.81 at current exchange rates. Such an irresistible bargain has even chipped away at the nation’s historic predilection for seafood over meat.
That said, probably the two most overweight regions of the world are Saudi Arabia and Mexico. The tacit cultural connection between a baby’s weight and his or her health and happiness is one reason why obesity levels are as high as they are across Mexico and, for that matter, across all of Latin America. In 2013, Mexico overtook the United States as the “most obese country” in the world, with approximately 70 percent of the Mexican adult population considered overweight, including 30 percent of all schoolchildren, and one-sixth of the adult population, or around 10 million people, diagnosed with diabetes. These figures proved to be so alarming that Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto introduced a nationwide soda tax in 2013 to discourage consumers from bingeing on empty calories.5
In Saudi Arabia, no such measures exist. Earlier, I mentioned that the Mutaween, or religious police, enforce the country’s nationwide dress code. In public, Saudi women are required to wear an abaya that covers everything but their face and their hands, and a niqab, or face veil. Saudi males of all ages wear a white thobe, and often a cloak, as well as a headdress. These not only satisfy the standards of the Mutaween, but also serve a secondary effect of camouflaging people’s shapes, which, in turn, detach them not just from their own bodies but from the everyday judgment of others. In cultures that require people to live their lives costumed in loose-fitting clothing, there is little social pressure to keep healthy or fit.
Along with Mexico, the Middle East has one of the globe’s highest rates of adult-onset diabetes, with nearly half the overall population expected to be diagnosed before 2030. Middle Eastern culture is sedentary, and the local diet is mostly sugar-based, made up of blended sweet foods, minced meats, breads and hummus. Restricted by the year-round hot climate, which discourages exercise or most outdoor activities—the heat is so relentless I typically pack two pairs of shoes in my suitcase, knowing that at some point the soles of one pair will melt—the Middle East also claims the world’s highest consumption of computer and screen-based games. Moreover, Saudi women have been traditionally dissuaded from exercising, in contrast to Saudi men, who are “allowed” to appear in public and even jog. In 2015, Saudi women and girls were granted their own exercise and sports programs at school, but not without controversy. According to National Public Radio, some religious conservatives believed that exercising for girls “is a Westernizing influence . . . that could lead to adultery and prostitution.”6
The weight problem has trickled down to the younger generation. According to The Wall Street Journal, an estimated 9.3 percent of school-age Saudi Arabian children meet the World Health Organization’s body-mass-index criteria for obesity.”7 Most Saudi schools lack physical fitness programs for children, leaving kids with nothing else to do but sit at home or in the backseat of cars or play at their computer consoles.
America and Europe, on the other hand, have a notoriously fraught relationship with weight. The Western diet book industry is huge and, along with the beauty industry, is predicated on a recurring cycle of hope and discouragement. Westerners will attempt a new dietary regime—or facial moisturizer, or lipstick—for, on average, three weeks to a month. When it doesn’t “work”—i.e., deliver instant results, or even transform identity—they move along briskly to the next diet, or brand. The South Beach Diet, the Paleo Diet, the Atkins Diet, the Hormone Reset Diet, the Belly Burn Plan, the Gluten-Free Diet, the No More Excuses Diet—how different are these from applying a Clarins facial moisturizer, followed by creams made by Shiseido, Clinique, La Mer, Jurlique and La Prairie? Another issue, across America at least, is that overweight people often eat sparingly in public, but at home, feeling hungry and deprived, they’ll reward themselves with a second calorie-laden meal.
Whenever I visit consumers’ homes, I always make it a point to scope out the insides of refrigerators, knowing the owners have prepared for my arrival and that I’m in the presence of a choreographed scene. The interiors of most consumer fridges—including my own—are beautifully and carefully arranged. Objects sparkle and sweat. There are bowls of celery, carrots, radishes or cherry tomatoes. But by their very nature, shame and secrecy are private, a perspective that becomes clear when I get down on my knees in a consumer’s kitchen and look at what sits on a refrigerator’s bottom shelves.
The lower shelves are where the “bad stuff” resides—the cheese, the cold cuts, the breads, the alcohol, the chocolate bars. By keeping unhealthy food out of sight, consumers can convince themselves they eat more healthily than they actually do. Over the years, I’ve found six-packs of soda buried among shoes, potato chips concealed in storage rooms and, in one case, a huge stock of chocolate and Gummi Bears hidden underneath someone’s bedroom floorboards. Consumers often justify the presence of a case of Pepsi or a dozen bags of corn chips by reminding me that it is more cost-effective to buy in bulk, which is true. At the same time, studies show that the more soda and snacks we buy, the more likely we are to consume them.
Along with studying the insides of refrigerators and the food caches hidden in cabinets, sometimes I’ll go so far as to ask whether I can go through someone’s garbage. One aspect of my job that I especially enjoy is talking with local garbage collectors. No matter where they live in the world, they get to see, and smell, privileged information. When most of us toss something in the garbage and tie it up, we seldom think about it again. The evidence of our recent history, and our habits, good or bad, is rendered neutral and harmless once we toss it away, or at least this is what we want to believe. One garbage collector in Sweden told me he could tell a lot about people from the way they sealed their garbage bags. His more self-confident customers never placed separate plastic ties around their bags; they simply maneuvered the plastic into a knot. The more insecure the person, he said, the more knots or ties there tended to be.
What’s inside garbage cans—“the blend,” as another garbage collector I interviewed called it—can also communicate a lot about their owners. If someone crushes a tube of toothpaste and tosses it away capless, experience tells me they are prudent about saving money, though at the end of the day they will spend money on themselves, as if to compensate for their earlier inattention. Consumers who discard a toothpaste tube with its cap screwed down tightly seldom allow themselves to relax, and are reluctant to expose who they really are, or to indulge themselves with a luxury. Consumers who throw away a half-full toothpaste tube are, in general, less secure than people who wait until the tube is depleted. All this and more . . . from a simple garbage bin.
A few years ago, I got a close-up perspective on obesity and fast food when McDonald’s Europe asked me to help them create a new, healthier Happy Meal. The job began in France, spread across the European Union and migrated to the United States—where, I might add, the concept I came up with was roundly rejected. The idea later bounced back to Europe, where Germany and a handful of other countries eventually implemented it.
First, some context. As the world’s largest food chain, McDonald’s has 35,000 franchises in 118 countries and territories, and serves 68 million customers every day. But a decade or so ago, McDonald’s was facing a public relations firestorm. In 2001, journalist Eric Schlosser published Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, a best-selling expose of the fast-food industry, which revealed many unsavory details its main players would have liked to keep undercover. Three years later, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock released the documentary Super Size Me, chronicling his decision to consume only McDonald’s food three times a day for an entire month, and the consequences of a fast-food diet on both his physical and psychological well-being. By the end of his experiment, Spurlock had gained 25 pounds and was depressed and lethargic. His cholesterol had skyrocketed, and he had heart palpitations. When studies were published around that same time showing that obesity levels across Europe had more than doubled over the past two decades, McDonald’s found itself on the defensive about the ways in which its menu contributed to the epidemic, and poor eating habits overall. It was at this perilous moment that the chief marketing officer of McDonald’s Europe asked whether I might be able to come up with some ideas to reinvent the concept of the Happy Meal.
McDonald’s biggest markets in Europe are Germany, England and France—and it was there I launched my Subtext Research. In France, McDonald’s bears little resemblance to its American counterpart. French McDonald’s are more elegant, the chairs more comfortable, the tables less flimsy, the décor more subtly upscale, with the brash yellows and reds Americans are accustomed to exchanged for darker, muted forest-greens. The French are renowned for loving “McDo,” and with its 1,200 French locations, France is McDonald’s most profitable country outside the United States. Of course, in a nation with high taxes, inflation and unemployment, and an expensive capital city, Paris, whose outskirts are home to some of the poorest people in the world, McDonald’s is also a comparative bargain.
Some observers attribute McDonald’s success in France to its embrace of French eating habits and locally sourced ingredients, including cheese, potatoes and grass-fed beef, a product line augmented by baguettes, pastries and macaroons, and even a separate Halal menu for the country’s large Islamic population. I agree, but also believe that the chain’s success in France is in part a rebellion against the national tradition of multihour, multicourse meals, with no one permitted to leave the table until everyone else is done eating. A similar rebellion can be seen in the phenomenal success of Picard, France’s frozen-food chain and the largest chain of its kind in the world. Every one of Picard’s 500 boutique-like stores is noticeably sterile, almost hospital-like, in appearance, with Picard’s private-label meat, shellfish, potatoes, vegetables and desserts for sale stacked in waist-high freezers. With a majority of French women working outside the home, frozen food in France has been such a popular trend that even some Michelin-starred restaurants have taken to using frozen ingredients.
McDo’s may differ aesthetically from McDonald’s in the United States, but both markets adhere to the company’s core principles, foremost among which is that McDonald’s isn’t a place for children, or adolescents, to just hang out, but for families to visit together. And across France, families were flocking to McDonald’s. After traveling around the country paying visits to franchises in small towns and cities, I found myself facing a uniquely French imbalance. The presence of French families in its restaurants may have been good news for McDonald’s bottom line, but it also suggested that the opportunities for French parents to connect with their children were diminishing. When I began interviewing French parents, two things stood out: both parents worked outside the home, and neither believed they were spending enough time with their kids.
Across the world, the Happy Meal, which was launched in the late 1970s, appears under different aliases, from Joyeux Festin in Canada to Cajita Feliz, or “Happy Little Meal in a Box,” in Latin America. Then, as now, a Happy Meal consists of the choice of a hamburger, cheeseburger or Chicken McNuggets; a small order of French fries; and a soda. As everyone knows, the Happy Meal also includes a toy that connects to a popular family-oriented television show, movie or preexisting toy line.
My position was that McDonald’s needed to show the world it could achieve anything—and that included proving that healthy food could be “fun,” a feat, I might add, that no company had ever accomplished. I went to work—or, more precisely, I went for a swim in a public Olympic-sized swimming pool in a waterfront suburb of Sydney, Australia, known as Milson’s Point.
The reason I prefer to stay in hotels equipped with swimming pools is that pools are where good ideas come to me. I’m not alone. Lots of people are inspired by the presence of water, whether they’re strolling along a beach, taking a shower or even listening to water running or to a soundtrack of waves hitting the shore. The Greek mathematician, physicist and engineer Archimedes was said to have discovered the principles around density and buoyancy as he drew a bath, and songwriter Pharrell Williams begins each morning the same way: “I shower, and that’s where a lot of my concepts come from,” Pharrell told Fast Company. He even composes songs under a nozzle. “If you don’t interrupt (your subconscious) with the ego, or are like, No it’s gotta be like this, then a lot of ideas will come. Once you start judging it and editing it, then you’re no longer tapped in . . . so I spend a lot of that time just standing there in the water with a blank stare.”8
Why good ideas tend to materialize in pools, lakes, ponds, oceans, showers and tubs is harder to figure out. A popular explanation is that, while we may not realize it, most of us are rarely inside the present moment. We spend a disproportionate amount of time plotting the future or revisiting past events. But when we swim, or shower, or take a bath, we have little choice but to position ourselves in the present, giving our thoughts room to float and wander (though more and more young people tell me they take their phones into the shower with them and, keeping them at arms’ distance, send and answer texts). When we actively pursue answers or solutions to a problem, they almost never materialize, but when we engage in routine, relaxing activities that require little active thought, they do. Shelley H. Carson, a Harvard University researcher and psychologist, said once that if we’re troubled by a problem, any interruption in focus provides “an incubation period . . . In other words, a distraction may provide the break you need to disengage from a fixation on the ineffective solution.”9
At the same time, a certain kind of activity is better than others at encouraging new or good ideas. Ideally, that activity is both routinized and inventive, like running, bicycling or gardening. All three involve implicit, automatic motions that are also improvisational, allowing disparate ideas to come together. Over the course of my own career, I’ve taken to calling these revelations “Water Moments,” and the one I had about McDonald’s Happy Meal clicked for me that day at Milson’s Point.
It was late afternoon, and I was doing laps, swimming alone in the center lane. At one point I became aware of a nearby café selling the usual summertime stuff—hot dogs, hamburgers, French fries and onion rings. Children were playing around the shallow end of the pool, and one, I saw, was munching on a carrot stick. Probably some Australian quirk, I remember thinking, and then I noticed the children were speaking in German. Halfway through my hour-long swim, a few things had become clearer.
The biggest problem with the Happy Meal, as I saw it, was how prosaic it was. It was exactly as advertised, and not much more than that. It didn’t inspire imaginative play, nor was there much fantasy or magic connected to it. As soon as they opened their Happy Meals, children grabbed the enclosed toy, ate their meal, and that was that. There was no story line, no space for them to imagine, or dream.
The new Happy Meal—Happy Meal 2.0, as it eventually came to be called—was inspired by the pool’s three swimming lanes. Each lane, I thought, could reflect an ingredient of McDonald’s new children’s meal. One lane represented tomatoes; another carrots; a third broccoli. The only question was finding a concept, and a story line, that combined all three vegetables.
With the help of a creative team in Denmark, the idea quickly evolved from there. By themselves, vegetables—a bowl of peas, a side of broccoli—aren’t all that compelling. But string them onto a necklace, or emboss a carrot in the form of a monster and suddenly vegetables become fun. Over the next few weeks, the team and I came up with a short list of concepts, including a prototype for a new, environmentally friendlier Happy Meal 2.0 container. We realized as well that if the goal was to convince children to eat cucumbers, or tomatoes, or broccoli, McDonald’s had to continue its longtime relationship with toys linked to companies like Disney, DreamWorks and Pixar.
We began with the idea that children would find it more interesting to assemble their own hamburgers. Our first Happy Meal 2.0 concept featured a small dragon holding a hamburger bun, with a bare hamburger patty resting nearby. Navigating past a tomato slice, and over “stairs” made out of cucumber strips and carrot bars, children could then uncover a miniature Shrek or Princess Fiona. Our second prototype, “Space,” was based on the Space Shuttle. A tomato rested in the cockpit, while carrot sticks manned the back doors, alongside a small bag of melon balls, which children could spear with a small plastic wand. Once kids had managed to find three special numbers hidden on the cockpit floor, they could crack the Space Shuttle’s “code” to uncover their hamburgers or chicken nuggets. Happy Meal 2.0 had several others advantages, too. Parents could observe the unfamiliar phenomenon of their children actually enjoying vegetables, mothers could take comfort in the fact they weren’t feeding their kids junk and fathers could take their children to McDonald’s without risking criticism from their wives.
When I presented my ideas to the senior management of McDonald’s Europe, they were enthusiastic. So why, you might be wondering, isn’t the veggie-based Happy Meal 2.0 a staple of McDonald’s fast-food restaurants across the globe? Unfortunately, the concept fell victim to operational obstacles and went nowhere. When a company as large and complex as McDonald’s has been manufacturing Happy Meals for 30 years, and operating multiple factories that focus exclusively on food container and toy manufacturing—McDonald’s is the largest distributor of toys in the world—it is just too difficult, and too expensive, to change course. What’s more, the company schedules new additions to their menu up to 18 months before they come to market. There were other obstacles, too, including the need to invest in new machinery, find new licensees and educate and retrain thousands of McDonald’s employees, and the shelf life of vegetables themselves. Carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes can’t be frozen without turning soggy, or losing their taste or shape. In hindsight, Project Happy Meal 2.0 is an initiative I believe I could carry off today with my greater experience with people and politics, but a decade ago it was just too daunting.
Cut to a few years ago when Jenny Craig, the weight loss and nutrition company, contacted me, hoping I could come up with a new marketing innovation to ensure consumer loyalty and make the Jenny Craig brand more “sticky” among dieters.
Founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1983 by two American expatriates, Jenny and Sidney Craig, Jenny Craig’s philosophy is that losing weight is as simple as reducing calories, portion size and fat content. When dieters walk into one of Jenny Craig’s weight-loss centers—there are 450 across the United States—they pay an enrollment fee, sign up for weekly one-on-one sessions with a Jenny Craig counselor, many of whom are former Jenny Craig members themselves, and choose from one of several set menus of Jenny Craig frozen foods. The diet ranges from 1,200 to 2,300 calories daily, with the average Jenny Craig client spending around $100 a week on breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, and remaining on the program for around 12 weeks. By contrast, Jenny Craig’s chief rival, Weight Watchers, allocates points to thousands of foods and drinks, which members are told not to exceed. Weight Watchers dieters attend weekly meetings, and can also access advice and support from online forums. In short, if the mission of Weight Watchers is to equip dieters with awareness about what they’re eating, Jenny Craig, with its frozen-food lines, does a lot of the work for them.
When Jenny Craig hired me, the company was a colossus, a corporate machine with approximately 700 diet centers in Canada, the United States, France, Puerto Rico, Australia and New Zealand. Since 2002, it had survived the usual corporate turmoil that takes place once a founder leaves a company, and it was on its third owner. Jenny Craig had both the advantages and disadvantages of a global business that could almost run itself. It was an organized machine, but it had lost some of the personality and intimacy that had led to its success. It also wasn’t cheap, and the dropout rates were higher than they should have been. Could I come up with a new initiative to increase the odds that new dieters would stick with Jenny Craig, recommend it to their friends and, ideally, serve as brand ambassadors?
After nearly two months of conducting Subtext Research across Southern California and elsewhere, I’d developed a profile of the average Jenny Craig dieter. Let’s call her Caroline. (Jenny Craig offers a customized program for men, as well as teens, diabetics and elderly people, but the majority of Jenny Craig clients are female.) Caroline was a woman anywhere between the age of 30 and 45, married, with children. She enjoyed watching television game shows, and kept the television on in the background as she carried out her chores and family responsibilities. She was also noticeably superstitious. She didn’t let a day go by without glancing at her horoscope in the newspaper. She also visited eBay more often than the average woman, and bought more lottery and scratch tickets than most.
What explained Caroline’s ritualized—and to me, unusually superstitious—behavior? In principle, the answer was simple. When we gamble, our brains release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that floods our senses whenever we anticipate anything rewarding, from food to alcohol to sex. Reading a horoscope, it seemed to me, was largely about the attempt to control a world that seemed chaotic, and superstitious behavior links back to control itself, an issue in the lives of many dieters. But what reward might a Jenny Craig dieter be anticipating? There really wasn’t one. Both Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers promise clients that if they stay on the program, they’ll lose one or two pounds a week, but in this case, losing a pound didn’t seem to be enough.
The question was: What was Caroline, and each Jenny Craig dieter I interviewed, compensating for? When they checked their daily horoscope, or bought lottery tickets, or bid on clothing and appliances on eBay, what were they getting or, rather, what were they not getting?
My concept of a new way to approach this question took place during an interview with a 52-year-old housewife and mother in her carpeted, suburban home in Carlsbad, California. Her name was Jan. Her 26-year-old daughter lived in a nearby suburb, but when I asked about the young man I kept seeing in photos wearing a military uniform, Jan told me her son had died in battle overseas. As her eyes filled with tears, her fingers grasped the charm bracelet she was wearing around her wrist. Gently, I asked her if there was any connection between the loss of her son and the bracelet around her wrist. There was. The airplane charm on her bracelet couldn’t help but remind her of her son, an Air Force pilot in love with planes and flying ever since he was a boy. When I asked what would happen if she ever lost the bracelet, Jan shook her head. She didn’t want to think about it.
Why do women—and men for that matter—wear jewelry in the first place? A few years before I began working for Jenny Craig, it was a question I asked consumers around the world on behalf of a Danish jewelry brand known as Trollbeads. Among the responses I got were as follows: “Jewelry enhances the way I look—and it makes me look pretty.” “People notice you, and you want to feel noticed, especially when you become a mother.” “It’s a very important fashion accessory. When I put on a necklace, or wear a certain bracelet, it changes my whole outfit and my whole attitude, too.” “Jewelry is timeless—it never goes out of style.” “Jewelry is just something other people are drawn to automatically.” Above all else, it seemed, jewelry was an essential talking point when two women were trying to establish an emotional connection.
Despite its un-euphonious name, Trollbeads is an extremely successful jewelry company with a presence in 35 countries, including Holland, Italy, Switzerland and China. Trollbeads’ handmade bracelets, rings and necklaces vary in size and are made from Murano glass, freshwater pearls, gemstones, leather, glass and Swarovski crystal. Still, when I began consulting for the company, I wasn’t quite prepared for the fanaticism of Trollbeads’ core customers. Most were middle-aged, with a competent, slightly tough manner about them. None, overall, were especially trusting, and a few expressed unease about having an interviewer come into their house and ask them questions. Many told me they’d felt excluded as children, or as high school or college students. On the surface, they may have been hardworking and accomplished, but inside they were superstitious, compulsive, vulnerable and adept at hiding high levels of stress. Trollbeads, it seemed, gave many of them the chance to reveal a creative, interesting, highly visual person they’d never been able to express comfortably in other social situations, and also helped them forge a powerful sense of belonging with other Trollbeads fans across the world.
Trollbeads, I realized, were far more than random pieces of silver, gold or glass. Trollbeads were fun. Trollbeads were personal. Trollbeads were whimsical. Trollbeads were almost human. One Dutch Trollbeads fan told me she devoted anywhere from eight to ten hours a week to international conference calls with other Trollbeads fans as far away as South Africa and Asia. Another woman likened Trollbeads’ passionate following to her own family growing up. “From the time I was young, my family and I all had a secret language—eye movements, hand gestures, facial expressions,” she said. “I have that today with my own children and my husband, and I have it with other Trollbeads fans.” What’s more, each colored bead that Trollbeads put out signified something that “only I, and the other person, know about.” The biggest revelation: each and every Trollbead women collected served as a badge of honor, or a memento, that signified a cherished time or event in their lives.
The question remained: What was behind this particular obsession? How did it begin, and why? Most of the women I spoke to were mothers, and I soon realized that their obsession with Trollbeads began when their teenage children began closing the doors to their bedrooms, thereby shutting their mothers out of their lives. Most of the women I spoke to described this moment as shattering, akin almost to a death. After all, they’d spent the past decade and a half attending to their children’s needs and desires. They were cooks, chauffeurs and confidantes. In many cases, becoming a mother had given many of them visibility, influence and power for the first time in their lives. Now, without warning, psychologically at least, they’d been, temporarily, closed out of their children’s lives.
The vacuum, or imbalance, that I kept seeing? Many of these women no longer had someone who relied on them, or sought them out. They’d become invisible, and for women who admitted feeling left out or socially excluded during their lives, this was especially difficult.
In the marketing world, an “entry point” refers to those times in our lives—among them marriage, pregnancy, first parenthood, buying a home, the empty nest—when identity is either challenged or transformed. During these periods, consumers are especially vulnerable to new perspectives, as well as new brands; for Trollbeads users, the entry point appeared when their adolescent children closed their bedroom doors.
I couldn’t help but think of my experience with Trollbeads fans when Jan, the Jenny Craig dieter in Carlsbad, California, touched the airplane charm on her bracelet when discussing her late son. Like Jenny Craig dieters, Trollbeads fans were also dependent on their daily horoscopes, and many also knocked on wood for good luck. Every time a Trollbeads customer bought a new bead, it took on an emotional meaning and weight. One woman, for example, showed me a Trollbead she said was a gift from her late grandmother. Another woman displayed a Murano glass bead she’d bought to commemorate her daughter’s middle-school graduation.
Trollbeads, then, symbolized many things. Via Trollbeads, women could tell the world that despite their age or appearance, they were still interesting and creative. Wearing a Trollbeads necklace was also a socially acceptable way to showcase in public a private obsession. Nothing illustrated this better than a German woman who, during our interview, held up what she called her “Ocean Bead.” A lifetime fan of water and the seaside, she told me a story about a trip to the beach she’d taken years earlier with her father, her husband and her children. “It was the best beach day I have ever had in my life. I can still see my dad holding my kids’ hands as they picked up seashells and sea glass.” She passed me her Trollbeads bracelet. “Every single color of that day—all the ocean colors of green and blue—is in that bead.”
In short, like many leading brands, Trollbeads functioned on both a rational and a highly emotional level. Intriguingly, this was a duality that also interested the British film director Alfred Hitchcock, of all people. Most remember Hitchcock as a skilled storyteller, but what few know is that the director shot his movies using two separate scripts. The first, known as “the Blue Script,” was entirely functional. In it were all the tangible onscreen components, including dialogue, props, camera angles and set descriptions. The second script, which Hitchcock referred to as “the Green Script,” chronicled in fine detail the emotional arc, or “beats,” of the film he was shooting. Hitchcock relied on both scripts, but the Green Script reminded him how he wanted moviegoers to feel, and at what point, as they watched Suspicion, or Shadow of a Doubt, or North By Northwest.
Some of the most powerful brands in the world make unconscious use of a Blue Script and Green Script. Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger and Apple CEO Steve Jobs once had a conversation about retail, during which Jobs told Iger that retailers should always ask themselves one question: If a store could talk, what would it say to the people entering it? Disney Stores may have a functional layout, but from an emotional perspective, Disney’s Green Script intent is to create the 30 happiest minutes in a child’s life. Enter an Apple Store and its architecture, simple wood and sparse, jewel-like product selection intentionally evoke the layout of a contemporary art museum. What does Whole Foods “say” to customers? Whether it’s the fresh flowers on display as you enter the store, or the products on shaved ice (most of which have no need for refrigeration), or the hand-scrawled signs describing a product’s provenance, Whole Foods conveys freshness, purity and localness, while tacitly congratulating its customers for their discernment and even education level. It helped inspire a strategy I’d used at Lowes, too, creating an emotion-based story line by inviting in local farmers to discuss their fresh produce and chefs to provide customers with the latest recipes.
My work with Trollbeads gave me a part of a solution that might strengthen brand loyalty among Jenny Craig dieters. Another missing piece came from work I’d done in Dubai, Oman, Beirut and Bahrain that confirmed my observations about the importance of beads, or “palpables,” as they’re referred to in the industry. My employer was VOX, one of the Middle East’s largest theater chains, and I’d been asked to help redesign their movie theaters.
Middle Easterners go to the movies as regularly as Indians do, which is to say up to three or four times a week. Typically, the entire family goes as a unit and orders large amounts of junk food—at theaters worldwide, you will find the exact same snacks, including hot dogs, hamburgers, French fries and, in the Middle East, five different flavors of popcorn—before commandeering half a dozen or more seats. (Filmgoers are offered three different tiers of seat, at escalating costs.) Middle Eastern theaters, in fact, closely resemble airplanes, which reminded me that native moviegoers go to the movies not just to watch a new film, but to escape their real lives and identities for a while. Nor can the climate be underestimated. Along with shopping malls, the movies provide one of the few means of relief from the daily 100-degree-plus temperatures.
Westerners who’ve never traveled abroad don’t realize the extent to which American movies and actors, and Hollywood imagery, dominate overseas cinemas and markets. In an attempt to instill an elegant, glamorous feeling in the theater decor, and to escort moviegoers on a “dream” journey, I impressed on management the necessity for heavy velvet ropes and heavy crimson curtains. From my Subtexting, I knew that Middle Eastern moviegoers wanted to feel special, as most inhabit oil-rich countries where they are constantly faced with flamboyant emblems of wealth. Many regular cinema-goers are Indians, Pakistanis and Filipinos, who compose the region’s emigrant workforce and whose long working days couldn’t be further removed from such opulence.
I was so preoccupied with the design of the theaters—How thick should the velvet ropes be? Should they be plum or crimson? Should a silhouette cutout of Sean Connery or Cary Grant or Bette Davis be situated here or there?—that it took me awhile to notice that seven out of ten moviegoers were holding a clasp of beads. The clasps held anywhere from 10 to 15 beads on them, and as families trooped in and out of the cinemas, both the men and the women used their fingers to rub and flick them. The fiddling was constant, but it accelerated when moviegoers came into the theater lobby to buy food or drinks.
What did the beads mean? Were they symbolic of the region’s aggregate nervous system, a regional anxiety expressed via their palpables, or did they mean something else? For the next two weeks, I studied what happened when filmgoers across the Middle East bought sodas, snacks and other unhealthy concessions. There seemed to be an almost direct correlation between bead-flicking and the consumption of popcorn, hot dogs, hamburgers and candy. The worse the food was nutritionally, or calorically, the more rubbing and flicking there was. When moviegoers ordered or ate or drank healthier things, like water, or fruit, the flicking didn’t stop, but it slowed down. Beads, at least across the Middle East, seemed to be a repository for self-censure, a symbol not of memory, as was the case with Trollbeads, but of gentle reprimand.
What if you could bring together these two ideas as one, on behalf of Jenny Craig?
Over my years as a branding guy, I’ve come to realize that both men and women have two ages: a chronological age, and an emotional age they feel inside. (I’ll explore this subject in more detail in a later chapter.) Men typically conceal evidence of their younger selves in drawers, or buried inside online folders, whereas women are less embarrassed about publicly showcasing their younger selves, and express it openly through jewelry, stuffed animals and collections. The female body has more visible real estate, and more opportunities, and permission, for display than the male body does. The last few square inches of unused real estate of a woman reside in the underside of her footwear, which is one reason I’ve long been intrigued by Christian Louboutin shoes, with their signature patch of red between the sole and the heel. Louboutin heels are not only a display of sexiness, sauciness, rebellion and economic status (or all of the above), they also serve as a kiss and a wink to other Louboutin tribe members.
If my mission was to retain Jenny Craig dieters, and enlist them to serve as unofficial brand dignitaries, then it wasn’t enough to coin a new slogan, or hand out free fitness trackers. Americans, I’d learned, walked less than any other industrialized nation on earth, with the average US native taking 5,117 steps daily compared to 9,695 in Australia, 7,168 in Japan and 9,650 in Switzerland.10 In a car-dependent culture, encouraging walking wasn’t enough. I needed to come up with something visible and tactile, and the solution I came up with was a Jenny Craig bead.
The global community of Trollbeads fans taught me something important: beads gave many women an identity they had recently lost, and also served to prove membership in a tribe or community. As a company, Jenny Craig had become so large and cumbrous it risked losing its sense of community and belonging—that is to say, its Green Script.
The concept was this: What if Jenny Craig’s trained counselors gave dieters their own free charm bracelet? The bracelet wouldn’t be expensive, but nor should it be cheap or flimsy. Each bead on our new Jenny Craig charm bracelet would serve as a symbol of experience, success, hope and, in some cases, setbacks. From Small Mining, I knew that many Jenny Craig dieters who had gained a pound or two were reluctant to call the company’s consultants, and knowing this I invented what I called a “Get-Out-of-Jail” bead. If a Jenny Craig dieter gained weight, her counselor was now instructed to give her a Get-Out-of-Jail bead, as if to say No harm done, slipups happen. The bead was a badge, a promise and a commitment to stay on the program. What’s more, it had the potential to make dieters cry.
A weight-loss specialist working at Yale told me once one of her goals was to make people burst into tears. This is not an altogether bad thing. When people cry, it creates a “bookmark” in their brains—it is a moment, or experience, they are unlikely to forget. She pointed out that tears also precede the process of transformation. With our phones and laptops eternally on, the concept of transformation—of finding ourselves in an emotional state distinct from our everyday emotional lives—is vanishing. Transformation is critical when men and women conceive of losing weight, which is why when the specialist makes her clients cry, they are more likely to complete their dietary programs. It can happen as a result of dieters’ frustrations around losing weight, or during a “seat belt” moment. (Many prospective dieters sign up for a weight-loss program on the day they experience the negative somatic marker of being unable to secure their car seat belts.)
Earlier, I wrote that while I consulted with Lowes, I imported the Asian custom of handing over an item of worth to customers. With Jenny Craig, I recycled this technique once again. When a consultant handed out a charm bracelet to a dieter, the new company-wide rule was that they would hand it over using two hands. Again, the idea behind handing someone something with two hands conveys the feeling that the gift comes from a person’s heart and soul, that it represents a pact, or exchange, between two people. My intent was to create the strongest possible psychological and emotional connection with Jenny Craig, with each bead reflecting not just losses and gains, setbacks and successes, but memories as well.
Over the next few months, pilot tests—as well as smaller, subsequent rollouts across the United States—showed a dramatic increase in customer retention at Jenny Craig. The charm bracelet concept literally halved Jenny Craig’s attrition rate, or as one American executive told me, “It was almost like doubling the number of customers signing up for the program in the first place.” Trailing Weight Watchers in market share,11 and competing with upstarts like Nutrisystem and the Zone, only three years after Jenny Craig rolled out its new bead program, an independent group of doctors and government officials voted Jenny Craig America’s number one diet program. If nothing else, it was a jewel in the company’s crown—or maybe I should I say wrist.