Made to Stick (10 page)

You can imagine the surprise, if not shock, that these stories provoke in new Nordstrom employees. “Wrap a gift from Macy’s! I don’t get it. What’s in it for us?” These stories attack the unspoken assumptions of customer service, such as: Service stops at the door of the store. Don’t waste your time on someone who’s not buying. Once you close a sale, move on to the next prospect.

To new employees, the idea of wrapping a gift bought at a competitor’s store is so absurd, so far outside the bounds of their existing notion of “service,” that the story stops them in their tracks. Their guessing machines have been broken. Their old “good service” guessing machine would never have produced the idea of altruistic gift-wrapping. The stories provide the first step toward replacing a new employee’s schema of “good service” with the Nordstrom service schema.

In this way, Nordstrom breaks through the complacency of common sense. Instead of spreading stories about “Nordies,” Nordstrom could simply tell its employees that its mission is to provide “the best customer service in the industry.” This statement may be true, but, unfortunately, it sounds like something that JCPenney or Sears might also tell its employees. To make a message stick, you’ve got to push it beyond common sense to uncommon sense. “Great customer service” is common sense. Warming customers’ cars in the winter is uncommon sense.

Note that these stories would be even more unexpected—and even less commonsensical—if they were told about a 7-Eleven employee. “Yeah, I went in to get a pack of smokes and the counter clerk
ironed my shirt!”
The value of the stories does not come from unexpectedness in and of itself. The value comes from the perfect alignment between Nordstrom’s goals and the content of the stories. These stories could just as easily be destructive in another context. The 7-Eleven management does not want to face an epidemic of gift-wrapping clerks.

Nordstrom’s stories are a classic example of the power of unexpectedness.
There’s no danger that the stories will feel gimmicky, because the surprise is followed by insight—the stories tell us what it means to be a good Nordstrom employee. It’s uncommon sense in the service of a core message.

Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for
Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally
, and
Sleepless in Seattle
have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the
New York Post
and
Esquire
. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher.

Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalists gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why.

As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.”

The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento … blah, blah, blah.”

The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment.

Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is
‘There will be no school next Thursday.’”

“It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls. “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.” For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret—a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.

T
his idea should be in the Sticky Hall of Fame. This teacher had a huge impact not because he was a dynamic speaker or a caring mentor—though he may have been both—but because he crafted a brilliant idea. It was an idea that, in a matter of seconds, rewrote the schema of journalism in the minds of his students. An idea that changed a student’s career plans and stuck with her thirty years later.

What made this idea work? First, the teacher knew that the students had a defective schema of journalism, and he knew
how
it was defective. Second, he made them publicly commit to their defective models with the “write the lead” assignment. Then he pulled the rug out from under them with a well-structured surprise. By revealing the right lead—“There will be no school next Thursday”—he took their mental models, gave them a swift kick, and made them work better.

CLINIC

Does America Spend Too Much
on Foreign Aid?

THE SITUATION:
Over the years, polls have shown that the majority of Americans think the federal government spends too much on foreign aid. The ratio has dropped toward fifty/fifty since 9/11, but half of Americans still think we overspend. Let’s look at two arguments that try to persuade people that we spend too little, not too much
.

• • •

MESSAGE 1:
Here is a message from the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center, a Catholic advocacy group:

Americans persist in thinking we spend too much on foreign aid despite honest efforts to inform the public by the State Department and other government agencies. Even President Bush’s proposed increases, though welcome, will not make the United States generous in its foreign assistance. In fiscal year 2003, the Bush administration will spend about $15-billion in foreign aid, but over $7-billion of this amount—almost half—will be military, not economic assistance. The $8-billion in foreign economic assistance is, according to a recent estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, less than the cost of one month of war with Iraq. Of all the industrialized nations, the U.S. spends proportionally the least amount on foreign aid, and has for many years. All of sub-Saharan Africa receives just over $1-billion of economic assistance, about the cost of a B-2 bomber. Our foreign aid programs do not support our belief that we are a nation known for its good works around the world.

COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1:
First, notice that the lead has been buried. The last sentence is the most effective argument. Americans’ schema
of the United States is that it is a generous, caring country—“known for its good works around the world.” The way to break that schema is to lay out the blunt fact that the United States “spends proportionally the least amount on foreign aid, and has for many years.”

The numbers in billions are unlikely to stick—huge numbers are difficult to grasp and hard to remember. One effective part of the message, in combating this “big-number problem,” is the analogy comparing our sub-Saharan Africa aid to the cost of a single B-2 bomber. We really like this comparison, because it puts the reader in a decision-making mode: “Would I trade one B-2 bomber for the chance to
double
aid to sub-Saharan Africa?”

To make this message stickier, let’s try two things. First, let’s just reshuffle the great raw materials that are already there while downplaying the numbers in the billions. Second, let’s choose a concrete comparison that has a better emotional resonance. Some people might think B-2 bombers are a reasonable expense. Let’s try to create a comparison that would be more unexpected because it’s clearly frivolous.

• • •

MESSAGE 2:
Our foreign-aid programs do not support our belief that we are a nation known for its good works around the world. The public believes we spend a great deal more money helping other countries than we actually do. Polls suggest that most Americans think the federal government spends about 10 to 15 percent of its budget on foreign aid. The truth is that we spend less than 1 percent, the lowest of any industrialized nation.

All of sub-Saharan Africa receives just over $1 billion in economic aid. If everyone in the United States gave up one soft drink a month, we could double our current aid to Africa. If everyone gave up one movie a year, we could double our current aid to Africa
and
Asia.

COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2:
Here’s what we tried to do to make this message stickier: First, we built interest by quickly and directly breaking our schema of a “generous America.” We also shifted the conversation to percentages, which are easier to understand than billions. Second, we tried to make the B-2 analogy more concrete by replacing it with soft drinks and movies. Soft drinks and movies are more tangible—does anyone really have a “gut feel” for what a B-2 bomber costs, or what it’s worth? Soft drinks and movies, because they are frivolous expenses, also provide an emotional contrast to the critical human needs present in Africa.

SCORECARD
Checklist	Message 1	Message 2
Simple	-
Unexpected	(B-2 comparison)	(intro & comparison)
Concrete
Credible
Emotional	-
Story	-	-

PUNCH LINE:
The best way to get people’s attention is to break their existing schemas directly.