The Catalyst

How to Change Anyone's Mind

Jonah Berger

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781982108656
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

" Jonah Berger is one of those rare thinkers who blends research-based insights with immensely practical guidance. I am grateful to be one of the many who have learned from this master teacher. " — Jim Collins, author Good to Great, coauthor Built to Last From the author of New York Times bestsellers Contagious and Invisible Influence comes a revolutionary approach to changing anyone's mind. Everyone has something they want to change. Marketers want to change their customers' minds and leaders want to change organizations. Start-ups want to change industries and nonprofits want to change the world. But change is hard. Often, we persuade and pressure and push, but nothing moves. Could there be a better way?This book takes a different approach. Successful change agents know it's not about pushing harder, or providing more information, it's about being a catalyst. Catalysts remove roadblocks and reduce the barriers to change. Instead of asking, "How could I change someone's mind?" they ask a different question: "Why haven't they changed already? What's stopping them?" The Catalyst identifies the key barriers to change and how to mitigate them. You'll learn how catalysts change minds in the toughest of situations: how hostage negotiators get people to come out with their hands up and how marketers get new products to catch on, how leaders transform organizational culture and how activists ignite social movements, how substance abuse counselors get addicts to realize they have a problem, and how political canvassers change deeply rooted political beliefs.This book is designed for anyone who wants to catalyze change. It provides a powerful way of thinking and a range of techniques that can lead to extraordinary results. Whether you're trying to change one person, transform an organization, or shift the way an entire industry does business, this book will teach you how to become a catalyst.

1. Reactance

Chuck Wolfe was facing an impossible task. Florida’s governor had asked him to head up a new program. This itself was nothing new. Chuck had served the governor for almost a decade in a variety of different roles: operations manager, director of external affairs, and executive director of financial oversight. He had developed and implemented programs that aided relief efforts after Hurricane Andrew and helped the city of Miami dig itself out of its financial crisis.

But this time the challenge was much larger. Chuck’s job was to build a team to fight an industry that sold more than a trillion products to more than a billion consumers worldwide. An industry that spent almost $10 billion a year marketing its products and in which leading companies individually had profits larger than Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and McDonald’s.

Combined.

Chuck’s goal? To do something dozens of organizations had failed at for decades: to get teens to stop smoking.

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In the late 1990s, smoking was the biggest public health crisis facing the nation. Cigarettes were the largest cause of preventable deaths and disease, killing tens of millions of people worldwide. In the United States alone, smoking was responsible for one in five deaths and had an economic cost of almost $150 billion a year.¹

The problem was particularly acute among teens. Tobacco companies knew the youth market was vital to their success. While outwardly they claimed to avoid teens and children, internally they knew that wasn’t an option. “Today’s teenager is tomorrow’s potential regular customer, and the overwhelming majority of smokers first begin to smoke while still in their teens,” a Philip Morris memo noted. Not selling to children meant going out of business.

So companies used all manner of devices to appeal to the younger demographic. When the Flintstones cartoon debuted in 1960, Winston cigarettes was the sponsor, and commercials showed Fred and Barney Rubble taking cigarette breaks. When advertising on television and radio was banned in the early 1970s, cigarette companies invented friendly cartoon characters like Joe Camel to make cigarettes seem fun. And when regular cigarettes didn’t seem attractive enough for younger palates, they introduced flavored tobacco in colorful candy wrappers to make the product more appealing.

It worked.

Teen smoking rates should be low. Federal law requires that people be at least eighteen to purchase cigarettes in the United States, and most students don’t reach that age until midway through their last year of high school. Some cities have raised the age even higher.

But by the late 1990s, things looked ominous. Almost three-quarters of high school students had smoked.² One in four seniors reported smoking daily. Teen smoking was at a nineteen-year high. And the numbers were increasing.

Someone needed to shut teen smoking down. And fast.

But stopping teens smoking was no easy task. Organizations had tried—and failed—for decades. Countries banned cigarette advertising. They added health warnings to tobacco packaging. And they spent billions of dollars trying to persuade young people to quit.

But despite all these efforts, smoking rates actually increased.³

How could Chuck Wolfe succeed when everything else had failed?

When Warnings Become Recommendations

To answer that question, it helps to understand why prior warnings fell short. And what better way to do that than examine a warning that shouldn’t have even been necessary in the first place?

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In early 2018, Procter & Gamble had a small PR problem.

Fifty years earlier they had launched Salvo, a granular laundry detergent compacted into tablet form. The tablets weren’t that successful, but after decades of work, Procter & Gamble had a new formulation that they thought would be more effective. Rather than having to measure out exactly how much detergent to use, or risk getting a sticky mess on their clothes, consumers could just pull one of these small self-encased bubbles from a box and toss it into the washing machine. The plastic would dissolve in the water, releasing the detergent only when needed. No muss, no fuss.

Procter & Gamble introduced the product under the Tide brand, called them Tide Pods, and launched them with the promise of making laundry easier. The company invested more than $150 million in marketing, believing that the pods could ultimately capture 30 percent of the $6.5 billion U.S. laundry detergent market.

There was only one problem: people were eating them.

The Tide Pod Challenge, as it was called, started as a joke. Someone remarked that the bright orange and blue swirls looked good enough to eat, and after an Onion article (“So Help Me God, I’m Going to Eat One of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods”), a CollegeHumor video, and various social media posts, a buzz started.

Now people were challenging others to eat detergent. Teens would shoot videos of themselves chewing or gagging on the pods and post them on YouTube, daring others to do the same. In feats of culinary inspiration, some were even cooking the pods before ingesting them.⁴

Soon everyone from Fox News to the Washington Post was covering the craze. Doctors were brought in to comment, parents wrung their hands, and everyone puzzled over the odd trend that was picking up steam.

So Procter & Gamble did what many companies would do in this situation. They told people not to do it.

On January 12, 2018, Tide tweeted “What should Tide PODs be used for? DOING LAUNDRY. Nothing else.

Eating a Tide POD is a BAD IDEA…”

To make things even clearer, Tide enlisted celebrity football player Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski to help. In a short video, Tide asks Gronk whether eating Tide Pods is ever a good idea. His answer is simple. “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,” Gronk says as he shakes his finger at the camera and the screen fills with “NOs.” “Not even as a joke?” they ask. “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,” Gronk replies. “Should you use Tide Pods for anything but cleaning clothes?” they say. “NO,” says Gronk.

The video closes with a warning: “Laundry packs are highly concentrated detergent meant only to clean clothes.” And as if that weren’t unambiguous enough, they add a quote from Gronk: “Do not eat.”

For good measure, a couple hours later Gronk himself followed up on social media. “I’ve partnered with @Tide to make sure you know, Tide PODs are for doing laundry,” he tweeted. “Nothing else!”

And that’s when all hell broke loose.

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Warning people about health risks has been a standard approach for decades. Eat less fat. Don’t drink and drive. Wear your seat belt. Pick any health concern, add an admonishment to do it (if it’s good) or not do it (if it’s bad), and you’ve basically captured the essence of public health messaging for the last fifty years.

So it’s no surprise that Procter & Gamble thought this is what they should do. The Tide execs probably thought it was ridiculous that they had to say anything in the first place. Who would think that eating something filled with alcohol ethoxy sulfate and propylene glycol would be a good idea? After all, the website already had a helpful note saying, “Keep out of reach of children.” Enlisting Gronk to tell people not to eat the pods should help spread the word and stem any doubt.

But that’s not what happened.

Right after Gronk and Tide warned people not to eat them, Google searches for Tide Pods spiked to their highest level ever. Four days later they had more than doubled. Within a week they were up almost 700 percent.

Unfortunately, the traffic wasn’t from concerned parents trying to figure out why Tide had taken to Twitter to remind people of the obvious. Visits to poison control centers shot up as well.

In all of 2016, there had been only thirty-nine cases of teens ingesting, inhaling, or absorbing laundry packets. In a dozen days following the Tide announcement, there were twice that many. Within a few months the number had more than doubled that of the prior two years combined.

Tide’s efforts had backfired.

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The Tide Pod Challenge might seem unusual, but it’s actually an example of a much broader phenomenon.⁵ Instructing jurors to disregard inadmissible testimony can encourage them to weigh it more heavily. Alcohol prevention messages can lead college students to drink more. And trying to persuade people that smoking is bad for their health can actually make them more interested in smoking in the future.

In these and similar examples, warnings became recommendations. Just as telling a teenager not to date someone somehow makes that person more alluring, telling people not to do something has the opposite effect: it makes them more likely to do it.

The Need for Freedom and Autonomy

In the late 1970s, researchers from Harvard and Yale published a study that helps explain why warnings backfire.

Working with a local nursing home called the Arden House, they conducted a simple experiment.⁶ On one floor, residents were reminded of how much freedom and control they had over their lives. They could choose how they wanted their rooms to be arranged and whether they wanted the staff to help them rearrange the furniture. They could decide how they wanted to spend their time and whether they wanted to visit other residents or do something else. And they were reminded that if they had any complaints, they could provide feedback so that things would change.

To underscore their autonomy, these residents were given some additional choices. A box of houseplants was passed around, and residents were asked whether they wanted a plant to take care of, and, if so, which one. A movie was being shown two nights the following week, and residents were asked which night they wanted to go, if they wanted to go at all.

On another floor, residents received a similar speech but without the inclusion of freedom and control. They were reminded that the staff had set up their rooms to try to make them as happy as possible. They were handed houseplants and told the nurses would take care of them on their behalf. And they were reminded there was a movie the following week and told they would be assigned to watch it one day or the other.

After some time passed, researchers followed up to see how residents were doing and whether the reminders had any effect.

The results were striking. Residents who had been given more control were more cheerful, active, and alert.

But even more astonishing were the longer-term effects. Eighteen months later the researchers examined mortality rates across the two groups. On the floor that had been given more freedom and control, less than half as many residents had died. Feeling that they had more autonomy seemed to make people live longer.

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People have a need for freedom and autonomy. To feel that their lives and actions are within their personal control. That, rather than driven by randomness, or subject to the whims of others, they get to choose.

Consequently, people are loath to give up agency. In fact, choice is so important that people prefer it even when it makes them worse off. Even when having choice makes them less happy.

In one study,⁷ researchers asked people to imagine being the parents of Julie, a premature baby admitted to a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit with a brain hemorrhage. Julie’s life was being sustained by a ventilator, but unfortunately, after three weeks of treatment, her health had not improved. Consequently, the doctors summoned Julie’s parents to explain the situation.

There were two options: stop the treatment, which meant Julie would die, or continue the treatment, although Julie might die anyway. Even if she survived, she would suffer crippling neurological impairment. Both options were far from ideal.

Participants were divided into two groups. One group was asked to make the choice themselves. Whether to stop treatment or continue it.

The other group was told that the doctors made the decision for them. They were told that the doctors had decided it was in Julie’s best interest to stop the treatment.

This is clearly a terrible situation to be in. Whether people made the choice themselves or the doctors made it for them, all participants felt nervous, upset, distressed—and guilty.

But researchers found that the choosers felt worse. Having to personally choose whether to pull the plug made the situation feel all the more awful.

That said, choosers still didn’t want to give up control. When asked, they said they preferred making the decision themselves rather than letting the doctor decide. Even though it made them feel worse, they still wanted to have control.

Reactance and the Anti-Persuasion Radar

The choice study and the nursing home study help explain what happened with Procter & Gamble and the Tide Pods. People like to feel they have control over their choices and actions. That they have the freedom to drive their own behavior.

When others threaten or restrict that freedom, people get upset. When told they can’t or shouldn’t do something, it interferes with their autonomy. Their ability to see their actions as driven b...