The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (33 page)

In the early 1940s, the U.S. government began shipping much of the nation’s domestic meat supply to Europe and the Pacific theater to support troops fighting in World War II. Back home, the availability of steaks and pork chops began to dwindle. By the time the United States entered the war in late 1941, New York restaurants were using horse meat for hamburgers and
a black market for poultry had emerged.
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Federal officials became worried that a lengthy war effort would leave the nation starved of protein. This “problem will loom larger and larger in the United States as the war goes on,” former president Herbert Hoover wrote to Americans in a government pamphlet in 1943. “Our farms are short of labor to care for livestock; and on top of it all we must furnish supplies to the British and Russians. Meats and fats are just as much munitions in this war as are tanks and aeroplanes.”

Concerned, the Department of Defense approached dozens of the nation’s leading sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists—including Margaret Mead and Kurt Lewin, who would go on to become celebrity academics—and gave them an assignment: Figure out how to convince Americans to eat organ meats. Get housewives to serve their husbands and children the protein-rich livers, hearts, kidneys, brains, stomachs, and intestines that were left behind after the rib eyes and roast beef went overseas.

At the time, organ meat wasn’t popular in America. A middle-class woman in 1940 would sooner starve than despoil her table with tongue or tripe. So when the scientists recruited into the Committee on Food Habits met for the first time in 1941, they set themselves a goal of systematically identifying the cultural barriers that discouraged Americans from eating organ meat. In all, more than two hundred studies were eventually published, and at their core, they all contained a similar finding: To change people’s diets, the exotic must be made familiar. And to do that, you must
camouflage it in everyday garb.
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To convince Americans to eat livers and kidneys, housewives had to know how to make the foods look, taste, and smell as similar as possible to what their families
expected
to see on the dinner table, the scientists concluded. For instance, when the Subsistence Division of the Quartermaster Corps—the people in charge of feeding soldiers—started serving fresh cabbage to troops in 1943, it was rejected. So mess halls chopped and boiled the cabbage until it looked like every other vegetable on a soldier’s tray—and the troops ate it without complaint. “Soldiers were more likely to eat food, whether familiar or unfamiliar, when it was prepared similar to their prior experiences and served in a familiar fashion,” a
present-day researcher evaluating those studies wrote.
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The secret to changing the American diet, the Committee on Food Habits concluded, was familiarity. Soon, housewives were receiving mailers from the government telling them “every husband
will
cheer for steak and kidney pie.”
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Butchers started handing out recipes that explained how to slip liver into meatloaf.

A few years after World War II ended, the Committee on Food Habits was dissolved. By then, however, organ meats had been fully integrated into the American diet. One study indicated that offal consumption rose by 33 percent during the war. By 1955,
it was up 50 percent.
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Kidney had become a staple at dinner. Liver was for special occasions. America’s dining patterns had shifted to such a degree that organ meats had become emblems of comfort.

Since then, the U.S. government has launched dozens of other efforts to improve our diets. For example, there was the “Five a Day” campaign, intended to encourage people to eat five fruits or vegetables, the USDA’s food pyramid, and a push for low-fat cheeses and milks. None of them adhered to the committee’s findings. None tried to camouflage their recommendations in existing habits, and as a result, all of the campaigns failed. To date, the only government program ever to cause a lasting change in the American diet was the organ meat push of the 1940s.

However, radio stations and massive companies—including Target—are a bit savvier.

To make “Hey Ya!” a hit, DJs soon realized, they needed to make the song feel familiar. And to do that, something special was required.

The problem was that computer programs such as Hit Song Science were pretty good at predicting people’s habits. But sometimes, those algorithms found habits that hadn’t actually emerged yet, and when companies market to habits we haven’t adopted or, even worse, are unwilling to admit to ourselves—like our secret affection for sappy ballads—firms risk going out of business. If a grocery store boasts “We have a huge selection of sugary cereals and ice cream!”
shoppers stay away. If a butcher says “Here’s a piece of intestine for your dinner table,” a 1940s housewife serves tuna casserole instead. When a radio station boasts “Celine Dion every half hour!” no one tunes in. So instead, supermarket owners tout their apples and tomatoes (while making sure you pass the M&M’s and Häagen-Dazs on the way to the register), butchers in the 1940s call liver “the new steak,” and DJs quietly slip in the theme song from
Titanic
.

“Hey Ya!” needed to become part of an established listening habit to become a hit. And to become part of a habit, it had to be slightly camouflaged at first, the same way housewives camouflaged kidney by slipping it into meatloaf. So at WIOQ in Philadelphia—as well as at other stations around the nation—DJs started making sure that whenever “Hey Ya!” was played, it was sandwiched between songs that were already popular. “It’s textbook playlist theory now,” said Tom Webster, a radio consultant. “Play a new song between two consensus popular hits.”

DJs, however, didn’t air “Hey Ya!” alongside just any kind of hit. They sandwiched it between the types of songs that Rich Meyer had discovered were uniquely sticky, from artists like Blu Cantrell, 3 Doors Down, Maroon 5, and Christina Aguilera. (Some stations, in fact, were so eager they used the same song twice.)

Consider, for instance, the WIOQ playlist for September 19, 2003:

“Managing a playlist is all about risk mitigation,” said Webster. “Stations have to take risks on new songs, otherwise people stop listening. But what listeners really want are songs they already like. So you have to make new songs seem familiar as fast as possible.”

When WIOQ first started playing “Hey Ya!” in early September—before the sandwiching started—26.6 percent of listeners changed the station whenever it came on. By October, after playing it alongside sticky hits, that “tune-out factor” dropped to 13.7 percent. By December, it was 5.7 percent. Other major radio stations around the nation used the same sandwiching technique, and the tune-out rate followed the same pattern.

And as listeners heard “Hey Ya!” again and again, it became familiar. Once the song had become popular, WIOQ was playing “Hey Ya!” as many as fifteen times a day. People’s listening habits had shifted to expect—crave, even—“Hey Ya!” A “Hey Ya!” habit emerged. The song went on to win a Grammy, sell more than 5.5
million albums, and earn radio stations millions of dollars. “This album cemented OutKast in the pantheon of superstars,” Bartels, the promotion executive, told me. “This is what introduced them to audiences outside of hip-hop. It’s so fulfilling now when a new artist plays me their single and says,
This is going to be the next ‘Hey Ya!’
”

After Andrew Pole built his pregnancy-prediction machine, after he identified hundreds of thousands of female shoppers who were probably pregnant, after someone pointed out that some—in fact, most—of those women might be a little upset if they received an advertisement making it obvious Target knew their reproductive status, everyone decided to take a step back and consider their options.

The marketing department thought it might be wise to conduct a few small experiments before rolling out a national campaign. They had the ability to send specially designed mailers to small groups of customers, so they randomly chose women from Pole’s pregnancy list and started testing combinations of advertisements to see how shoppers reacted.

“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week, and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive with firsthand knowledge of Pole’s pregnancy predictor told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly. Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawnmower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she
hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

The answer to Target and Pole’s question—how do you advertise to a pregnant woman without revealing that you know she’s pregnant?—was essentially the same one that DJs used to hook listeners on “Hey Ya!” Target started sandwiching the diaper coupons between nonpregnancy products that made the advertisements seem anonymous, familiar, comfortable. They camouflaged what they knew.

Soon, Target’s “Mom and Baby” sales exploded. The company doesn’t break out sales figures for specific divisions, but between 2002—when Pole was hired—and 2009, Target’s revenues grew from $44 billion to $65 billion. In 2005, the company’s president, Gregg Steinhafel, boasted to a room full of investors about the company’s “heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby.

“As our database tools grow increasingly sophisticated, Target Mail has come into its own as a useful tool for promoting value and convenience to specific guest segments such as new moms or teens,” he said. “For example, Target Baby is able to track life stages from prenatal care to car seats and strollers. In 2004, the Target Baby Direct Mail Program drove
sizable increases in trips and sales.”
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