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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 b
e 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.
Chapter 5
How Horses, Shirt Collars and Religious Belief Helped Recarbonate a Struggling Brazilian Beer
Once, while working for a local telecommunications company in Medellín, Colombia, I learned that one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, Comuna Trece, was home to the largest escalator in the world, one as tall as a twelve-story building. The escalator was opened to the public in 2011 as part of an initiative to connect neighborhoods on Medellín’s outskirts to the downtown. Despite the amount of traveling I do, I almost never have time to visit tourist attractions—I collect insights from people, not monuments—but the Medellín escalator sounded too good to pass up, and the telecommunications executive agreed to come with me.
Twenty minutes later, we were in the backseat of a cab, heading to Comuna Trece when, without warning, the driver pulled over. Afraid for his own safety—Comuna Trece had a reputation for petty crime and gang violence—he had changed his mind. The executive and I hailed another cab. This driver, too, had no interest in taking us to Comuna Trece. We must have gotten in and out of half-a-dozen taxis before we finally reached our destination.
Bisecting a sprawling shantytown, Medellín’s escalator was modern, stylish and immaculate, with a serpentine red roof covering its 357 stairs, stories and landings. A team of red-shirted neighborhood residents milled around the bottom, answering questions and making sure no one stole the “magical” stairs that seemed to vanish into the earth, as escalator stairs can appear to do. The executive and I were there for a half hour before catching a cab back to downtown Medellín. Later, she told me, that to her colleagues’ surprise, she was considering buying a home in the area.
People have asked me over the years if I ever feel unsafe visiting unfamiliar countries. My response is always the same: the day I let myself feel fear is the day I stop working. When you surrender to apprehension, or worry, or nerves, you effectively place a filter over your senses and are no longer able to see what’s right in front of you. Yet why wouldn’t I follow the lead of nearly half-a-dozen experienced taxi drivers who, it’s safe to assume, know their city neighborhoods better than I do? My response is that very often, a “fear halo” surrounds a city or country, the result of events that took place years earlier—in this case, the 1980s, when Medellín was synonymous with drug cartels and violence—and this fear halo affects residents, too. I had a very similar experience years earlier when I was preparing to visit Nigeria. People warned me about random terrorism threats, power outages, widespread corruption and more. I encountered none of these things, and, in fact, Nigeria is still one of my favorite places to visit.
Which isn’t to say that over the years I haven’t had one or two close calls. Once I was nearly kidnapped in Venezuela. I’d just finished giving a keynote address in Caracas, and my taxi had just pulled up in front of the airport when two men greeted me by name. They were there, one told me, to make sure I reached my gate in a timely manner. Not for a second did I believe them, and I also had a nagging feeling something wasn’t right. Thinking quickly, I told them that I had changed flights, and obviously no one had alerted them to the last-minute switch. Would they mind watching over my suitcase while I paid a quick visit to the bathroom?
Who leaves his bag behind with strangers if he doesn’t plan on coming back for it? Gripping my smaller computer bag—it had my toothbrush in it, I told the two men—I made my way toward the men’s bathroom and, once inside, looked behind me. The men looked fretful and anxious. By now convinced something was wrong, I left the bathroom a few seconds later via a back door. Having lost sight of me, the men were now craning their necks. They looked panicked. For the next fifteen minutes I did whatever I could to avoid being seen. I ducked through a series of waiting areas. I crouched down behind kiosks. At one point I caught a glimpse of a black car driving away. I never saw either of the men, or for that matter, my suitcase, ever again.
Fear often shadows tourists paying their first visit to Brazil. Most websites and guidebooks issue the same warnings: Don’t bring anything to the beach. Avoid wearing jewelry or expensive watches. Make sure you leave your cell phone and wallet in your hotel room, preferably in a locked safe. A friend told me that when he told friends he was planning his first trip to Brazil, two of them told him—jokingly, or maybe not—that Brazil is famous for its organ trafficking industry, and he could find countless stories online about tourists blacking out and awakening to find a kidney missing. Like many stories about Brazil, this one is an urban legend.
Still, I found that Brazil’s fear halo had affected some of my Brazilian colleagues. During a visit to Salvador, in northern Brazil, where I was doing interviews on behalf of Brasil Kirin, my host not only provided a translator but a local driver. And, in some areas of Salvador, even the driver was reluctant to go inside the favelas. Another day, when we pulled up in front of a crowded Brazilian elementary school during a soaking rain, I saw that my assistant was literally shaking. I suggested that the two of us take a short walk, and he could show me what “fear symbols” he was picking up on in the neighborhood. We did just that. No bars covered any of th
e windows; there were no padlocks on any of the doors. Residents sat outside, smiling and talking and fanning themselves. My assistant finally admitted he could find nothing obviously, overtly fear-inducing about the neighborhood, and from that point on he came with me everywhere.
Kirin is a Japanese-owned beverage conglomerate, known for its beers and soft drinks. Brasil Kirin, the national affiliate, has a wide portfolio of local brands, including Devassa, which means “libertine,” or “naughty,” a tropical lager founded by locals in 2001 in Leblon, the wealthiest, most cosmopolitan and desirable neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. Then and now, Devassa’s logo is a kneeling, scantily clad, alabaster-white female posed with both arms behind her neck.
The problem? Somewhere along the line, Devassa had lost its identity. At one time a premium ale, the beer was now just another supermarket brand, indistinguishable from the others. My mission: to restore Devassa to its upmarket status by creating an “aspirational” brand, meaning a higher-priced beer that consumers associate with a desirable, even elusive lifestyle. In a country like Brazil, with its rigid class divisions and strong commitment to façade, this was a complex problem that would require, in the end, a complex solution.
Of all the countries I’ve visited, Brazil is the one whose image and veneer are most radically at odds with its everyday life. Brazil, it is said, is home to the world’s most beautiful women, the best-looking men, the most seductive music, the most sinuous dancers and the most libidinous nightlife. But with the exception of parts of Rio de Janeiro, during the next two months in Brazil I found few glimpses of ease, or glamour. Brazil is a soulful, warmhearted, hospitable nation unlucky enough to be saddled with high levels of government corruption, an overburdened infrastructure, a poorly funded education system and stark discrepancies between rich and poor. At the same time, compared to the efficient, highly developed countries of northern Europe, Brazil is also raw, emotional and direct. A well-known musician who grew up in Rio before moving to Los Angeles summed up to me his experience living in both America and Brazil. “The US is a great place to live,” he said, “but I feel terrible whenever I’m there.” He paused. “Brazil is a terrible place to live, but I feel great whenever I’m there.”