Small Data Page 9
Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis has always intrigued me in the process of brand building, considering that our brains typically “flag” the intersection of two dissonant images. Out of the thousands of hours of television commercials we are exposed to every year, why do we recall at most only two or three? Why, for example, do we remember the Geico lizard? The answer? Because a lizard and life insurance have nothing in common. The same is true for a cymbal-playing bunny and an Energizer battery. If someone brings up The Godfather, what is your first association? Most people will say “horse’s head,” in reference to a scene in the book and the movie where a Hollywood film producer who has angered the mob boss, Don Corleone, awakens to a blood-soaked bed and the head of his favorite stallion under his sheets.
To that end, and as a response to the absence of conflict in American life, I created my first somatic marker: I insisted that rectangles, not circles, dominate the new Lowes. Squares, after all, are edgy and, to Americans, unfamiliar. From now on, I told management, Lowes supermarkets would sell only square cakes inside square containers. My goal wasn’t just to overturn the tacit national predilection for circularity; it was to wake shoppers up by forcing them to operate by someone else’s rules. To accompany the square cake concept, we hired a singer to sing a song whose melody was deliberately wavy and circular. A square cake. A circular song. A somatic marker. Another reason why I introduced the square cake concept was because it subverts the rules—with rare exceptions, cakes are supposed to be round—thereby giving shoppers “permission” to break the rules (of their diet). Even though they are made of mostly natural ingredients, and with real butter and whipped cream in the frosting, I needed Lowes cakes to make a dramatic statement in order to stand out from all the other “chemical” cakes typically on display.
Manufacturing square cakes was only the first step. The second was to create a sense of storewide community. Based on my experience that people come together in the presence of disagreement, I set myself the task of igniting in-store conflict. As I wrote earlier, based on my Subtext Research, there was a consensus that the best thing at Lowes was its rotisserie chicken. Even rival supermarket executives had nice things to say about Lowes’ chickens. The problem was, at first I had nothing to build on but the promise, the anticipation and the taste of the chicken. Not least, in a digital era where the concept of anticipation is disappearing, I wanted to reintroduce the concept of craving, as studies show that the more anticipation a brand, or an event, can create, the more people enjoy it when it finally shows up.
Most Americans who came of age in the 1970s remember the Back to the Future film franchise. Michael J. Fox played an adolescent boy who, with the help of a mad scientist, is transported back in time, where he has to play matchmaker for the high-school couple who will eventually marry and become his parents, thereby assuring his own existence. Back to the Future inspired my next idea. Why that film, and not another? I chose a movie it was safe to assume most adults had seen in their own teens or early twenties. Three decades later, I wanted to give them permission to feel like a child again, this time inside a Lowes supermarket.
A few months later, Lowes Chicken Kitchen was up and running. Imagine a stand-alone counter selling chickens and only chickens, manned by an employee wearing a specially tailored Chicken Hat. He’s engaged in perpetual disagreement with his rival, who stands behind a second kiosk, the SausageWorks, and is dressed as Back to the Future’s Doc Brown. With the help of Lowes management, I created scripts for both characters, and asked them to remain in character and spend all day bickering and hollering at each other.
Again, when people witness disagreement—in this case, orchestrated, cartoonish conflict—they not only feel more alive, but the “community” feeling that conflict generates ripples through every department and aisle of the store. In no time at all, huge crowds had formed around the Chicken Kitchen and the SausageWorks. At first, shoppers looked concerned. Then, when they realized it was a game, they came together as a single tribe. Today, as a result of the Mad Professor at the sausage counter “fighting” with the proprietor of the Chicken Kitchen, Lowes not only sells more chickens and sausages, it sells more of everything.
What’s more, every time a chicken comes out of the oven, Lowes’ proprietary “Chicken Dance” song plays over the store’s loudspeakers. Overseen by a stage manager, every member of Lowes staff participates in the dance and the song, creating exactly what the local community craved: a sense of belonging. No matter where they were in the store, customers stopped what they were doing and began dancing. It sounds ridiculous, and it was, but it was ridiculous in an un-self-conscious, liberating way. For a few minutes, shoppers felt free to behave like children again. Today, Lowes follows an internal rule: everyone from senior management to hourly wage employees should be prepared to participate in the Chicken Dance. If they don’t feel like it, well, they simply do not fit into the organization.
It’s worth taking a short detour to say a few words about the visual representation of animals across the world. In 2014, the Copenhagen Zoo sparked international outrage by euthanizing a healthy, year-and-a-half-old giraffe, which was then dismembered before an audience and fed to the zoo’s lions and tigers. European zoos have a narrow gene pool, and zoo administrators, defending their decision, told reporters they were concerned about the risk of inbreeding. “The emotional debate over animal euthanasia also reflects a cultural divide between the United States and Europe, which is relatively more open to euthanizing animals in the name of conservation and ensuring genetic diversity,” the New York Times noted. Which is another way of saying that across Europe, a certain hardheaded common sense trumps sentimentality.
The smiling chicken logo atop the Lowes Chicken Kitchen was, of course, a deliberate attempt to de-couple the animals themselves from the products on sale. This is a rule of thumb in the United States, but nothing you would ever see in Europe. Europeans have known extensive food shortages, and rationing, and Americans, fortunately, never have. When US tourists visit a marche or charcuterie in France, many are startled and even repulsed by the displays of meat and fowl and fish. A dead rabbit unmistakably resembles a dead rabbit; a turkey still wears its comb and claws. Contrast this presentation to the meat and chicken for sale in the United States, which arrives precut in a white or black Styrofoam container, as severed from the actual animal and the way it met its death as possible.
My belief? The American perspective on animals, and the death of animals, can be traced back to the books and films they read and watched as children, whether it was Bambi, Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp or E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. Snow White and Cinderella, after all, are surrounded by talking birds and animals, and the idea of animals as protective, and near-human, stretches as far back as the popular mythology of cows and donkeys guarding Jesus in his manger.
It was one thing to create a sense of theater and community inside Lowes, but I was convinced that two additional techniques would ensure that Lowes customers remained loyal to the supermarket. The first requires some context. In most parts of the world, at least in the West, men and women exchange business cards reflexively and thoughtlessly. The gesture is automatic, and even indifferent. Businesspeople will tell you that almost all of the business cards they receive end up in a stack of other look-alike cards, or placed inside a Rolodex, never to be looked at again.
But in Japan, the exchange of business cards is formal and ceremonial. A Japanese businessman hands you his business card using two hands, and at chest level, as if communicating he is giving you his card from his heart. In stores throughout China and Japan, employees also take enormous pains wrapping and boxing objects. In some Tokyo stores, clerks spend up to 45 minutes carefully packaging a customer’s purchase. When a Japanese butcher hands a customer a steak, he doesn’t merely slap it on the counter. He intricately folds the butcher paper around the beef. Next, he comes out from behind the cou
nter, and places the folded beef in the consumer’s hands. The effect is twofold. First, shoppers leave the store feeling that the employees who work there care about them as individuals. Second, by using both hands to place the package in the customer’s hands, an employee is indirectly “holding” a stranger’s hands, drawing him or her into a kind of intimacy, which as humans we can’t help but reciprocate.
Not only that, but when we use both hands to give something to someone else, they automatically receive it with two hands. I instructed the hosts of both the Chicken Kitchen and the Sausage Works to wrap and present their wares to shoppers using just this method. By doing so, both convey to consumers that what they have just received is special, and even exceptional, and that the person giving it and the person receiving it are just as exceptional. As I wrote earlier, one of the measures of a country’s happiness is its natives’ capacity to physically touch one another, and in some small way, I wanted to restore an aspect of tactility that most Americans didn’t know was missing.
This new “rule,” I hoped, might even create a sense of employee pride. Lowes employed approximately 100 employees per store. Most showed up for work in the early morning or midafternoon, changed into their tan caps and black aprons, worked six- or eight-hour shifts, changed back into their clothes and went home, only to return the next day. Most were understandably unskilled college students, or high-school kids looking to make extra money. Still, I couldn’t help but think back on the days where cities and small towns had butchers or fishmongers proud of both their profession and expertise. Today, with butchers and seafood shops a vanishing species, the pride that came along with that identity has also disappeared.
Within the French and Italian hospitality industries, food service employees take pleasure in being the best at what they do. They may be the finest oyster shucker, the most knowledgeable vintner, an expert cheese purveyor. Toiling in an American supermarket is widely presumed to be a stopgap job, seldom a vocation. My hope was that by retraining Lowes employees and teaching them a new way to interact with customers, and wrap and hand over their cuts of meat with care, some employees would begin to feel, for the first time in some cases, proud of what they did.
There was one more section of the store to tackle, and that was the produce section. In response to consumers letting me know they would be more likely to buy local produce grown by area farmers, Lowes rolled out a new initiative to ensure that its fruits and vegetables were as fresh as possible, and also locally sourced. Along the way I helped management redesign the store’s fruit and produce section by using a wide variety of symbols intended to make shoppers feel “close to the earth,” including wicker handle baskets and chalkboards on which the current market prices were scrawled in chalk. We renamed this new section “Pick and Prep.”
By evoking farms and fresh produce, this new Pick and Prep section subconsciously evokes the ideas “Made in the U.S.A.” and “Healthy” and “Community” and “Mom” and “Table” and “Kitchen.” Lowes teamed up with farmers to create a “community table,” helping shoppers connect with the local farming community. Lowes Pick and Prep staffers also took special courses where they not only learned how to cut fruit efficiently, but also how to create fruit sculptures, which attracted the attention of children. (If fruit is “fun,” children will eat it.)
By positioning Pick and Prep in a part of the store geographically detached from the rest of the aisles, Lowes communicates to shoppers that fruits and vegetables are essential to a healthy life, and shouldn’t have to share physical space with mass-produced, chemical-laden factory foods. In turn, if fruits and vegetables are kept separate, most consumers will pay a premium price for them.
What I tried to do at Lowes is, in fact, just the beginning of what bricks-and-mortar stores can do to wage battle against larger Internet retailers. Why not revolutionize what the inside of a supermarket looks like? What if a supermarket could create fresh yogurt on the spot, or even fresh baby food? In my work across the globe, any number of mothers have told me that their babies dislike the taste of homemade food. New mothers are preoccupied with freshness, but few have any interest in buying a squash or a sweet potato, grinding it into single-serve portions, and throwing away what’s left. (But we’ll come back to that later.)
Amazon, and even Walmart, can’t begin to compete against freshness delivered literally a minute or two after a shopper has placed an order. Nor, it seemed, at least in North and South Carolina, were any local supermarkets equipped to compete with the new Lowes, where sausage sales rose several thousand percent in only two months, and chicken sales increased 120 percent. Inside the store, the environment had been transformed. It now felt casual, welcoming, playful, the layout one of structured chaos, creating an illusion of improvisation and even wildness while bounded by pathways, trees and roadways. Like the courtyards in eastern Siberia, the new Lowes was built around solid values and community and the concept of “local.” Also in the works was a Beer Den—a place where, if they wanted, men could relax and kick back a beer as their wives did the shopping. Victoria’s Secret has a “parking lot” for men in many of its outlets—a seating area with high walls on each side where males can bide their time as their wives, girlfriends or daughters shop. The Beer Den was Lowes’ version of this parking lot, helping to increase the amount of time both female and male customers spent in the supermarket, with no one exerting pressure to hurry up or wrap up.
But if you asked me to convey in a single sentence what the management team working collaboratively brought to Lowes, it was this: we gave shoppers, most of them middle-aged and older, the freedom to be themselves, and to be children again. “‘Big data’ never told us to build a SausageWorks,” a member of Lowes’ executive team told me later. “In fact, the opposite is true.” The largest untapped desire in America is to be truly liberated. By freedom, of course, I don’t mean the kind advertised in slogans, or trumpeted by political leaders, or used to package and sell wars fought thousands of miles away. I mean the freedom that comes from lack of worry, responsibility and self-consciousness, the luxurious liberty, that is to say, that comes from being a kid again.
Which is why, in every single Lowes, we hired a store manager whose only task was to determine whether or not shoppers were happy. They did, too. When people shopped at Lowes, they told me afterward, they felt “at home.” Not one of them could tell me why.
Chapter 3
The United Colors of India
Selling Breakfast Cereal to Two Generations of Warring Women
For a long time I’ve been struck by how every country in the world “skims” other cultures, appropriating the best of what foreign cultures offer, and leaving behind the rest. Across France, for example, you can find any number of “American diners” that serve cheeseburgers, hot dogs and French fries to a musical soundtrack of rock and rockabilly from the late 1950s and 1960s. In the United Kingdom, natives visit nightclubs with names like Malibu, and the Planet Hollywood chain stretches from the United States to France. Japanese consumers can visit a Japanese-owned chain known as the Andersen Bakery, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen, which, ironically, only recently opened its first bakery in Andersen’s birthplace, Denmark. Across the world, diners can eat at a Chinese, Mexican or Italian restaurant, or at an Outback Steakhouse, the Australian-themed restaurant that has literally nothing to do with Australia (it was created in 1988 by four Florida businessmen). But perhaps the all-time clearest example of skimming from the top of a culture is yoga as it’s practiced in the West.
To a melodious soundtrack of low-pitched ragas, students perform anywhere from two to three dozen asanas, most of which are introduced in Sanskrit. Some studios jack up the temperature to over 100 degrees, the goal being to replicate the weather conditions in which Indian men practiced in caves 6,000 years ago. From its beginnings as a meditative, spiritual and philosophical practice, yoga has evolved, at least across the West, int
o a controlled sport saved from its very strenuousness by an emphasis on breathing and awareness. With yoga, you can appropriate the best of Hindu and Buddhist traditions without ever paying a visit to India.
All these thoughts filled my mind when I traveled to Mumbai and New Delhi on behalf of a global cereal manufacturer. Along with most other forms of packaging, cereal boxes sold in Indian mom-and-pop stores had long been distinguished by eye-catching colors strategically designed to arrest the attention of new mothers. The packaging had worked well for decades, but in 2013, the company couldn’t figure out why its most popular breakfast cereal had been steadily losing market share among younger female buyers. Could I help them hatch some ideas about new packaging that would appeal to the brand’s demographic?
I wrongly assumed it would be a simple assignment. I had no idea I would soon be running up against an issue that crosses all castes and classes across India: the combustible relationship between Indian mothers-in-law and their daughters-in-law.
The BRICS nations—a widely used acronym referring to the developing countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—are often treated as indistinguishable, but nothing could be further from reality. Having run workshops in both China and India, in my experience, China places an emphasis on structure and operations, and creativity is all but nonexistent. India, by comparison, is all about creativity and chaos, with almost no attention paid to structure and operations. (If the two countries merged, they would become a serious threat to Western business.) With a population of 1.3 billion, India is a country of dramatic and sometimes shocking contrasts. The poverty is real and immediate, beggars are everywhere, and the pollution is among the worst in the world. Indian children are more likely to be malnourished than children from Zimbabwe, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s three poorest countries,1 and in Delhi, nearly 5 million school-aged children have irreversible lung damage from that city’s air quality, which is twice as bad as Beijing’s.2 The sanitation is poor—one New York Times estimate reports that more than 620 million people in India defecate outdoors, with Hindu devotees regularly bathing in the Ganges River, the end-destination of any number of sewage pipes.3 The infrastructure in even the most modern Indian cities is inadequate for the millions of people who live there, and electrical blackouts take place several times a day.