AAAW #4 - The Tipping Point (2)
This week has been pretty packed with lead generation, so I haven't had as much time as I'd like to read and review. I've managed to squeeze a little time to finish the next segment of the book below: enjoy!
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The second factor asks us to consider that outside of contagiousness, we also need to consider how sticky or lasting it is. In marketing, it's about making these bites of information memorable - I'm sure many of us can remember one or two jingles from our childhood that never really seem to go away. This is a critical component in making the tipping point becoming viable - in many scenarios, the sheer deluge of competitors, content, and more make the chances of whatever we are trying to make go viral incredibly small. Ensuring that we present and structure information in an impactful way (for content virality), or when a virus is particularly resilient and hard to beat - all go a long way into heightening the likelihood of an epidemic.
The fascinating case study used here is that of Sesame Street - logically speaking, television should be a horrible medium for education. While it certainly reaches many people in a cheap and easy fashion, the way information is typically portrayed on television is usually not particularly engaging - especially for children, who have notoriously short attention spans. In early childhood education, you typically want to tailor material to the child, based on their strengths and weaknesses. It is interactive in nature, and helps ensure that the child is engaged and learning. Television, by nature, is inactive and passive. You don't need to interact with your audience - just to engage and enthrall.
What Sesame Street did differently was to go above and beyond in making their content memorable - catchy song and dance, entertaining and interesting characters, content that all served to delight and engage its young audience. Numerous studies have proven that Sesame Street makes a significant impact on learning in children. Its creators had painstakingly engineered the show to hold the attention of children, and more importantly, ensure that the learning outcomes were still achieved. If you have the time, do check out some of the studies the show's creators conducted in its making. This is a great example of the amazing things you can do with sticky content.
However, Sesame Street had its failings as well. It was designed to be entertaining and smart. Its audience was not just the children, but the parents watching along as well. As such, its content was loaded with adult elements too, like puns, pop culture references, and more. By being sophisticated and funny to cater to an older audience, it inevitably alienated the younger watchers from time to time. Additionally, it was heavily influenced by tactics used by commercials at the time - using short, unconnected selections of sketches lasting not longer than 3 minutes to ensure that their attention was kept - which eventually turned out to be grossly underestimating the cognitive capabilities of children. In spite of the above, it was a massive success, by virtue of its brilliant writing and amazing cast. But what if there was a show that pushed all the right buttons, pulled all the right levers in stickiness? That show - was Blue's Clues.
Blue's Clues was perfectly literal, with little to no wordplay (the mailbox character was called Mailbox - two other animated characters, a salt and pepper shaker, were called Mr Salt and Mrs Pepper respectively), and had just one live actor, Steve.
And yet, it absolutely dominated Sesame Street in the ratings, despite being technically far simpler and less advanced. More importantly, it scored higher in terms of capturing children's attention, and children similarly showed statistically significant differences in flexible thinking and problem solving.
They stripped away the parts from Sesame Street that didn't work: all of the funny wordplay, the complex references - and doubled down on the parts that did: long pauses to elicit reactions from children, asking questions, encouraging participation. In shooting, there are often close-ups of Steve's face, interesting, but not distracting sets, and more. It wants children to verbally participate and be actively involved in the show - by engaging kids physically and intellectually, the message is more memorable and meaningful. It tried something completely unheard of - Nickelodeon ran the same episode for five straight days before going on to the next one, as a means of repetition. Rather than play to the search for novelty (like what adults and older children seek), it attempts to support a search for understanding and predictability. It's a careful balance that must be struck - the message has to be complex enough to allow for deeper and deeper levels of comprehension upon repeat exposure; but not so complex that the first time around it confuses its audience and turns them off. To that end, the staff test the full episode (vs a third for Sesame Street), and changes are as detailed as the order in which the clues are presented.
Sure, you can have the best Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople to spread the word. But the content of the message - the stickiness - is just as important. Is it so memorable and interesting that it can sustain momentum? Malcolm raises an amazing example of Direct marketers, and the innovative means they adopt to reach customers. No spoilers, but I promise you it's worth it.
The second example he gives is related to fear - specifically, a psychological study by Howard Levanthal in the 60s. He wanted to see if presenting content in a high-fear (using graphic images, dramatic terms to describe the symptoms and results of tetanus) or a low-fear (no pictures, relatively neutral language) approach would influence students into getting tetanus shots. We see this today on cigarette packets too - presumably by showing smokers graphic pictures of lung cancer, rotting lungs and teeth, we can reduce the likelihood of smoking.
As you might have guessed, there was no marked difference between students who were in the high-fear treatment group and the low-fear treatment group, even if students in the high-fear group were more convinced of the dangers of tetanus. Almost none of the students went to get a tetanus shot. Why?
Howard theorised that despite being more aware of the dangers, the message was not sticky enough. Purely being cognizant of the potential effects of tetanus was not a sufficient motivator to get students to get a shot. However, with one small change to the experiment, over 25% of the students went to get a shot. In the booklets, Howard added a map of the campus with the health centre highlighted, and a table of slots to get their shot. With this small change, the advice became practical, personal - and hence memorable.
From the above, you can see that tiny changes (the order of clues, the highlighting of a health centre) can have a massive impact on the way messages are perceived. It's about tinkering with the presentation of these ideas, by repetition, by long pauses: the fine line between an epidemic that tips and one that does not.
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That's it for the second part - we're about halfway through the book now. Stay tuned for the final segment on Context :)