The four-letter code to selling anything | Derek Thompson | TEDxBinghamtonUniversity

For thousands of years, some of the smartest people in the world have been asking versions of the same question: why do we like what we like? Is there a formula for beauty, popularity, human affinity and the ancient Greeks said yes, of course there is? golden ratio 1.62, etc., etc. 2:1 and then the enlighteners kurz The Enlightenment thinkers said yes, of course it exists, it's a question of aesthetics, but today we don't have the golden ratio, we don't have philosophers, we have Google and Facebook, we have advertisers. and in the advertiser's formula, the first variable is always novelty. This is a scientific fact.

In fact, several decades ago they looked at all the words they could find in all the ads there were and the most common word in all of those ads was. It wasn't because it wasn't a risk-free guarantee now, it was new. We live in a cult of novelty. Companies want us to like new things, to buy new things, to crave new things, but the truth is that we don't like new things. In fact, we hate it based on the mere exposure effect, one of the oldest and strongest theories in the history of psychology, mere exposure to any stimulus over time will bias you toward that stimulus in familiarity with English, well and, in fact, when you think.

In this regard, we look for new songs, but the songs we enjoy most are those with familiar chord structures and timbres, we look for new movies, but every year of this century, most of the top ten movies in the United States have been sequels, adaptations or reboots, familiars, familiars. Familiar, in fact, perhaps the best proof of the power of familiarity is that thing that is so familiar, your own face, that it turns out that people prefer the face they see in mirrors to the face they see in photographs, perhaps You have a friend who complains. constantly about how he looks and Facebook photos, but often constantly admires himself in the mirror, well this is not pure vanity, it is a mere exposure effect, the face is slightly asymmetrical, we see different versions when we see a reflection versus a photo and If you're not a celebrity, then the version you're most used to seeing is not in a photograph but in the world's most common reflection in a mirror.

You prefer that version of your face, not because it is you in your most beautiful form. but because it is you at your most familiar, in fact the power of familiarity seems so profound that people think it must be written into our genetics. The evolutionary theory of preference for the familiar is that if you are a hunter-gatherer and When you are fishing in the African savannah and you see a plant or an animal and you recognize it, it is a very good sign that the plant or animal is still It hasn't killed you, so of course you should prefer it, but this creates a huge problem for creative creators. guys because I just told you that people only like new things if they are like old things, so the question before us today is how to balance familiarity and surprise in such a way that you can design hits for designing things that people love it. possible to design a family surprise and begin to answer that question.

I want to tell you a short story about a man who was a hero to me, a hero of my book, but also a man who I imagine to be 9 to 95 percent of this room. don't know his name is Raymond Loewy and he designed the 20th century Raymond Loewy was a French orphan who came to the United States after World War I and his brother picked him up in a taxi and we're in the 1920s where they drive downtown . Manhattan where one of the tallest buildings is the Equal Building which looks a bit like a tuning fork with sort of two large buildings rising into the sky and Raymond Loewy takes an elevator to the top of this building and looks down on Manhattan from He sees and expects from his dreams in Paris to see a beautiful, round, feminine world, but the New York that he sees in front of him is exactly the opposite, it is dirty, it is noisy, it is the Hulk of the industrial age and he humbly makes a promise to himself and his brother, he says: I am going to dedicate the rest of my life to beautifying America in my image and he did precisely that Raymond Loewy designed the most famous automobile of the 20th century, the 1953 Studebaker, he designed the most famous train and locomotive of the 20th century, the Pennsylvania Railroad gg1, he designed the modern Greyhound bus, from the modern tractor to the modern Coca-Cola fountain, he designed that pencil sharpener that looks like an egg from which a small spindle emerges that Lo I've seen in a hundred thousand classrooms, he designed the logos for Exxon and USPS, he basically designed the entire 1950s in America, and in fact, one day Raymond Loewy was with his friend and he saw the president's plane take off and he said it looked striking. .

President Kennedy invited Loi to the Oval Office where they sat on the floor and cut small papers until they came up with the perfect design for Air Force One and in fact the design that Raymond Loewy came up with there on the Oval Office floor. with JFK still. adorns the most famous airplane in the world today, so the question is what did this man understand about human psychology, who knew what we wanted from airplanes, trains and automobiles, this man was like Don Draper and Steve Jobs of the 20th century , understood everything. Unfortunately for us, Raymond Loewy had a great theory of everything.

His name was Maya. Perhaps the most advanced but acceptable. Raymond Loewy said that human preferences are divided between two opposing forces. On the one hand, there is neophilia, the love of new things and the appreciation of new things. the new is a need to discover but, on the other hand, there is neophobia, fear of

anything

that is too new, a deep conservatism and LOI said that to achieve success it is necessary to manufacture products that live right at that intersection of familiar surprise for To sell something familiar you have to make it surprising, but to sell something surprising you have to make it familiar and LOI was not a scientist, but this theory has been tested and validated by dozens of studies and meta-studies since he died, it has been used to explain.

Successes in technology, in academia, in culture and even in politics, begin with technology. Technologists often find themselves in the position of having to make something new and then make it popular with an audience that doesn't understand it. This was the problem recently on Spotify. Spotify obviously the famous music streaming company that was developing their app that probably many people in this audience have used called discover weekly, if you haven't used discover weekly every Monday discuss that Spotify will download 30 songs on your phone and initially they wanted those 30. the songs were brand new so people had never heard the songs and never heard the artists, but when they were testing it initially there was a bug in the algorithm that accidentally let through some familiar songs and some familiar artists, so they quickly fixed it. the bug and they continued testing, but what happened is that when they continued testing the app, once they fixed the bug, engagement with the app plummeted, it turns out that having a little bit of familiarity with this discovery platform made it significantly more popular .

To sell what was surprising, they had to make it familiar to academics. I imagine that most academics do not consider themselves hitmakers, they do not consider themselves operating in a cultural market, but to become a star in their discipline, they often need to be published by the most famous publishers and therefore you're essentially giving up your research and pitching your research to people who are essentially your audience, so in 2014 a group of researchers at Harvard University in the Northwest wanted to figure out what the Formula for a successful paper is: they wanted to figure out what kind Article types were more likely to be accepted by the NIH if they were truly novel or extremely familiar proposals, so they created a dummy list of 150 articles and

code

d each of them. for novelty and then they gave those articles to a group of 150 researchers who rated their favorites and the graph of that score looks a little backwards you here have the greatest familiarity here you have the greatest novelty but it turned out that the researchers who were evaluating these proposals also preferred what they called myah identity 3 optimally familiar advanced but acceptable in my hitmakers book.

I spend a lot of time trying to solve this question of why fads exist if the brain is an organ. of ancient chemistry, so why should we change our opinion about what is good, but of course it is? Guitar solos are rare in the 1930s, extremely popular in the 1970s, and then strange again in the 2000s. Skinny jeans are unpopular and then popular and unpopular and popular and they followed the K sign, the sign curve, then , Why does this happen? Well, it's really important to understand that for the vast majority of human history fashions didn't really exist, people wore the same clothes for centuries for millennia, it never occurred to people to wear togas. should somehow change the look of their toga from one decade to the next, but a really interesting way to look at fashion is to say, "Okay, let's say that people clearly have different fashion preferences when it comes to clothing, but let's imagine a fantasy store and in the store all the clothes just exist, they all cost the same price and there is no marketing, it is important to think about this store in your head because as an economics writer I often think that it is okay to explain fashion, I think that you have to explain it by the price or by the fact that Jake, who no longer wants you to wear a certain type of pants, they take them away from you or they want you to wear a new type of pants, they sell it, but imagine with me This magical store where. all the clothes exist and they all have the same price and marketing is impossible.

Well, in fact, that store exists here in the real world. Think about it. All the names exist. and there's no direct marketing Nike really wants you to buy their next shoe, but there's no ad in Nike history that said "oh, and after you buy your shoe, could you name your baby after the Greek goddess of victory?" and speed has never happened, so why do names follow the same hype cycles as clothes? So a sociologist named Stanley Levison looked into this and came up with a really interesting theory that essentially goes back to Mya and he found that people tend to prefer names. those are family surprises, so take a name like Samantha Samantha, the 1980s wasn't a particularly popular name, it was about the 30th most popular girl's name in the country, but enough young couples decided that that was a perfectly fine name. popular for your little girl.

In 1992, 222,000 couples named their baby Samantha, making it the second most popular girl's name that year, but then, thinking about what happens five years later, all these little Samanthas go to kindergarten together and suddenly the kindergarten goes crazy with Samantha Samantha Samantha. when all these parents thought they were giving their daughter a unique name and since most parents have a preference for names that are familiar but also surprising, the name Samantha naturally, without any organization, increases in popularity and then falls when more interesting evidence demonstrates the fact that Parents have a specific taste for popularity. Siblings tend to have similar names, common or uncommon, and this is intuitively true if you know the Michael siblings Emily and Sarah, it's a little strange if they say and this is our sister Xanthippe II, but if you know the siblings antha P prairie rose Esmerelda is very strange if they are like here is also our brother Chad parents have a specific taste for familiarity, but one of the most interesting tests of this theory of names is to observe the phenomenon of girls' names for blacks.

Americans for the vast majority of human history for American history, excuse me, blacks and whites had similar names, but starting in the 1960s there was a big bifurcation where some names started to sound white and others and other names they sounded black and one of those markers for a The black name is the prefix LA or le as for LeBron James or LaDainian Tomlinson, but this was basically unknown before the 1960s, but Stanley Lieber soon discovered it starting in 1967, eight distinct black baby and girl names peaked in popularity with the prefix la and peaked in the following order: Latonia Latonya Latasha Latoya the Treece Lakeisha Lakeisha Latricia and what's fascinating about the sequence is how ordered each following popular name is.

It's a play on what came before, taking the familiar and turning it into a surprising

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th policy. In this era of hyper-partisanship and polarization there is a huge demand to discover how people can talk to each other, how we can persuade each other,but often when we get into debates and try to persuade someone to our point of view. From our point of view, we start with our

code

of ethics, so if you are liberal you will say that you should not like Donald Trump because his policies are cruel to Hispanics or if you are conservative you could say that you should not like Bernie.

Sanders because he is now trying to turn us into Denmark At first glance, these statements are perfectly genuine and sincere, but they immediately fail as articles of persuasion because if you are a conservative who supports Trump you probably like those policies that are discriminatory and if you are the liberal supporting Bernie Sanders, you want to push America towards Denmark, but imagine if instead we reverse the process and start with the code with the code of ethics of the person we are talking about, we take advantage of their familiarities, so yes Yes you're talking to someone as a liberal and you're talking to someone who supports Donald Trump, you might say one.

One of the things I've always respected about the Republican Party is its emphasis on patriotism, putting country before self and seeking service. It helped me think about the times and business career of Donald Trump. He has been a model of these values. Now maybe he doesn't think he's a Bernie Sanders. supporter on the spot they can slap you for carelessness you will get much further by following this path then you are exposing first principles that the person you are talking to does not agree with the model I just proposed is called moral The theory of foundations and essentially saying that it is always most beneficial when debating with someone else, to start with your first principles, start with your code of ethics, and then show how slowly walking that code of ethics toward the center can make their position seep into yours. . every debate involves a form of ideological advertising and both in the controversy and in the products to do it Maya make it familiar the last story I want to tell takes us back to Raymond Loewy and takes us back to his last assignment as industrial designer Raymond Loewy Se asked him to design the interior habitat for NASA's first space orbiter, the most amazing, unknown and exotic environment imaginable for a human being in deep space, and he humbly performed a series of habitability studies and made some adjustments. here and other settings there. but his most famous contribution to space history is that he drilled a hole in the side of NASA's space orbiter, placed a sheet of glass in there, and created a viewing portal—yes, that viewing portal you've seen in all those movies. .

Raymond Loewy facilitates innovation and I can't think of a more perfect illustration for Maya or a more beautiful inspiration for creators around the world because he says that a window to a new world can also show you home. Thanks, so Maya is a very interesting concept with so many unique applications. I'm wondering if you think there are ways to apply this idea to help people from diverse backgrounds relate better to each other. Yes absolutely. I mean, one of the ideas that comes up in developmental psychology is this question of sensitive periods. People develop particular tastes during specific periods of their lives, which tend to be relatively young, people tend not to change their taste in music or their taste in food after age 40 or 50, so When thinking about this question of justice, sometimes it's important not only to focus on the adults, not only to try to remedy the adults, but also to realize that the way to get liberal-minded people, the way to get people who think multiculturally and accept people of all stripes, colors and creeds, is actually having a kind of cradle to grave strategy where you say we should build neighborhoods, we should focus on neighborhoods and build neighborhoods where there is a combination of ideologies and colors and creeds and all this, so I think sometimes we think of justice as purely corrective and of course, there are a lot of people doing very important work there, but it's also very important that we think about training of taste, even on important issues like politics, as a project that involves the neighborhood level.

Absolutely thank you, thank you.