The 7 Captivation Triggers (Part 1) | Venture Capitalist and Author, Ben Parr

The first stage is something I call automaticity. So we're gonna do a pop quiz here. If you're a hitchhiker on the side of the road, pretend you're a hitchhiker, you're lost somewhere on the road, and you wanna have the best chance of being picked up, what color shirt should you wear?

Red.

No shirt.

No shirt.

No shirt.

No shirt.

Someone inevitably always says no shirt, and I know one thing about you, I'll see you at Burning Man next year. So the answer is, it is gender-specific, actually. If you're a man, any bright color will work. Yellows, oranges, even neons, because of the higher contrast they have with their surroundings here, with the green grass and the dark roads and the dark ground. If you're a woman— and there was literally a French scientist who decided to study this— it's a little bit different. On average, wearing most colored shirts, A woman will be picked up about 13% of the time, unless they are wearing the color red, in which case they are picked up a whopping 21% of the time. And it is because of the romantic associations we have with red in Western culture. In fact, if you put just a thick red border around your face, the opposite gender will rate that— rate you as several points more attractive. I gave you a Tinder tip, everyone. But these automatic unconscious associations drive our immediate attention and drive the attention of your potential users and customers. Oh yeah, by the way, I like having that picture up. It's an automatic response. And there's lots of things to know about. You have to think about 2 things when it comes to the automatic response. Oh, you like that picture, huh? He's just nodding. I want to do that. I want to be that. There are 2 things to know about— there are 2 things you have to consider when it comes to the automaticity trigger, and that is contrast and association. A sensory stimuli will pop out either because of the contrast it has with its surroundings, not just color, but sound and sight and other things, or because of its associations that we have unconsciously based off of our biases, based off of our cultural upbringing, based off of other factors. So let me give you some examples. So Amazon does a very, very good job of A/B testing, and the thing that pops out the most for most people are the buttons. Yellow and orange do a really good job, as you remember from before, of standing out on most backgrounds. In white and gray backgrounds, they have the highest contrast. And so that's— there's a reason why Amazon uses these as the buy buttons. So they're great when it comes to contrast. However, association game What do you think when you see this guy? Blurt it out.

Douchebag.

I heard douche a lot. I usually hear prison as well, and Dutch. But here's the point. If this person— if you walked into a job interview wearing that, how likely do you think you would be to get the job? In fact, orange and yellow, according to one study, have the lowest correlation with competence. Teal and blue actually have the highest correlation, which is actually why I used blue and teal for the COVID of my book and not red. But the contrast is very high, but the association isn't strong. And so you have to consider these things. Red has that romanticism appeal, while black is highly correlated with luxury, etc. And I have— there's a lot of these different kind of cultural associations we have, and they depend culture to culture as well. And there's actually— Great graph that has that. But it's not just colors, it's also smells. So this is the camellia flower, and a few years ago Revlon decided to make a perfume based off of it. Did pretty well in the US, so they're like, we're gonna go expand it internationally. Let's take it to South America. Problem is that this specific flower is used in a lot of South American funerals. So when they started marketing this, they were literally marketing the smell of death. You can imagine how that went. And the thing completely bombed. And so they screwed up on the association game when it came to this smell. One last little tip for you before I go to the next trigger. On feel, there's a bunch of studies that find that if you just give a hot cup of coffee or tea to somebody, that person is going to have warmer feelings towards you and be more generous towards you because we unconsciously correlate the feeling of warmth with the interpersonal sensation of warmth. And so a warm cup of coffee will help you close the deal. Not that kind of deal, sickos. Business deals. Trigger number 2, framing. So to tell you about framing, I need to tell you about the story of deodorant and a 16-year-old female entrepreneur from the 1900s. So when I'm sure you all smell great. I haven't smelled you, but I'm sure you smell great. Deodorant's a $16 billion market now, but back in the early 1900s, there was no deodorant. This was literally what people used to protect themselves from sweat. Cotton balls, dress shields, and cotton pads.

Why?

Well, there were 2 reasons. People didn't want to use deodorant. One, they thought it would kill you to use deodorants, that antiperspirants, that it would literally kill you and that it was unhealthy. And more important, and number 2, it was not a ladylike thing to discuss. You did not discuss body odors and bodily fluids publicly. And this sentiment made it impossible to talk about deodorants and antiperspirants and the benefits of them. And so, they existed, but none of them had actually taken off. Now, in the early 1900s, there was this female entrepreneur. Her name is Edna Murphy. She was 16. And her father, a surgeon, invented an antiperspirant for his hands because He wanted to not sweat when he was doing surgeries. And her being a smart gal was like, you know what? I could put this on my armpits. So she did. She packaged it and she turned it into Odorono, literally the name of the product. She got a $500 investment from her grandfather and she started marketing this and selling this. And it did okay, but she wasn't able to get— she hit a ceiling very quickly because She couldn't get over these frames of reference people had about antiperspirants and deodorants. So she teamed up with a guy named James Webb Young, who eventually became the first chairman of the Ad Council, to figure out a way to break through these preconceptions. And so they decided they had to figure out ways to break the 2 preconceptions I told you about. One, how do you get people to talk about— to not think that deodorant's going to kill them? Well, you advertise the fact that it was made by a doctor. And that doctors recommend it. And so they put out these actual ads that talk about how it's recommended and used by leading physicians and was made by a doctor. And the sales doubled almost immediately after this campaign came out. And so they addressed that concern. But the big one was still there. It was not something you discussed— body odor and bodily fluids. So the two of them put out this ad. And this is a famous ad from 1919 called Within the Curve of a Woman's Arm: A Frank Discussion of a Subject Too Often Avoided. It was in the most popular magazine of the time. Does anyone want to guess what magazine? Harper's Bazaar.

Vanity Fair.

I don't even think Vanity existed back then. What?

Vogue.

Vogue? That would be a good guess. I don't think it existed back then either. Time and Life existed, but it's neither of them. The answer is Ladies' Home Journal, which I'm sure all of you are avid readers of. And half of you are like, magazines? I barely remember what those are. But this ad was basically, was very straightforward. It was, let's have a frank discussion. Body odor exists. Bodily fluids exist. You don't have to smell bad. There's a product that fix it. It's called Odor-O-No. And so they put this ad in Ladies' Home Journal, and it was the most controversial ad of 1919. Hundreds of women canceled their Ladies' Home Journal subscriptions in protest of the ad. But the ad did its job. It made people— it started people talking about antiperspirants and deodorants, and suddenly sales went through the roof. And less than a decade later, Edna Murphy was able to sell her company for millions of dollars.

Wow.

And so the lesson here is that you have to find a way to adapt to your audience's frame of reference. Your audience comes in with preconceptions and preconceived notions. Whether you're talking to investors, to journalists, or to users, they have certain preconceptions. They have certain things they already know. And you have to find a way to either adapt to them or you have to change the frame of reference and reframe the conversation. And so actually when I interviewed David Copperfield, he gave me this quote, which is, knowing your audience's history Knowing what kind of people they are, that is important to use to guide their attention to something that's important, that you want them to focus on. Odorono did this by adapting to the audience's frame of reference by making sure they knew that it was not going to kill them to use antiperspirant, and more importantly, reframing the conversation, making it okay to discuss body odor by attacking it head-on. And there are lots of ways to change the frame of reference, and I can't talk about all the different ways, but I will talk about one that's relevant for all of you. So, who here likes Twinkies? Raise your hand. You are all disgusting people. Twinkies are rolled pieces of toilet paper wrapped in crap. Come on, guys. But these toilet papers wrapped in crap, if you remember a few years ago, they went bankrupt, and suddenly everyone had to have Twinkies, and they were sold out everywhere, despite the fact they didn't taste any less shitty They became much more popular. Yeah, fuck Twinkies.

But—

I have my biases. But here's what happened, scarcity. And so the research shows that when something is more scarce, we value it more. But there's a very specific caveat to this. If it's scarce because it's popular, we don't attribute any more value to it. But if we think, if it's scarce because of an outside factor or another factor, like a production problem or something else, we attribute more value to those objects. A company that does a great job of this in the industry is Google, for example. When they did the Gmail invite system or they did the Google Wave invite system, thousands of people were begging for invites. Someone offered me $100 for one of my Gmail invites. And I'm like, what the fuck is wrong? Oh, thank you for the $100. But we attribute more value to a product, to something when it is more scarce, especially because of reasons other than popularity. Trigger number 3, disruption. We pay attention to the people and things that violate our expectations. So there was a study that was done that kind of exemplifies this. And what they wanted to do was to see what kind of sentences people remembered better. And some of these sentences were simple, like, the nuns put the food on the table. While other sentences were a little different, like, The nun licked the ammonia off the floor. Now, which one do you think you're gonna remember more after a week?

The nun licked the ammonia off the floor.

There's actually a scientific term for this. It's called the bizarreness effect. And the reason for this is because we have a stronger memory for things that are out of place, and we pay attention to things that violate our expectations because it's a survival response. We have to pay attention to something that's out of place because it might be a threat. So let's pretend Let's pretend we're on a date, all right? We're just sitting down in a coffee shop like this one, and a friend of ours, let's say you, comes in a giant clown suit and just sits down next to us, or we don't even recognize you. We're gonna pay attention to him, right? Because of 2 reasons. Because we need to figure out whether this person is a threat or it's a positive development. Maybe it is our friend and he's about to go to the children's hospital and go perform, or maybe it's a crazy clown guy who's about to mug us. We don't know. You're very paying a lot of attention. Good job. But we don't know, so we have to pay attention. It comes from our old survival response where 1,000 years ago or thousands of years ago, we were always constantly shifting our attention, looking at the landscape, looking for either food or threats. You know, was that— is that rustling in the leaves a saber-toothed tiger or is that a boar that we can eat? And I don't know about you, but I haven't run into a saber-toothed tiger in the last couple of years. But we still have that same instinct, and so we look for things that violate our expectations. In the business world, we see this in the form of awesome ad campaigns. Ones like, for example, the Patagonia campaign. Patagonia, a clothing company, went and said, don't buy our jackets. This is a clothing company. They're telling you not to buy their shit. What's going on? But when you dig deeper into that, they start just talking about why they're saying that. And the whole point of Patagonia is about protecting the environment, and that they don't want— they will help you repair your clothes if they can, because they don't want you to unnecessarily use more resources to have clothing that you don't need. But of course, they will sell you new clothes, they'll sell you a new jacket if you need it. And this campaign telling people not to buy their stuff made people buy a ton of their stuff. Their sales doubled within 9 months and have been on a rise ever since. And it's because it's a disruption of our expectations and it's a positive one. The Old Spice guy who's been making a comeback in the last couple weeks, I don't know if you've all saw, is another perfect example. Every few seconds he does something that's crazy and off the wall and unexpected, but you have to pay attention because you don't know what he's gonna do next. Are diamonds gonna come out of his hair? Is he suddenly going to shoot a basketball with a moose? Who knows? But one of the things about it is it's a positive campaign. It's always a positive. And so a big thing here is that a disruption has to match your brand's values. You can't just go and run around in a clown costume or run naked, which is what you do, and expect it to work. Will people pay attention? Yes, but it won't necessarily accomplish your goals. And to explain that, I'm gonna show you a quick video.

We love these times, so it's our ador-a-roth when you bring in a coupon. All things to eat, all your changes, Honey, rise up for Headlocks! Any coupon box! Beware of paper cuts! Take Quiznos subs!

Quiznos. Mm-mm, mm-mm-mm.

Toasty.

All right, let's review. We just saw an ad that some CEO actually approved where mutant fucking rodents are stancing around off-key next to your food. Why the fuck would you eat any of that shit? I need to swear a lot to emphasize that point. But seriously, does it capture your attention? Sure. Does it make you actually want sandwiches?

No.

And proving my point, Quiznos went bankrupt last year. Violations, disruption has to match your brand's values.

Thank you.