22 Nov In the third week, demand exploded (CHARLES DUHIGG)
One day in the early 1900s, a prominent American executive named
Claude C. Hopkins was approached by an old friend with a new
business idea. The friend had discovered an amazing product, he
explained, that he was convinced would be a hit. It was a toothpaste, a
minty, frothy concoction he called “Pepsodent.” There were some
dicey investors involved—one of them had a string of busted land
deals; another, it was rumored, was connected to the mob—but this
venture, the friend promised, was going to be huge. If, that is, Hopkins
would consent to help design a national promotional campaign.
Hopkins, at the time, was at the top of a booming industry that had
hardly existed a few decades earlier: advertising. Hopkins was the man
who had convinced Americans to buy Schlitz beer by boasting that the
company cleaned their bottles “with live steam,” while neglecting to
mention that every other company used the exact same method. He
had seduced millions of women into purchasing Palmolive soap by
proclaiming that Cleopatra had washed with it, despite the sputtering
protests of outraged historians. He had made Puffed Wheat famous by
saying that it was “shot from guns” until the grains puffed “to eight
times normal size.” He had turned dozens of previously unknown
products—Quaker Oats, Goodyear tires, the Bissell carpet sweeper,
Van Camp’s pork and beans—into household names. And in the
process, he had made himself so rich that his best-selling
autobiography, My Life in Advertising, devoted long passages to the
difficulties of spending so much money.
Claude Hopkins was best known for a series of rules he coined
explaining how to create new habits among consumers. These rules
would transform industries and eventually became conventional
wisdom among marketers, educational reformers, public health
professionals, politicians, and CEOs. Even today, Hopkins’s rules
influence everything from how we buy cleaning supplies to the tools
governments use for eradicating disease. They are fundamental to
creating any new routine.
However, when his old friend approached Hopkins about
Pepsodent, the ad man expressed only mild interest. It was no secret
that the health of Americans’ teeth was in steep decline. As the nation
had become wealthier, people had started buying larger amounts of
sugary, processed foods. When the government started drafting men
for World War I, so many recruits had rotting teeth that officials said
poor dental hygiene was a national security risk.
Yet as Hopkins knew, selling toothpaste was financial suicide. There
was already an army of door-to-door salesmen hawking dubious tooth
powders and elixirs, most of them going broke.
The problem was that hardly anyone bought toothpaste because,
despite the nation’s dental problems, hardly anyone brushed their
teeth.
So Hopkins gave his friend’s proposal a bit of thought, and then
declined. He’d stick with soaps and cereals, he said. “I did not see a
way to educate the laity in technical tooth-paste theories,” Hopkins
explained in his autobiography. The friend, however, was persistent.
He came back again and again, appealing to Hopkins’s considerable
ego until, eventually, the ad man gave in.
“I finally agreed to undertake the campaign if he gave me a six
months’ option on a block of stock,” Hopkins wrote. The friend agreed.
It would be the wisest financial decision of Hopkins’s life.
Within five years of that partnership, Hopkins turned Pepsodent
into one of the best-known products on earth and, in the process,
helped create a toothbrushing habit that moved across America with
startling speed. Soon, everyone from Shirley Temple to Clark Gable
was bragging about their “Pepsodent smile.” By 1930, Pepsodent was
sold in China, South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and almost anywhere
else Hopkins could buy ads. A decade after the first Pepsodent
campaign, pollsters found that toothbrushing had become a ritual for
more than half the American population. Hopkins had helped
establish toothbrushing as a daily activity.
The secret to his success, Hopkins would later boast, was that he
had found a certain kind of cue and reward that fueled a particular
habit. It’s an alchemy so powerful that even today the basic principles
are still used by video game designers, food companies, hospitals, and
millions of salesmen around the world. Eugene Pauly taught us about
the habit loop, but it was Claude Hopkins that showed how new habits
can be cultivated and grown.
So what, exactly, did Hopkins do?
He created a craving. And that craving, it turns out, is what makes
cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop.
Throughout his career, one of Claude Hopkins’s signature tactics was
to find simple triggers to convince consumers to use his products every
day. He sold Quaker Oats, for instance, as a breakfast cereal that could
provide energy for twenty-four hours—but only if you ate a bowl every
morning. He hawked tonics that cured stomachaches, joint pain, bad
skin, and “womanly problems”—but only if you drank the medicine at
symptoms’ first appearance. Soon, people were devouring oatmeal at
daybreak and chugging from little brown bottles whenever they felt a
hint of fatigue, which, as luck would have it, often happened at least
once a day.
To sell Pepsodent, then, Hopkins needed a trigger that would justify
the toothpaste’s daily use. He sat down with a pile of dental textbooks.
“It was dry reading,” he later wrote. “But in the middle of one book I
found a reference to the mucin plaques on teeth, which I afterward
called ‘the film.’ That gave me an appealing idea. I resolved to
advertise this toothpaste as a creator of beauty. To deal with that
cloudy film.”
In focusing on tooth film, Hopkins was ignoring the fact that this
same film has always covered people’s teeth and hadn’t seemed to
bother anyone. The film is a naturally occurring membrane that builds
up on teeth regardless of what you eat or how often you brush. People
had never paid much attention to it, and there was little reason why
they should: You can get rid of the film by eating an apple, running
your finger over your teeth, brushing, or vigorously swirling liquid
around your mouth. Toothpaste didn’t do anything to help remove the
film. In fact, one of the leading dental researchers of the time said that
all toothpastes—particularly Pepsodent—were worthless.
That didn’t stop Hopkins from exploiting his discovery. Here, he
decided, was a cue that could trigger a habit. Soon, cities were
plastered with Pepsodent ads.
“Just run your tongue across your teeth,” read one. “You’ll feel a film
—that’s what makes your teeth look ‘off color’ and invites decay.”
“Note how many pretty teeth are seen everywhere,” read another ad,
featuring smiling beauties. “Millions are using a new method of teeth
cleansing. Why would any woman have dingy film on her teeth?
Pepsodent removes the film!”
The brilliance of these appeals was that they relied upon a cue—
tooth film—that was universal and impossible to ignore. Telling
someone to run their tongue across their teeth, it turned out, was
likely to cause them to run their tongue across their teeth. And when
they did, they were likely to feel a film. Hopkins had found a cue that
was simple, had existed for ages, and was so easy to trigger that an
advertisement could cause people to comply automatically.
Moreover, the reward, as Hopkins envisioned it, was even more
enticing. Who, after all, doesn’t want to be more beautiful? Who
doesn’t want a prettier smile? Particularly when all it takes is a quick
brush with Pepsodent?
After the campaign launched, a quiet week passed. Then two. In the
third week, demand exploded. There were so many orders for
Pepsodent that the company couldn’t keep up. In three years, the
product went international, and Hopkins was crafting ads in Spanish,
German, and Chinese. Within a decade, Pepsodent was one of the topselling goods in the world, and remained America’s best-selling
toothpaste for more than thirty years.
Before Pepsodent appeared, only 7 percent of Americans had a tube
of toothpaste in their medicine chests. A decade after Hopkins’s ad
campaign went nationwide, that number had jumped to 65 percent. By
the end of World War II, the military downgraded concerns about
recruits’ teeth because so many soldiers were brushing every day.
“I made for myself a million dollars on Pepsodent,” Hopkins wrote a
few years after the product appeared on shelves. The key, he said, was
that he had “learned the right human psychology.” That psychology
was grounded in two basic rules:
First, find a simple and obvious cue.
Second, clearly define the rewards.
THE POWER OF HABIT
CHARLES DUHIGG
