I had a great double-burger "animal-style" at IN-N-OUT this weekend with my son Benj. For me, it's an ocassional indulgence, so I didn't really know what "animal style" was. And it's not on the menu. I ordered it at my son's advice. 

As a result, I felt that I had special inside knowledge. I had ordered off the secret menu! I was in the club. Now it may seem silly that buying a burger made me feel that way. However, the experience illustrates a core and essential human need: Belonging and feeling special.

Lots of restaurants have "secret menus" that make loyal customers feel in the loop (here's Meg Marco's list). Should organizations in the business of health or social change employ the secret menu tactic? Absolutely.

Think about what you can selectively provide to long-time members, customers, partners- once they know to ask. But don't have too many "secret menu" options- just a few is fine. The goal is to deepen the relationship by making them feel special, even privileged. Give it a shot.

Someone is knocking at my door. Two young men in suits are standing on my porch with serious-looking black books in hand, and bicycles in the background. This is the stereotype of Mormon missionaries spreading the gospel of The Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS).

Last year, the Mormon church launched its I'm a Mormon campaign. Instead of just knocking on our doors, the campaign reverses the dynamic. It invites us to knock on their (virtual) doors, drawn in by the intrigue of real-life personal video stories.(They have to be careful that the second "m" in Mormon is not obscured in their ads. Otherwise, well... are you a moron?).

A USA Today interview with an LDS Church spokesperson describes the campaign this way:

The purpose of the campaign is to make it easy for people to learn about the faith and get to know Mormons personally... it's an efficient and effective way to reach more people, and on their terms.

I like the I'm a Mormon campaign. The video profiles come across as genuine and unscripted. They hit they diversity issue head-on, as you can tell by the billboard above. The website also tackles the questions many people wonder about like "why don't Mormons drink coffee or tea or alcohol?".

The campaign nicely builds on the awareness of LDS generated by the Broadway hit The Book of Mormon, which won 9 Tony Awards last June including Best Musical. Plus church member Mit Romney is in the news a bit these days as well.

What triggered the campaign? The New York Times reported that it was negative stereotypes:

Using focus groups and surveys, they found that Americans who had any opinion at all used adjectives that were downright negative: “secretive,” “cultish,” “sexist,” “controlling,” “pushy,” “anti-gay.”

It could also be research that showed that 4 of 10 Americans would NOT vote for a Mormon for president.

The campaign seems to be scaling back recently. Some say cynically that it's Romney's clinching of the Republican nomination, others the parodies or counter-videos like this one:

I have not found studies or campaign results beyond number of website visits. Changing people's beliefs is hard. I like how the Mormon church is trying to reposition itself as multicultural non-racist religion. What is far more important than the campaign is the Church delivering on its promise.

What comes to your mind when you hear the word happiness?

For some, it's a pop culture reference like Paul McCartney singing Happiness is a warm gun on the Beatles' White album, or the award-winning 1998 movie called, well, Happiness. For others, it's about personal happiness, exemplified by Gretchen Rubin's bestselling book, The Happiness Project. 

For the United Nations, happiness may be the centerpiece of a new economic paradigm, as discussed in a recent UN conference on Happiness and Well-Being, convened by the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan (see my post here about our relentless pursuit of happiness as well as Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index). 

Maybe happiness should be a core element of a new paradigm for your organization too.

Why? We know that models grounded in the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) are running into serious problems. To quote Bhutan's Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley:

"The GDP-lead development model that compels boundless growth on a planet with limited resources no longer makes economic sense. It is the cause of our irresponsible, immoral and self-destructive actions," Thinley said. "The purpose of development must be to create enabling conditions through public policy for the pursuit of the ultimate goal of happiness by all citizens."

Similarly, but on an organizational level, an economic model centered just on the market value of what the compay produces runs into the same problems. What if we add happiness into the mix? Can employee happiness produce wealth for a company? I say yes, a whole lot better than unhappiness can. And no, not just by itself.

Don't dismiss happiness becaue it sounds soft or subjective. Think of it as an essential ingredient of business sucess, as follows: Organizational Happiness means happy employees. Happy employees means greater productivity. Greater productivity means greater profits. Which means happier employees. And on and on.

What would it take for happiness to be a business outcome you fuel, measure, and care about?

_______________

To read the just-released World Happiness Report, by Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs and colleagues, click here. For a good NPR story on the UN Conference, click here.

Last night the popular TV show Glee effectively used the power of entertainment and the reach of prime time television to deliver two powerful messages to teenagers. The first message was about violence - specifically gay-bashing bullying, and the second was about texting while driving. The pop culture ripple effect is already happening. Check out USA Today and numerous other news outlets. Now public health needs to step up and capitalize on the exposure!

When high school football player Karofsky went from bully to bullied after coming out as gay, he couldn't take the pain and attempted suicide. Lots of modeling of good and bad behaviors in the scene, immediately followed by an anti-bullying/sexual preference/suicide prevention PSA featuring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter). Kudos to Fox for pairing a message in a show with a resource to take action.

As a result, the interplay between bullying, LGBT, and suicide will be on lots of people's minds. Entertainment opened the door and created mindspace among millions of viewers. Now public health can step in and take it one big step further.

Later in the show we see bad girl turned good Quinn texting while driving hurriedly to the impromptu City Hall wedding of her high school friends Rachel and Finn. The episode ends with her car crashing full speed into another car.

Check it out.

Will she die? We won't know till the next new episode airs in a couple months. While we're waiting for that episode, again, public health should step in and ratchet up its distracted driving campaigns to move the social norm and motivate safer behaviors. 

Entertainment provides so many opportunities for those in the business of improving health and society. Let's get on it!

P.S. Check out CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control for resources on preventing violence, accidents, and injuries.

6 blades... really!?!  Read on...

When I was in college Gillette came out with the innovative Trac II- two blades on one razor. The logic made sense to me- the first blade does most of the work and the second blade gets what the first blade missed. That was 30+ years ago.

Today's razors have not two, but up to six blades! The value proposition just isn't there. There's incremental improvement, and there's improvementless improvement. Here's a scathing commentary (rated R for language kids!) from the Onion, written a year before the five bladers hit the market. And check out this video contrasting the Trac II with Gillette's new (as of 2010) ProGlide razor.

I understand the need for continuous innovation and improvement. And the need to to create a "felt need."Every marketer does. I get Gillete's oft-cited mantra of giving away the razor and making money on razor blades. And generating a perpetual revenue stream at $10 for a handful of razor blades every few weeks. 

But six blades?! Maybe it sells and is a money-maker. From a customer point of view, it appears manipulative and disingenuous. As a proponent of honest marketing and customer intimacy, I think Gillete, Schick, or a new entrant in the market would garner far more trust, competitive advantage, and market share by going back to a two-blader and telling customers exactly why. Who wil take the risk and reap the rewards?

Me? I just bought an old-fashioned double-edged safety razor. Classic design, far more economical, and closer shaves. Yeah.

We do a lot of work with companies that make products for the healthcare industry. One of the recurring challenges we take on is helping companies figure out how to connect emotionally with their customers - often doctors, nurses, and healthcare executives. One useful conceptual framework is Emotional Design, pioneered by Don Norman in a book by the same name (Don was a psych. professor and mentor of mine at UCSD a few decades ago, and is one of those very smart and practical guys). His framework can help achieve connection when designing medical devices, developing public health programs, or shaping healthcare services. Don's Linked In profile summarizes the framework this way:

 "The three kinds of design, the better to ensure enjoyable, pleasurable results. Visceral Design emphasizes appearance. Behavioral design emphasizes function, understandability, and the sheer joy of handling, touching, hearing, and using a well-designed product. Reflective design is about pride of ownership, about image, and the role of brands."

Here's an old TED video in which Don explains his thinking that led to the book.

More and more, I think marketing is all about connecting on an emotional level. Call it heart connection. So how do you know if your design is on the right emotional track?

Apply our think/feel/do test. For every feature of your product, program, or service, force your team to articulate what it should make the user think, and feel, and do. Then do the research to see if the features achieve the intended objectives, especially the feeling or emotional objective. If yes, you're on the right track. If not, back to the drawing board. For when design connects on an emotional level, it is astounding.

P.S. For the theorists among us: Given that the Emotional Design framework grew out of the classic ABC model  (affect, behavior, and cognition) to understand how attitudes are formed, our simple think/feel/do test is well-aligned with its principles. 

Image source: http://cpaprotectplus.com/blog/2011/03/warning-signs-of-an-unhealthy-heart-th...

Imagine you have a bunch people in a room talking about buying or using a certain product or service. Like in a focus group. And you happen to know that emotion drives behavior more than logic. So how do you get these folks to reveal not just their thoughts but their underlying feelings too?

Let's set aside the assumption (and it's a significant one!) that the people are aware of and able to talk about their feelings. 

One standard query, borrowed from psychotherapy, is asking "How do you feel about that?" In my opinion, this is bad in therapy and it's bad in marketing research. As soon as we ask "How..." we are inviting people to become analytical, which frequently moves them away from feelings, not towards them. That's why responses are usually not expressions of emotion, but rather thoughts like "I feel that it's a good product" or simply "OK." When we get more directive, and say "How does that make you feel?" we still hear back thoughts, but often coupled with defensiveness triggered by the implied causality.

What works better is to ask what questions like "When you use the product, what do you feel?" perhaps supplemented with a range of examples. However, I think it's most effective to probe about feelings in real time when we observe them. For example, if you see people become passionate in a discussion, acknowledge it and get more by saying, "You seem to have strong feelings about that. Tell me about it." And when doing so, be sure you echo back the intensity of the feelings they expressed.

Getting people to talk honestly about their feelings is an art. And it's not easy. A lot of moderators are more comfortable facilitating discussions about thoughts and ideas, rather than feelings and emotion. But bottom line, nothing makes for open hearts and deeper connections more than the respectful and honest sharing of emotion. Which makes the outcomes of marketing research far more effective.

Image source: http://cache2.artprintimages.com/p/LRG/7/781/6G8I000Z/art-print/jim-borgman-h...

How do you get people to change their behaviors? 1) You can EDUCATE them. 2) You can ENFORCE consequences. 3) You can change their ENVIRONMENT. These are the "3Es" of behavior change, a simple and powerful model for influence.

The current "cell phone in cars" debate offers a prime illustration of the 3Es. As a starting point, we all know it's a bad problem getting worse, as CDC's Injury Center makes very clear.

What to do? Take EDUCATION. The cell phone and auto industries, together with injury prevention folks, can create campaigns to teach us that driving while texting, talking or surfing the web is dangerous and even deadly. Check out, for example, the Department of Transportation's (DOT) "Distracted Driving" efforts here. These campaigns can make a difference, though research shows that most health campaigns generate only a modest impact. That's in part because most campaigns are based on the misguided premise that if people just know better, they will change. Decades of research, and even a bit of life experience, make clear the often-exercised human ability to not act in accordance with what we "know" is best.

So let's add some teeth with ENFORCEMENT! We're trying that now with police levying heavy fines on people driving while holding and using a cell phone. But it's tough to catch people in the act. And we need to deal with the resource allocation argument of diverting police from "serious" crimes. In a sense, enforcement is a fear tactic, which means that the perceived risk of getting caught coupled with the perceived seriousness of the consequences (fines, loss of license, shame, etc.) needs to be sufficient to motivate behavior change, but without being so scary that it makes people tune out.

Will changing the ENVIRONMENT help? Some call this approach social engineering (a powerful and traditionally unpopular phrase in some political camps). An example would be creating technology in cell phones and cars that make it impossible to use the phones while driving. Note that in the extreme, this approach eliminates choice. Knowledge and motivation no longer matter. That's the power of engineering an environment that makes the desired behavior change happen. 

Engineering the environment is what I think it will take to really impact such prevalent and highly addictive behaviors like cell phone use in cars. Complement it with education so we object less, and with enforcement for those who create workarounds. 

There you have it. The 3Es in action.

Photo source: plg-pllc.com

Set a goal. 

Because as ace marketing consultant The Cheshire Cat advised to his client Alice in Wonderland...  "If You Don't Know Where You're Going, Any Road Will Get You There." 

What you may not know (only because I'm, well, making it up right now) is that The Cheshire Cat then continued... "Only It Might Take You A Very Long Time, And You Might Never Know When You Are There, Which Means You Really Need to Start With A Goal."                           

There are lots of goal-setting tools and heuristics, like S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound). I just want to add one piece of advice. Make your first 2012 marketing goal an outcome goal, not a process goal. That means it specifies an accomplishment or result, not just an activity.

Think big. Where do you want your business or organization to go? What outcomes do you envision? List them, apply the S.M.A.R.T. test, then choose one. 

Rather than moving forward without a clear direction (more on this via our late friend George Harrison in his poignant song Any Road), or choosing an end point blindly (as Dr. Doolittle did to go to Spidermonkey Island), or "throwing the rock, then moving the target" (as my colleague at AARP Senior Research Advisor Bob Vorek describes many social science research projects), set your goal with purpose and commitment.

It will set you up for a solid and effective start for 2012.

For years, the dairy industry "owned" the category milk. In our minds, milk meant the stuff from cows. As a result, other forms of milk needed a descriptor. For example, nursing a baby wasn't about just "milk," it was about breast milk. 

Marketers know there is nothing better than dominating a category. Like FedEx created and dominated the category of overnite delivery, the dairy industry (a family of brands) dominated the category of milk. 

But, in the words of the great singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, "Times, they are a-changing."

Check out the game on the Got Milk website to find "real" milk. Here's a screen shot of how they show what one can only assume are the "fake" milks.

Then take a look at their "Real Milk comes from cows" TV ad. Seems that the California Milk Processor Board (they're behind the long-running the Got Milk campaign) is getting defensive. That means Silk and other brands of Soy Milk, Almond Milk, Coconut Milk, Rice Milk, and others are taking not just shelf space, but market share from cow milk folks. Hence, the campaign to equate cow milk with real milk. 

As a long-time consumer of the competing non-dairy products (when my "raised on rice milk" kids were little and lactose-intolerant, they heard the refrain cow milk is for baby cows at least a million times), I see this as a prime example of a category (milk) growing beyond its dominant product line (cow milk).

Will we see the day when restaurants say, "Would you like cow's milk, coconut milk, or rice milk with your cereal?" I suspect we will.