One day after taking his dog for a walk, a man noticed that both he and his dog were covered with annoying cockleburrs. How did he transform this annoyance into a million dollar idea?
Subject: Invention - Velcro
Event: George de Mestral trademarks Velcro, 1958
. . . the average English-speaking adult knows about 40,000 words. The number of active US trademarks is more than thirty times larger than the common English vocabulary. -Christopher Johnson
Today is the anniversary of a registered trademark that gave the world an alternative to zippers and buttons: Velcro.
One man’s annoyance can be another man’s eureka. One day, when Swiss inventor George de Mestral returned with his dog from a walk, he noticed that he and his dog were covered with cockleburrs. Instead of being annoyed, he studied the burrs under a microscope where he noted their hook-like shape.
Engineering artificial fasteners that replicated the ones he found in nature took a few years, but Mestral eventually succeeded in creating his easy to use hook and loop fastener. He registered his invention in 1958. For the name of his product, he blended two French terms: “vel” from velvet and “cro” from crochet (little hook).
Image by Tonguemation from Pixabay
Today, Velcro Industries is a successful international company, but like other successful companies, Velcro is challenged by a paradox: they want people to use their trademarked name as much as possible to promote their product; however, because the name is used so often and the product is so successful and so ubiquitous, the name of the product becomes a generic, non-capitalized word. As a result, companies like Velcro are in a constant battle to protect their trademark and in turn their bottom line. The lines are blurred even more when a word, like Google, becomes used so often that it becomes more than just a noun. No doubt the legal department at Google and the neologism department at the American Heritage Dictionary are both busy tracing the growth and development of this word.
The following statement from the Velcro website is an example of the kinds of reminders and warnings that companies put out to protect their brand names:
The goodwill and integrity which are reflective of the Velcro companies are ingrained in the VELCRO® trademark. This makes the trademark a very valuable asset to the company and to our customers who purchase the VELCRO® brand fasteners.
Many terms that we all use frequently in our everyday language were once trademarks. All of these terms lost their distinction as trademarks because their owners allowed them to be misused by the public. That’s why the Velcro companies pay close attention to how the VELCRO® trademark is used (1).
As stated by the Velcro website, there are several brand names that were once registered trademarks, but today they have lost their capital letter and entered the dictionary and the English lexicon as generic terms, such as cellophane, escalator, and yo-yo. Other brands seem generic, but they legally retain their trademarks, such as Kleenex, Jet Ski, Play Dough, Popsicle, and Q-tips.
The one key quality of Velcro, its stickiness, is an excellent metaphor for exploring how ideas are communicated to an audience. In their 1922 book Made To Stick, Chip and Dan Heath explore the key principles that make an idea stick, in other words, the principles that persuade an audience to both pay attention to a message and to accept it. A good example comes from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and its effort to persuade the public in 1992 that movie theater popcorn was unhealthy, specifically because it was prepared with coconut oil, which is high in saturated fat.
The basic claim that the CSPI was making was that “movie popcorn is fatty.” In order to sell this idea, however, they needed to do more than just say it; instead, they needed a way to make the idea stick. On September 27, 1992, the CSPI called a press conference to make their pitch: Standing in front of table covered with a smorgasbord of greasy entrees, the CSPI spokesperson’s message what short but sticky: “A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all trimmings -- combined!”
The sticky pitch stuck, and the proof was that sales of movie popcorn plunged, and soon the big theater chains discontinued the use of coconut oil to pop their popcorn.
Using examples like the successful CSPI pitch, the Heath brothers created an acronym that lays out six principles to consider when trying to make a message stick: SUCCES:
Simplicity: As the CSPI pitch demonstrated, a profound but clear one-sentence statement has great power. As Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”
Unexpectedness: Think about the expectations of your audience, and then consider how you might violate those expectations with a counterintuitive idea. Who would have thought that a medium bag of popcorn would add up to an entire day of meals?
Concreteness: More than just telling an audience something, a truly sticky message must show the audience something. Even if the CSPI had not included the table of food, the message still had a chance to stick because it was full of the specific names of menu items that an audience could imagine.
Credibility: Going back to Aristotle, who invented rhetoric, the importance of the authority of a speaker has been emphasized as a key to the success of any message. The speaker must consider the audience’s point of view and appeal to the kinds of authority that they will find believable and credible.
Emotions: More than just making an audience think, successful messages make an audience feel. A reasonable message based on sound evidence is good, but if it doesn’t have something that appeals to an audience's specific emotions, it may not move the audience or be memorable enough to stick. The visuals and specifics of the CSPI message, for example, made the audience think, but more importantly, it made them feel the excess of the fat in the popcorn.
Stories: Narratives are the oldest form there is for getting a message across. Even if we are not aware of it, we understand our world by connecting ideas through the stories we tell about those ideas. Even though the CSPI message did not have a specific story, the layout of the message created a dramatic connection between the one bag of popcorn and the entire table of fatty foods (2).
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: How did George de Mestral get the idea for Velcro? What are the key elements that make a sticky message?
Challenge - Sticky SUCCES: What is an example of an advertisement or public service announcement that you have seen that you would classify as sticky. Describe the advertisement/PSA and explain which elements of SUCCES are included and how these elements contribute to the effectiveness of the message.
Sources:
1 – https://www.velcro.com/about-us/our-brand
2-Heath, Chip and Dan Heath. Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Die and Others Survive. New York: Random House, 2007.
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