The message of the campaign was Texans donât litter. Notice that the celebrities are valuable only insofar as they can quickly establish the schema of âTexasââor, more specifically, of âideal, masculine Texans.â Even people who dislike Willie Nelsonâs music can appreciate his quality of Texan-ness.
The campaign was an instant success. Within a few months of the launch, an astonishing 73 percent of Texans polled could recall the message and identify it as an antilitter message. Within one year, litter had declined 29 percent.
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Donât Mess with Texas,â as a phrase, is a great slogan. But we shouldnât confuse the slogan with the idea. The idea was that Syrek could make Bubba care about litter by showing him that real Texans didnât litter. The idea was that Bubba would respond to an identity appeal better than he would to a rational self-interest appeal. Even if a second-rate copywriter had been hired, and the slogan had been âDonât Disrespect Texas,â the campaign would still have decreased cans on Texas highways.
âINNOVATION CYCLE STEP 1: FARM FOR DISSENT . . . Finally, one VP said to me, âYouâre so intense when you believe in something, Reed, that I felt you wouldnât hear me. I should have laid down on the tracks screaming that I thought it would fail. But I didnât.â
The culture at Netflix had been sending the message to our people that, despite all our talk about candor, differences of opinion were not always welcome. Thatâs when we added a new element to our culture. We now say that it is disloyal to Netflix when you disagree with an idea and do not express that disagreement. By withholding your opinion, you are implicitly choosing to not help the company.
Most important were the lessons that not just Yasemin, but the entire Netflix Marketing team learned from her mistake. âWhen we hire new marketing people, we have a series of historic cases we cover with them to teach what not to do. The Turkey Black Mirror campaign is one of our favorite teaching cases and everyone talks about it.â Yasemin explains. âIt demonstrates so clearly the importance of socializing and what happens when you donât do it. But it also helped all of us in marketing to remember our goal at Netflix is to create moments of joy. So donât run a campaign thatâs a little creepy. Donât try to spook the public into watching our shows. Instead, a good campaign should be exciting, joyful, and just plain fun.
Even when I ran my bar I followed the same policy. A lot of customers came to the bar. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and said heâd come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it the other way, it didnât matter if nine out of ten didnât like my bar. This realization lifted a weight off my shoulders.
Still, what Chenoweth and Stephan found was dramatic. The Selma march and the larger American civil rights movement were not exceptions. Nonviolent campaigns were ten times more likely to be successful than violent ones. They seem better able to inspire trust between people on opposing sides of a divide, reduce the doubting churn that otherwise exists between them, and thus enable more cooperation going forward. As Chenoweth put it in an interview with the Harvard Gazette in 2019, âCountries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaignsâ whether the campaigns succeeded or failed.â
The Selma marchers, in their willingness to suffer peopleâs inhumanity out of faith in peopleâs ultimate humanity, had tapped into a less obvious but long understood source of power.