1. Reactance
Chuck Wolfe was facing an impossible task. Florida’s governor had asked him to head up a new program. This itself was nothing new. Chuck had served the governor for almost a decade in a variety of different roles: operations manager, director of external affairs, and executive director of financial oversight. He had developed and implemented programs that aided relief efforts after Hurricane Andrew and helped the city of Miami dig itself out of its financial crisis.
But this time the challenge was much larger. Chuck’s job was to build a team to fight an industry that sold more than a trillion products to more than a billion consumers worldwide. An industry that spent almost $10 billion a year marketing its products and in which leading companies individually had profits larger than Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and McDonald’s.
Combined.
Chuck’s goal? To do something dozens of organizations had failed at for decades: to get teens to stop smoking.
* * *
In the late 1990s, smoking was the biggest public health crisis facing the nation. Cigarettes were the largest cause of preventable deaths and disease, killing tens of millions of people worldwide. In the United States alone, smoking was responsible for one in five deaths and had an economic cost of almost $150 billion a year.1
The problem was particularly acute among teens. Tobacco companies knew the youth market was vital to their success. While outwardly they claimed to avoid teens and children, internally they knew that wasn’t an option. “Today’s teenager is tomorrow’s potential regular customer, and the overwhelming majority of smokers first begin to smoke while still in their teens,” a Philip Morris memo noted. Not selling to children meant going out of business.
So companies used all manner of devices to appeal to the younger demographic. When the Flintstones cartoon debuted in 1960, Winston cigarettes was the sponsor, and commercials showed Fred and Barney Rubble taking cigarette breaks. When advertising on television and radio was banned in the early 1970s, cigarette companies invented friendly cartoon characters like Joe Camel to make cigarettes seem fun. And when regular cigarettes didn’t seem attractive enough for younger palates, they introduced flavored tobacco in colorful candy wrappers to make the product more appealing.
It worked.
Teen smoking rates should be low. Federal law requires that people be at least eighteen to purchase cigarettes in the United States, and most students don’t reach that age until midway through their last year of high school. Some cities have raised the age even higher.
But by the late 1990s, things looked ominous. Almost three-quarters of high school students had smoked.2 One in four seniors reported smoking daily. Teen smoking was at a nineteen-year high. And the numbers were increasing.
Someone needed to shut teen smoking down. And fast.
But stopping teens smoking was no easy task. Organizations had tried—and failed—for decades. Countries banned cigarette advertising. They added health warnings to tobacco packaging. And they spent billions of dollars trying to persuade young people to quit.
But despite all these efforts, smoking rates actually increased.3
How could Chuck Wolfe succeed when everything else had failed?
When Warnings Become Recommendations
To answer that question, it helps to understand why prior warnings fell short. And what better way to do that than examine a warning that shouldn’t have even been necessary in the first place?
* * *
In early 2018, Procter & Gamble had a small PR problem.
Fifty years earlier they had launched Salvo, a granular laundry detergent compacted into tablet form. The tablets weren’t that successful, but after decades of work, Procter & Gamble had a new formulation that they thought would be more effective. Rather than having to measure out exactly how much detergent to use, or risk getting a sticky mess on their clothes, consumers could just pull one of these small self-encased bubbles from a box and toss it into the washing machine. The plastic would dissolve in the water, releasing the detergent only when needed. No muss, no fuss.
Procter & Gamble introduced the product under the Tide brand, called them Tide Pods, and launched them with the promise of making laundry easier. The company invested more than $150 million in marketing, believing that the pods could ultimately capture 30 percent of the $6.5 billion U.S. laundry detergent market.
There was only one problem: people were eating them.
The Tide Pod Challenge, as it was called, started as a joke. Someone remarked that the bright orange and blue swirls looked good enough to eat, and after an Onion article (“So Help Me God, I’m Going to Eat One of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods”), a CollegeHumor video, and various social media posts, a buzz started.
Now people were challenging others to eat detergent. Teens would shoot videos of themselves chewing or gagging on the pods and post them on YouTube, daring others to do the same. In feats of culinary inspiration, some were even cooking the pods before ingesting them.4
Soon everyone from Fox News to the Washington Post was covering the craze. Doctors were brought in to comment, parents wrung their hands, and everyone puzzled over the odd trend that was picking up steam.
So Procter & Gamble did what many companies would do in this situation. They told people not to do it.
On January 12, 2018, Tide tweeted “What should Tide PODs be used for? DOING LAUNDRY. Nothing else.
Eating a Tide POD is a BAD IDEA…”
To make things even clearer, Tide enlisted celebrity football player Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski to help. In a short video, Tide asks Gronk whether eating Tide Pods is ever a good idea. His answer is simple. “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,” Gronk says as he shakes his finger at the camera and the screen fills with “NOs.” “Not even as a joke?” they ask. “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,” Gronk replies. “Should you use Tide Pods for anything but cleaning clothes?” they say. “NO,” says Gronk.
The video closes with a warning: “Laundry packs are highly concentrated detergent meant only to clean clothes.” And as if that weren’t unambiguous enough, they add a quote from Gronk: “Do not eat.”
For good measure, a couple hours later Gronk himself followed up on social media. “I’ve partnered with @Tide to make sure you know, Tide PODs are for doing laundry,” he tweeted. “Nothing else!”
And that’s when all hell broke loose.
* * *
Warning people about health risks has been a standard approach for decades. Eat less fat. Don’t drink and drive. Wear your seat belt. Pick any health concern, add an admonishment to do it (if it’s good) or not do it (if it’s bad), and you’ve basically captured the essence of public health messaging for the last fifty years.
So it’s no surprise that Procter & Gamble thought this is what they should do. The Tide execs probably thought it was ridiculous that they had to say anything in the first place. Who would think that eating something filled with alcohol ethoxy sulfate and propylene glycol would be a good idea? After all, the website already had a helpful note saying, “Keep out of reach of children.” Enlisting Gronk to tell people not to eat the pods should help spread the word and stem any doubt.