Let's dive into the first key barrier we need to reduce, and that is reactants. In what better place to examine why persuasion sometimes doesn't work, and then a situation when it shouldn't have even been necessary in the first place? In early 2018, the company, Procter & Gamble, had a small PR problem. Fifty years earlier, they had launched Salvo, a granular laundry detergent that was compacted into a tablet form. Rather than having a measure out exactly how much detergent to use or risk getting a sticky mess on your hands and clothes, consumers could just put one of these little small encased capsules into their laundry, into their washing machine and go ahead. It worked out okay, but it didn't do great, and so they took it off the market. But then a number of years later, Procter & Gamble came out a new version. They introduced it under the Tide Brand and they called them Tide Pods, and they launched them with the promise of making laundry easier, same idea. Sometimes we get our hands messy, we don't know how much to dose. These cute little tablets would make laundry easier. The company invested more than $100 million in marketing, believing that the pods could ultimately capture over 30 percent of the more than six billion dollar laundry market. They rolled them out and Tide Pods did okay, but there was only one problem, people were eating them. The Tide Pod challenge, as it was called, started as a joke. The ONION satirical website, CollegeHumor, another website, put out videos and pieces of content, joking that the Tide Pods, they're good enough that people could eat them. Now, people are actually challenging others to eat detergent. Teens would shoot videos of themselves chewing or gagging on the Pods and post them on YouTube. Other people took photos and pretended to eat them. Soon, everyone from Fox News to The Washington Post was covering the story. So Procter & Gamble did what most companies would do in a situation like this. They told people not to do it. On January 12th, 2018, Tide sent out of very simple tweet, what should Tide Pods be used for? Doing laundry, nothing else. Nothing, nothing else. Eating a Tide Pod is a bad idea. In case that wasn't enough, to make things even clearer, Tide enlisted a celebrity. They hired football player, Rob Gronkowski, of the New England Patriots of the time to help. In a very short video, Tide asked Gronk whether it's ever okay to eat Tide Pods, whether it's ever a good idea. Very simply, Gronk says, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." Shakes his finger and says no, no, no again, and the video closes with a warning. Laundry pacs are highly concentrated detergent meant only to clean clothes. If that wasn't ambiguous enough, they add a quote from Gronk, "Do not eat". They thought that would be enough and they thought that would get people to stop eating Tide Pods. But that's exactly when all hell broke loose. Now, warnings had been a standard approach for decades, whether you're trying to get people to eat less fat or not drink and drive, telling people what to do is a standard way to get them to do it. Wear your seatbelt, don't drink and drive, eat less fat. Pick any health concern and add an admonishment not to do it or to do it if it's a good or bad idea, and you've basically captured the essence of public health messaging for the last 50 years. So it's no surprise that P&G, Procter & Gamble, thought this is what they should do. The executive probably thought it was ridiculous that they had to say anything in the first place. Who would think that something filled with alcohol, ethoxy sulfate, and propylene glycol, if I even pronounced that correctly, would be a good idea? The website already had a note saying keep out of reach of children enlisting Gronk to tell people not to eat the pod should've been enough. It should have stemmed every doubt and gotten people not to do it. But that's not what happened. On the screen in front of you is a little bit of data. I love looking at data in these situations. So it shows the searches on Google for Tide Pods overtime. You see they're going up a little bit as the Tide Pod challenge comes out, but then you see a point in which P&G made their announcement. Now, you'd think that they announced would be enough to stop people. You would think that searches would go down and that would be the end of it. But as you can see, that's not what happened. Google searches for Tide Pods spiked to their highest level ever. Within a week, they were up almost 700 percent. Unfortunately, traffic wasn't just from concerned parents trying to figure out why Tide had taken into Twitter to remind people of the obvious. Visits to poison control shot up as well. Within a few months, the number of people had more than double that of over the prior two years combined. Very simply, Tide's efforts had backfired. The Tide Pod challenge might seem unusual. It might seem like a weird situation that only happened to them, but it's actually an example of a much broader phenomenon. Instructing jurors to disregard admissible testimony can actually encourage them to weigh it more heavily. Alcohol prevention messages, telling people not to drink, can lead college students to drink more. Trying to persuade people that smoking is bad by telling them not to smoke can actually make them more interested in smoking in the future. In these and dozens of other similar examples, warnings became recommendations. Just like telling a teenager not to date someone somehow makes that person somehow more alluring, telling people not to do something has the opposite effect. It often makes them more likely to do it. To understand why, we need to understand the science of reactants. Very simply when pushed, people don't just go along, they often push back.
