In 1966, at the University of Minnesota, 48 male sophomores listened to a tape of a student trying out for the College Quiz Bowl team. The student on the tape answered 92 percent of 50 questions correctly and mentioned, modestly, that in high school he had been an honor student, the yearbook editor and a member of the track team. Then, near the end of the interview, a clatter of crockery, a chair scraping back, and an anguished voice: "Oh my goodness, I've spilled coffee all over my new suit."
Some listeners heard that spill from the 92-percent man. Others heard the identical spill, duplicated from the same recording and spliced onto the tape of a man who had answered only 30 percent of the questions correctly and admitted he had failed to make his high school track team. Everything else was held constant. Elliot Aronson, Ben Willerman and Joanne Floyd ran the experiment and published it in Psychonomic Science, and the four attraction scores those tapes produced are the whole story of this article.
The star who spilled his coffee was liked the most. The star who stayed clean was liked less. The average man who stayed clean came in a step below that. And the average man who spilled was liked least of all. Each listener rated the man he heard on eight questions, each on a scale running from -7 to +7, and the four composite scores came out at 30.2, 20.8, 17.8 and -2.5. The average man who spilled did not just lose ground. One cup of coffee pushed him below zero, into net dislike.
The fine print punishes the mediocre
Here is the part every retelling drops. The pratfall's statistically solid effect is the punishment, not the lift. The average man's collapse from 17.8 to -2.5 was significant on its own, t = 3.15, p < .01. The star's rise from 20.8 to 30.2, in the paper's own words, "while in the expected direction, does not reach statistical significance" - t = 1.45, p < .18. What cleared the bar was the interaction between ability and spill, F = 10.33, p < .01. The pratfall by itself was statistically insignificant.
My reading of that fine print: a blunder does not create likability. It borrows against competence already banked. The spill bought the brilliant man 9.4 points of attraction and cost the ordinary man 20.3. Same coffee, same clatter, same anguished sentence. The only variable was what the listener had already been shown.
Which is why the two most famous confessions in advertising history worked, and neither was a gamble on charm alone.
In 1963, Avis, which had not turned a profit in 13 years, began running ads its agency Doyle Dane Bernbach had written, opening with the admission that it was No. 2 in rental cars and arguing that this was exactly why its people tried harder. Copywriter Paula Green wrote the line. Within a year, Avis had turned a $3.2 million loss into a $1.2 million profit. From 1963 to 1966 the share gap between Hertz and Avis narrowed from 61-29 to 49-36. Avis never caught Hertz, and the company dropped "We try harder" in 2012. What carried the line was not the confession but the behavior behind it: We Try Harder buttons on staff, operational standards that came to the counter with the slogan, a promise checkable at every rental desk.
Forty-six years after Avis opened its campaign, Domino's ran the pratfall on purpose. Its December 2009 "Pizza Turnaround" ads put real focus-group footage on camera, customers saying the crust was like cardboard, and shipped a reformulated pizza in the same breath. The confession never stood alone; it was the announcement that the fix had already happened. The company's May 2010 press release reported the score for the quarter that ended March 28, 2010: domestic same-store sales grew "14.3% as a result of increased store traffic from the successful introduction of its New and Inspired Pizza." A year earlier, the same measure had grown 1.0 percent.
Most brands run the study backwards. They confess instead of fixing, drafting humble copy to sit on top of a product nobody has improved. Or they fix and never admit, spending the improvement on silence and leaving the reader to assume the old flaws still live there. The listener in the Minnesota experiment answered one question before the spill counted for or against anything: how good is this person, really. Your customer answers the same question before your confession lands, and answers it from evidence, not from your tone.
Your standing is public here
On the leaderboard this blog lives on, the competence question is settled in public before anyone reads a word of copy. Your rank is your total bid value in the current month, ties are broken by the most recent payment, and the board resets on the 1st of every month with the minimum bid back at $1. The arithmetic of your standing sits on the page right next to your tagline, and the submission form lets you write that tagline yourself.
So the self-deprecating line, the "we are No. 2, so we answer faster" kind, is always available. Whether it reads as charm or as confirmation depends on the number printed beside it. From the top of the board, the modest tagline is the star's coffee spill: humanity sitting on demonstrated standing. From the bottom, the identical line is the -2.5 cell. Bank the 92 percent first, then spill.
If your work can carry the truth, claim a spot and write the tagline you mean at bidspotlight.com/submit.