How Texas reduced highway littering by 72% and created a national slogan

Personally, I’ve never been to Texas but I’m assuming these signs are everywhere:

First, a little bit of background. Prior to 1986, the state of Texas was incapable of reducing highway littering with their expensive and highly publicized advertisement campaign that emphasized civic duty. The litterers were males between the age of 18-24 (or 18-35 depending on the source), who probably didn’t care that some state official was trying to tell them what to do. How did Texas fix this issue and create a now-trademarked slogan that ended up in the Advertisement Hall of Fame? We call this a successful application of Segmenting, Targeting, Positioning.

The first two tasks are fairly easy to recognize. Dividing the population of Texas into segments, the state chose to target adult males under the age of 35 because they are statistically more likely to litter. With this information in hard, officials wanted to appeal to feelings of pride and toughness. They recruited popular Dallas Cowboys football players and famous singers like Willie Nelson over the years. In this vintage commercial, Randy White and Too Tall Jones are shown collecting trash along the highway, not to mention crushing beer cans and yelling “Don’t mess with Texas!” If you were a young man in the late 80’s, would you think twice before littering?

I decided to write about this slogan after reading a chapter in Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein’s recent book titled Nudge. In a nutshell, the authors explain how people make decisions, and sometimes they require shortcuts (hence, “nudge”) in order to get to the decision that makes the most economical sense. The Texas example is a case of “following the herd”, which happens to include recognizable figures in sports, television and music. Basically, people are more likely to do something (positive or negative) if they are convinced that other people are doing it. Why do you think trends happen?

Now, an estimated 95% of Texans know this slogan. I don’t even think 50% of British Columbians know what the BC slogan is. (Answer: The best place on earth) Ten years and 38 commercials later, it became (by a landslide) America’s Favourite Slogan. The spelling of “favorite” is really ironic here.

How many celebrities do you recognize here? And if Chuck Norris says not to do it, I sure wouldn’t try to.