Brandwashed Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Martin Lindstrom Company, Limited

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Crown Business,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lindstrom, Martin, 1970–

  Brandwashed : tricks companies use to manipulate our minds and persuade us to buy / Martin Lindstrom.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Include index.

  1. Consumer behavior. 2. Consumers—Psychology. 3. Brand choice—Psychological aspects. 4. Marketing—Psychological aspects. 5. Neuromarketing. I. Title.

  HF5415.32.L557 2011

  658.8343—dc23 2011023484

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53174-0

  JACKET DESIGN BY EVAN GAFFNEY

  v3.1

  Dorit, Tore, and Allan—

  without you I would be nothing

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword by Morgan Spurlock

  Introduction: A Brand Detox

  CHAPTER 1

  Buy Buy Baby

  When companies start marketing to us in the womb

  CHAPTER 2

  Peddling Panic and Paranoia

  Why fear sells

  CHAPTER 3

  I Can’t Quit You

  Brand addicts, shopaholics, and why we can’t live without our smart phones

  CHAPTER 4

  Buy It, Get Laid

  The new face of sex (and the sexes) in advertising

  CHAPTER 5

  Under Pressure

  The power of peers

  CHAPTER 6

  Oh, Sweet Memories

  The new (but also old) face of nostalgia marketing

  CHAPTER 7

  Marketers’ Royal Flush

  The hidden powers of celebrity and fame

  CHAPTER 8

  Hope in a Jar

  The price of health, happiness, and spiritual enlightenment

  CHAPTER 9

  Every Breath You Take, They’ll Be Watching You

  The end of privacy

  CONCLUSION

  I’ll Have What Mrs. Morgenson Is Having

  The most powerful hidden persuader of them all: us

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  MORGAN SPURLOCK

  PRESENTS THE GREATEST

  FOREWORD EVER WRITTEN

  by Morgan Spurlock,

  director of Super Size Me and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

  Over the years, I’ve put myself in some of the most horrible situations and scenarios possible. I once traveled to a half dozen or so Middle Eastern war zones, including Pakistan and Afghanistan, in the hope of finding the exact coordinates of Osama bin Laden. I worked as a coal miner in West Virginia, and I spent nearly a month wearing a jumpsuit in a prison cell. I also wrote, directed, and starred in the movie Super Size Me, in which I gorged myself with McDonald’s hamburgers, French fries, and sodas until my body was bloated, my liver was pâté, and my cholesterol was just this side of death.

  But can I just go on record as saying that nothing—not jail, not black coal dust, not the Afghanistan mountains, not the awful mirror image of my own McTorso—prepared me for the world of advertising and marketing?

  My latest film, Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, is a documentary about the insidious ways corporations manage to get their brands in our faces all the time—and incidentally, includes my own efforts to finance my film by precisely the same means. (In the end, I approached roughly six hundred brands in all. Most of them told me politely to get lost. In the end, twenty-two of them agreed to sponsor my movie.) As is the case with all the movies I make, all I was looking for was a little honesty and transparency. This is the Information Age, right? Aren’t honesty and transparency supposed to be “the thing” right now?

  My goal in making Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was to make you, me, and everybody else in the world aware of the extent to which we are marketed to, and clubbed over the head with brands, just about every second of our lives. After all, you can’t even go into the men’s room at the mall without being obliged to pee on a urinal cake that’s advertising “Spiderman 6.” Nor can you escape the brand paradise that is your local shopping mall without climbing behind the wheel of your Toyota Scion LC, turning up the volume on the Keb’ Mo’ playing on your Apple iPod that connects to your car radio via a Griffin iTrip FM transmitter, and sliding your Dockers-enclosed leg and Nike Air Force 1 sneaker onto the gas, at which point you’re assailed by one highway billboard after another for Kenny Rogers Roasters, Taco Bell, KFC, Papa Gino’s, Holiday Inn, Comfort Inn, Marriott Courtyard Residence, Shell Oil, and—are you getting some sense of why I wanted to make my movie? In one scene, I asked consumer advocate Ralph Nader where I should go to avoid all marketing and advertising entreaties. “To sleep,” he told me. It was a depressing moment.

  Which brings me to Martin Lindstrom and the groundbreaking book you’re gripping in your hands.

  I first met Martin when he agreed to appear in my film. I’d read his last book, Buyology, which explores the hot spots in our brains that compel humans to buy everything from Harley-Davidson motorbikes to Corona beers, and I thought he’d be an interesting, innovative person to talk to. As a global marketing guru who works with everyone from Coca-Cola to Disney to Microsoft, as well as a consumer who detests being manipulated by advertisers and corporations, Martin maintains a very fine line between what he knows and (how else to put it?) what he really knows. If you catch my drift.

  In Brandwashed, Martin yanks back the curtains and serves up a page-turning exposé of how advertisers and companies make us feel we’ll be bereft, stupid, and social outcasts unless we buy that new model of iPad or that new brand of deodorant or that make of baby stroller whose price is equal to the monthly rent of your average urban studio apartment. Just as I do in my documentary, he aims to expose all that goes on in the subterranean world of marketing and advertising. Only he has one distinct advantage. He’s a true insider. Martin takes us into conference rooms across the world. He talks to advertising and marketing executives and industry insiders. He teases out some fantastic war stories, including some of his own.

  Along the way he shows us the most underhanded ploys and tricks that marketers use to get us to part with our money. Such as scaring the crap out of us; reminding us of wonderfully fuzzy days gone by (which actually never existed); using peer pressure so we’ll feel like wallflowers if we don’t do, or buy, what the rest of the world is doing, or buying; using sex to sell us everything from perfume to men’s underwear; paying celebrities a bajillion dollars to endorse bottled water, or just cross their skinny legs (clad in $300 jeans) in the front row of a fashion show; injecting what we eat and drink with this or that magical elixir that promises to give us a one-way ticket to Shangri-la and eternal life; and that’s not even the half of what you’ll learn inside Brandwashed.

  In the course of these pages, Martin also rolls out a TV reality show called The Morgensons, where he implants a real-life family inside a Southern California neighborhood to test whether word-of-mouth recommendations work. (It’s fascinating, and also pretty horrifying, to consider that that sweet young couple down the block could actually be paid marketing commandos.) With my film and his book, he and I share a goal: to let consumers—you and me�
��in on the game, so that we know when we’re being conned or manipulated, and can fight back, or at least duck for cover, that is, assuming there’s anyplace left to hide.

  Now, because I’m all about transparency, you may very well be saying to yourself, Hmm, Morgan seems to like this book a lot and he’s never struck me as a bullshitter, so it must be worth reading, right? Well, guess what. You’ve just been hooked by not just one but several of the marketing ploys you’ll read about in this book.

  Only, in this case, it happens to be true: Brandwashed and Martin Lindstrom will blow your mind. Don’t just take my word for it. Read on and see for yourself.

  INTRODUCTION

  A Brand Detox

  In the UK, there’s an anticonsumerist movement called Enough. Its adherents believe that we as a society quite simply consume too much stuff and that our overconsuming culture is partly responsible for many of the social ills that plague our planet, from world poverty to environmental destruction to social alienation. Enough urges people to ask themselves, “How much is enough?” “How can we live more lightly, and with less?” and “How can we be less dependent on buying things to feel good about ourselves?”1

  I couldn’t agree more. I may be a professional marketer, but I’m a consumer, too. As someone who’s been on the front lines of the branding wars for over twenty years, I’ve spent countless hours behind closed doors with CEOs, advertising executives, and marketing mavens at some of the biggest companies in the world. So I’ve seen—and at times been profoundly disturbed by—the full range of psychological tricks and schemes companies and their shrewd marketers and advertisers have concocted to prey on our most deeply rooted fears, dreams, and desires, all in the service of persuading us to buy their brands and products.

  Yes, I’ve been a part of it. No, I’m not always proud of it. I’ve been part of some campaigns that I’m incredibly proud of. But I’ve also seen how far some marketing goes. Which is why, around the time I started writing this book—one in which I hope to pick up where Vance Packard’s 1957 classic, The Hidden Persuaders, left off and expose the best-kept secrets of how today’s companies and their marketers are manipulating us—I decided that as a consumer, I’d quite simply had enough.

  So last year I decided I would go on a brand detox—a consumer fast of sorts. More specifically I decided that I would not buy any new brands for one solid year. I would allow myself to continue to use the possessions I already owned—my clothes, my cell phone, and so on. But I wouldn’t buy a single new brand. How do I define “brand”? Well, in my line of work I look at life through a particular lens: one that sees virtually everything on earth—from the cell phones and computers we use to the watches and clothes we wear to the movies we watch and books we read to the foods we eat to the celebrities and sports teams we worship—as a brand. A form of ID. A statement to the world about who we are or who we wish to be. In short, in today’s marketing- and advertising-saturated world, we cannot escape brands.

  Nevertheless, I was determined to try to prove that it was possible to resist all the temptations our consumer culture throws at us.

  Yes, I knew this would be a challenge, especially for a guy who is on the road over three hundred nights a year. It would mean no more Pepsi. No more Fiji water. No more glasses of good French wine. That new album I was hearing such good things about? Forget about it. The brand of American chewing gum I’m partial to? No dice.

  How else did my lifestyle have to change? In the morning, since I couldn’t eat any branded foods, like Cheerios or English muffins, I started eating an apple for breakfast. To shave, I use a battery-powered Gillette Power razor known as the Fusion; luckily I already owned that, but since I couldn’t buy shaving cream, I had to start shaving in the shower. I traded my electric toothbrush and Colgate toothpaste for tiny travel ones the airlines offer for free, and I started using the other freebies that airlines and hotels provided.

  Some habits I had to give up completely. Sometimes, in countries where eating the local cuisine can be dodgy, I bring along packs of ramen noodles. Well, sorry, but no ramen. I’d just have to take my chances. As any traveler knows, the air gets dry on long plane flights and in hotel rooms, so I typically use a face moisturizer by Clarins. Not anymore. I often pop a vitamin C if I feel a head cold in the wings. Now I’d have to make do with a glass of orange juice (the generic kind). Sometimes before TV appearances, if my hair looks crazy, I’ll use a hair gel called Dax. For a year I’d have to run a comb through it and hope for the best.

  If I didn’t live the kind of life that I do, I might have been able to survive without brands for an eternity. But given my insane travel schedule, I knew I had to allow myself some exceptions, so before I kicked off my detox, I first set a few ground rules. As I said, I could still use the things I already owned. I was also permitted to buy plane tickets, lodging, transportation, and nonbranded food, of course (so I wouldn’t starve). I just couldn’t buy any new brands—or ask for any. Thus, in midflight, when the drinks cart came rolling around, I couldn’t ask for Pepsi or Diet Coke. Instead, I asked for “some soda.” I continued going to restaurants, but I made sure to order the “house wine,” and if a dish claimed it came with “Provençal” potatoes or “Adirondack tomatoes,” well, I’d just have to order something else.

  For the first few months I did quite well, if I may say so myself. In some respects, not buying anything new came as a relief. But at the same time it wasn’t easy. Have you ever tried shopping at the grocery store and not buying a single brand? In airports, for example, while I’m killing time between flights, I like to wander through duty-free shops. I enjoy buying gifts for friends or stocking up on chocolate. Then I’d remember—Martin, you’re in brand rehab—and I’d turn around and leave. At the time of my detox, the world was struggling through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—one precipitated in part by out-of-control consumer spending. So like most people, I wasn’t immune to the feeling that unless my purchases were essential and practical, I shouldn’t buy anything. Yet knowing that so many people felt this way, companies and advertisers were doing everything in their power to get us to open our wallets. From London to Singapore to Dubai to New York, fantastic sales and bargains and special offers were everywhere; it seemed every store window was a sea of signs for 50 percent off this or two for the price of one of that screaming my name. Each time I walked down the street, I seemed to be assaulted by posters and billboards for some sexy new fragrance or shiny new brand of wristwatch—on sale, of course. Every time I turned on the TV, all that seemed to be on were commercials: svelte twentysomethings gathered poolside drinking a particular brand of beer; rosy-cheeked children gathered at the breakfast table on a sunny morning, happily scarfing down a bowl of a certain brand of cereal; Olympic gold medalists performing feats of impossible athleticism in a certain brand of sports gear and sneakers. Somehow, even the packages of mouthwash and fruit juice and potato chips and candy bars I’d never noticed before were calling to me from the aisles of the supermarket and drugstore and seemed oddly alluring.

  But I took the high ground.

  Under the terms of my detox, I wasn’t even allowed to buy a book, a magazine, or a newspaper (yes, I think of all of these as brands that tell the world who you are or, in some cases, would like to be perceived as being), and let me tell you, those fourteen-hour transatlantic flights got pretty boring with nothing to read. Then there were the frustrating times a friend would tell me about a fascinating article or novel that had just come out. Under normal circumstances, I would have hunted down the thing. Now I couldn’t. Instead I’d stand balefully at the magazine kiosk or inside a bookstore, scanning the newspaper or magazine or book in question until a clerk shot me the universal look for “Get out if you’re not going to buy something.”

  Harder still was being around my friends. I couldn’t buy a round of beers at a bar or a gift for someone’s birthday—and I happen to love buying people presents. Instead, I made up one lame excuse
after another. I feared my friends secretly thought I was being a tightwad, that my brand detox was just an excuse to be cheap. But I stuck with it anyway. I was determined to prove that with a little discipline and willpower, I could inure myself to all the persuasive marketeering, advertising, and branding that surrounded me.

  Then, six months into it, it all came tumbling down. The fact that my brand fast lasted only six months, and the fact that a person who should have known better got punked by his own profession, says a whole lot about just how shrewd companies are at engineering desire. So does what happened to me immediately after I toppled off the wagon.

  If I Fell

  My relapse took place in Cyprus. The night it happened, I was scheduled to give a keynote presentation. But when my plane touched down at the airport, I discovered the airline had misplaced my suitcase. It was gone. Which meant I didn’t have anything to wear for my speech. I had the pants I was wearing, but no shirt other than a sweaty, unfragrant black T‑shirt that I had no time to wash. Here’s something they don’t teach you in Harvard Business School: Never give a keynote presentation naked from the waist up. This wasn’t some drive-by, meet-and-greet appearance, either. It was an important presentation, and they were paying me well and expecting a good crowd. I admit it, I freaked out.

  Half an hour after checking into my hotel, I found myself standing at the cash register of a local tourist trap, holding a white T‑shirt in my hands. It was the only color the store had. The letters on the front spelled out “I CYPRUS.”

  I’d officially relapsed. And all for a crappy T‑shirt, too. Not only did I break my detox, but for the first time in recent memory, I broke my all-in-black rule and gave my presentation wearing black pants and my ridiculous white T‑shirt. Despite my questionable attire, the evening went well, but that wasn’t the point. As they say in certain twelve-step programs, one drink is too much, and a thousand is too few. In other words, now that I’d given myself permission to end my brand fast, the dam had burst. I went a little nuts.