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  No big deal; Club Penguin costs only $5.95 a month! If you’re a parent, that’s not so bad, right? A small price to keep your children away from online pornography and YouTube (and get some peace and quiet). But hold on, what happens when the free coins run out? Your child can earn more . . . by playing. The more you earn, the more you can buy. The more you buy, the more you want to earn. The site may be keeping kids relatively safe, but it’s also schooling them in the pain and pleasures of compulsive shopping.

  Of course, there are games like this for grown-ups, too, like the highly addictive Facebook game Mafia Wars, which has so far grossed over $100 million and, as of August 2010, had 45.5 million active monthly accounts. Here, completing missions and “jobs”—like “icing” an enemy or unseating a “boss” or pulling off a successful heist—wins you cash and “experience points.” The more points you win, the more levels magically unlock, keeping you in the never-ending pursuit of higher and higher highs and bigger and better rewards.

  Then, of course, there’s Mafia Wars’ equally addictive cousin, FarmVille, another virtual-world phenomenon that, as of June 2010, was the most popular game on Facebook, with over 61.6 million active users and over 24.1 million fans. At time of writing, 20 million players checked into the game daily, according to the New York Times.32 The structure of the game is more or less the same, only here, you win cash and unlock levels through activities like planting pumpkins, picking apples, and harvesting chicken eggs (though of course, as with Mafia Wars, you can also purchase virtual currency with real dollars). And the more levels you unlock, the bigger and better things you can buy; one self-proclaimed FarmVille addict once told me (and I swear, I saw stars in her eyes) that it was her “dream in life” to someday be able to afford what is apparently the most coveted purchase in this virtual world: the FarmVille Villa (priced at, in case you’re wondering, one million FarmVille coins). Sure, it may sound monumentally tedious, but it is in fact utterly mesmerizing. So much so that today, according to Carnegie Mellon professor and game designer Jesse Schell, at the time of writing there were far more FarmVille members on Facebook than there were Twitter accounts,33 and according to a new Nielsen report, social networks and online games eat up roughly a third of our Internet time.34

  Of course, in addition to sending us shots of dopamine every time we buy a new tractor or renovate our barn, these games are also hard at work persuading us to buy real-world things. Let’s not forget that while we’re racking up all those “experience” points in pursuit of that dopamine high, we’re also being exposed to a whole lot of targeted advertising. In fact, Zynga, the parent company that publishes both Mafia Wars and FarmVille, got into hot water in 2009 for its direct-marketing program that invited users to amass virtual currency in exchange for clicking on various offers, filling out surveys, and downloading applications (a Mother’s Day ad campaign in which FarmVille players could earn virtual currency if they clicked on an offer promising that they would send someone real flowers).35 And in 2010, a scandal erupted when it was discovered that ten popular Facebook applications, including FarmVille, may have been passing on users’ personal information to marketing companies.36

  It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Facebook itself can be just as addictive as the games people play on it. I’ve spoken to teenagers and college-aged men and women who have attempted to go off the site, or rather, tried to take a break from it during, say, final exams. They can’t. For most users, particularly adolescents, it’s all or nothing. Like alcoholics who can trust themselves not to drink only by emptying the liquor cabinet, they find they can trust themselves not to log on only if they deactivate their accounts. Believe it or not, part of the reason the whole Facebook experience is so addictive is that it’s deliberately designed to be that way. According to Time magazine, Facebook has intentionally created what it calls “aha moments,” which reporter Dan Fletcher describes as “an observable emotional connection, like stumbling on the profile of a long-lost friend from grade school, seeing a picture of a newborn niece for the first time, or catching up with an ex-boyfriend.”

  And the company knows exactly how many of these moments users must have before they are good and truly hooked (though the site will not divulge the magic number, at least publicly). How do they know? “Because they’ve videotaped the expressions of test users as they navigate the site for the first time,” says Fletcher.37

  Last but not least there’s Foursquare, in which users earn points and badges by “checking in” at bars, stores, and restaurants and compete viciously for “mayorship” of their most-frequented establishments (giving those establishments free advertising in the process). Foursquare is hailed as the next big thing in social media (at the time of writing, there were some 2.5 million users), and I’ve spoken to aficionados who describe it as being “like a drug” and admit to feeling uneasy and on edge if they go somewhere and fail to “check in.” A recent New York Times article reveals the extent of players’ obsession with the game, describing one Philadelphia man who was competing with his girlfriend over mayorship of her own home and another man who became so obsessed with gaining mayorship of an alley (yes, an alley) that he developed a computer program that helped him cheat by automatically checking him in to the alley every day at 1:23 p.m. To explain this baffling phenomenon, the article quotes Alexander R. Galloway, an associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, who noted that “Foursquare taps into our urge to win when placed in a competitive environment, especially in front of our peers” and that “Foursquare turns spaces into a game, and part of its allure is the gamelike aspect.”38

  A similar game is SCVNGR, an app you can download to your iPhone or BlackBerry (and some five hundred thousand users already have). As with Foursquare, you earn points and unlock badges by telling friends where you are and what you’re up to. But taking the game one step further, you also earn points for completing bizarre challenges. Want four points? Fold the aluminum in which your burrito was served into an origami bird! According to FastCompany, SCVNGR is even testing out a partnership with Citibank to roll out a card that is “a game itself, with two buttons and tiny lights that allow users to choose at checkout whether to pay with credit or rewards points.”39

  Lately, Web sites that make a game out of real-life shopping are cropping up all over. I’m talking about social “flash shopping” sites like Gilt, HauteLook, Rue La La, Woot, and ideeli, which hold “limited time only” sales of items from top luxury designers. If you visit one of these sites in the next twenty minutes, the breathless e‑mail in your in-box might say that you’ll get 75 percent off a Coach handbag or a pair of Tom Ford sunglasses. The thrill of the hunt! The joy of discovery! The satisfaction of scoring a deal! How could that not be addicting? These sites are increasingly gaining traction, too. At the time of writing, Gilt had two million members,40 and according to Hitwise data tracker, HauteLook’s online market share grew 750 percent in 2010, while Gilt Groupe and Rue La La grew their shares by 200 percent and 160 percent respectively.41 So how can a computer game or gambling addiction migrate over into a shopping addiction? Very simple: Once we shut down one dopamine supply, we desperately, and unconsciously, seek another source of the feel-good chemical. In short, once we’ve activated addiction in our brains, it stays with us forever.

  Groupon (an amalgam of “group” and “coupon”) is a similar and equally ingenious gamelike site that is catching on fast, with, at time of writing, a staggering four million members and a rumored market value of $15 billion.42 As most people know, Groupon delivers daily specials in your city via an e‑mail offering, for example, an 82 percent discount for a one-month membership at Gymboree. But hurry. The deal will take place only if, say, 150 members take advantage of it before time runs out.

  When I spoke to Paul Hurley, the CEO of ideeli, he admitted that his remarkably successful site has both a “social component” and a “game structure.” When you think about it,
ideeli, Groupon, and these other social flash shopping sites really do have everything an addictive game could want. A prize. A ticking clock. A challenge. Other players. An “invitation only” exclusivity. Not to mention it’s, well, fun. One study, which looked at an online auction site known as Swoopo, confirmed that although consumers aren’t pleased when they lose out on a deal, near misses “increased the desire to play the game.”43 Win or lose, our brains just want to keep on playing.

  Jesse Schell predicts that in the future the convergence between gaming and buying, especially online, will only continue to intensify. And what’s more, games will increasingly migrate over from “dream stage” to the “routine stage” and become more and more integrated in our daily lives. To some extent, this is happening already, from the bargain hunter who checks her daily Groupon and Gilt offers first thing every morning to the Foursquare user for whom checking in at Starbucks is as routine as drinking his morning coffee.

  So where does it all end? Time will tell. One thing, though, is for sure. Whether by engineering cravings, imbuing products with chemically addictive properties, or turning shopping and spending into a game we can’t stop playing, companies and their marketers will only get better and better at manipulating our psyches and our desires to hook us on their brands and products.

  CHAPTER 4

  Guess how many times a day men across the world think about sex? Two? Five? Twenty? Try thirty-two times a day—which adds up to 224 times a week.

  In my last book, I explored everyone’s favorite subject: sex. Specifically, the question “Does sex sell?”

  My research found that men and women reacted to sexually provocative advertising—suggestive commercials, ads featuring scantily clad models, that sort of thing—in much the same way they respond to sexual suggestion in real life. In general, women tend to be more easily persuaded by ads that are more romantic than sexual, ones that emphasize commitment, devotion, and partnership. Not surprisingly, men, on the other hand, responded to sexual innuendo and women in bikinis, especially when the ads or commercials were leavened with a heaping dose of adolescent humor.

  That said, my research revealed that when it comes to persuading us to buy, sexy ads can sometimes backfire. In one study, I showed two separate groups of men identical ads. The first group watched sexually suggestive ads, while the other group saw the same ads, only without the sexual content. Turned out, the men who saw the sexually suggestive commercials were no better at remembering the names of the brands and products they’d seen advertised than the men who’d seen the unerotic ads. In other words, while the male volunteers may have enjoyed the whiff of sexuality, ultimately it had no effect on their memory or impression of the actual product.

  Yet sexually suggestive advertising isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, mostly because when we see attractive, scantily clad young people advertising an energy drink or a brand of underwear or a new line of cosmetics, the mirror neurons in our brain allow us to imagine ourselves as being equally attractive and sexually desirable. And after all, what is advertising about if not planting hopes and dreams inside our brains?

  Sure enough, sex in advertising is still everywhere we look. Abercrombie & Fitch has recently reinstated its soft-porn in-store catalog, American Apparel still showcases its pouty, scantily clad models in giant store windows, footballer David Beckham still sprawls across a Times Square billboard in his skivvies (at the time of writing, at least), and the 420 million Web sites spawned by the $4.9 billion global pornography industry still carry ads for everything from “sexual enhancement” products to escort services to, well, more pornography (by the way, in case you’re wondering, the average age a child stumbles across a porn site? I hate to say it, but it’s eleven).1 And though it may not work all the time, there is evidence to suggest that a sexed-up ad campaign can be persuasive, if it’s done in the right way; as Dr. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, found, people are more likely to expend money and effort on products and activities if they’re first primed with photographs of the opposite sex or stories about dating.2

  To give you one example of how sex can still sell, a few years ago one of the world’s biggest car manufacturers contacted me to help it turn around declining sales of one of its most iconic brands.

  Throughout my years as a branding consultant, I’ve sought to explore the personality of the target customer so that I could help import that personality into the brand. This time around, though, I took a newfangled approach to connecting with consumers’ psyches. I created a rather unusual deck of cards—each of the two hundred cards picturing a different animal. Then I asked a group of middle-aged men (the target customers) to identify five different animals they believed best represented the brand.

  Next, I used fMRI neuroimaging to narrow the findings. When my team showed the men pictures of the first four animals they’d named, it was pretty much business as usual in their brains. But to everyone’s surprise, the final animal we showed them lit up those brain regions associated with sexual attraction and mating. When we then showed the same men photos and images of their dream cars (cars they either could ill afford or felt they were too old to drive), bingo: these same randy brain regions lit up.

  Turns out that subconsciously, these nicely dressed businessmen, who had been married an average of twenty-three years and were the fathers of an average of 2.5 children, associated their dream cars—and that particular animal—with one thing, and one thing only. Sex. Bingo, we had our answer.

  From that point forward, the animal—code-named “Asterix”—informed every single detail of the car’s design, engineering, and appearance. The animal in question was and is black, sleek, and rare, with smooth lines and long curves mixed with a “feminine” smoothness. The goal was to give the car smooth, shapely curves and motions: to make the male driver feel as if he were saddling up, riding, and conquering a fast, powerful, supple, beautiful animal. The engineers at the auto company imported these sensuous qualities to the car’s dashboard, gear stick, interior leather, and even door handles. In short, the car was sex on four wheels, and four years later, when it finally hit the road, the company enjoyed one of the greatest sales turnarounds in its history. (P.S. For the record, it was an Arabian horse, renowned, among other things, for, uh, the size of its penis.)

  If You Spray It, They Will Come

  So how do I know that men think about sex thirty-two times a day? Because I talked to David Cousino, a highly regarded Unilever executive and an expert in consumer and market insight, who shared this, as well as the many other surprising findings Unilever’s internal research team uncovered when preparing to roll out what would become a multimillion-dollar brand: Axe.

  Axe is a line of men’s personal-care products that includes deodorant body sprays, sticks, and roll-ons; shampoos; and body washes with names like Apollo, Kilo, Phoenix, Tsunami, and Voodoo. Introduced in the United States in 2002, Axe is renowned in marketing circles for how it craftily positioned is products as bottled pheromones—magical potions that could transform the greasiest, scrawniest, most acne-prone schlub into a confident, gorgeous, chiseled sex magnet. The behind-the-scenes story of how Unilever created this now-legendary Axe campaign isn’t just another demonstration of the power of sex in advertising; it’s also a fascinating example of just how deeply companies and marketers probe the depths of our inner psyches—our hopes, dreams, and daydreams—in the service of crafting the kinds of provocative, scandalously sexual, and smashingly successful campaigns that push the very limits of advertising as we know it.

  First, the Unilever team conducted an extensive, in-depth online survey of twelve thousand boys and men aged fifteen to fifty around the world—from the United States to the UK to Mexico to South Africa to Turkey to Japan. But it wasn’t your average survey. This survey asked these twelve thousand males a series of highly personal, somewhat embarrassing questions, such as: “What is your strategy when you want to pick up a girl?” “When do yo
u feel really insecure?” “When were you rejected by a girl?” “What is your ideal sexual fantasy?” and the aforementioned “How many times do you think about sex a day?” Why was Unilever asking these questions? “We wanted to identify male human truths,” recalls Cousino, whose team then analyzed the research country by country. “The things that make men tick, that are the same no matter where you go, no matter where you were born or who you are.”

  The results were, to say the least, revealing (there’s nothing like online anonymity to get a guy to spill his guts). It may sound like a cliché or a scene from a bad porno flick, but as it turns out, the number one fantasy among men is this: A boy or a man is lounging in a hot tub or spa. He’s surrounded by three or four naked women. A corked bottle of champagne stands nearby, with its foam bubbling over into the hot tub. Based on these responses and others, the Axe team realized something. The ultimate male fantasy isn’t just to be found irresistible by a sexy woman. It’s to be found irresistible by several sexy women! This was the groundbreaking revelation that was soon to become the crux of Axe’s campaign. Says Cousino, “We realized—or rather, had it confirmed . . . that if the campaign was to be successful, it would have to emphasize the pheromone aspects of the brand.” But wait, these marketers weren’t done probing yet.

  Next, in a spirit of male camaraderie, Cousino and his Unilever colleagues accompanied roughly a hundred males (identical studies were later carried out across other European countries, North America, and Latin America) aged fifteen to fifty to the pubs until three or four in the morning and (soberly, while secretly taking copious notes) watched them in action. Their goal was to see how these men would pick women out of the crowd and ultimately approach them (to analyze their “game,” as it were). After poring over their pages and pages of notes, in the end, and via a process known in the industry as “segmentation,” the Unilever team isolated six psychological profiles of the male animal—and the potential Axe user.