Brandwashed Read online

  The breakdown:

  The Predator, as Cousino describes him, conceals his insecurity under a facade of swaggering bluster. He drives a brand-name car, adorns himself with high-end fashion brands, and is constantly on the prowl. He has little if any respect for women and is markedly deceptive—he’s liable to lie to a woman about his job (when he’s in fact unemployed), where he lives (typically with his parents), and so on. The Predator tends to target women who are out alone, preferably drunk ones he can take easy advantage of. In sum, the Predator is any woman’s—and her father’s—worst nightmare.

  Natural Talent. This is the intelligent, athletic, achieving, magnetic, naturally confident male; the kind of guy other guys like to be around and women find inherently appealing. Natural Talent usually gets the woman he’s after, though never deceptively (interestingly, when the Axe researchers polled all the men, they found that nearly everyone not only wanted to be the Natural Talent guy; the vast majority believed they were the Natural Talent guy. It was like a sexed-up version of the Lake Wobegon effect).

  The Marriage Material Guy is exactly that: gentle, respectful, and self-confident. The kind of guy you want to bring home to Mom (despite what single women might tell you, according to Unilever’s research, Marriage Material men make up a pretty large segment in the young male population).

  Always the Friend. Is there a greater kiss of death for an amorous young man than to hear the words “Sorry, but . . . I like you more like a brother. Can we be just good friends?” Cousino remarks, not unkindly, “You watch them deflate right in front of you.” Not surprisingly, quite a few gay men (and closeted gay men) turned up in this category.

  The Insecure Novice. These poor young fellows haven’t the slightest idea what they are doing around women. Along with Marriage Material and Natural Talent, the United States boasts quite a few Insecure Novices. Ironically, they outwardly resemble the Predator in that they will simply step up and behave in ways that make most women uncomfortable, but their motives are pure and not deceptive.

  The Enthusiastic Novice. These young men have no idea what they are doing, either, but they come across as eager rather than creepy. They might not score, but darn it, no one is going to tell them they aren’t doing their best.

  So now that the Axe researchers had isolated these six segments, what did they do with the information? Well, the first step was to figure out which of these six types of men was their best target. Ultimately, they decided the most obvious choice would be the Insecure Novice, followed by the Enthusiastic Novice, followed by the Natural Talent. Why? Well, the first two segments, the marketers reasoned, with their lack of self-esteem and experience, could be easily persuaded that Axe would be the key to enhanced success with women—they would spray it on to ramp up their self-confidence. The Natural Talent guys, on the other hand, didn’t need a shot of self-confidence, but they could probably be convinced to use Axe as a finishing touch before going out for a night on the town. This was unlike, say, the Predator, who the marketers knew would never feel he needed the product, or anything other than his own sexy self, to score with women.

  So with the Insecure Novice as their primary target, Axe came up with a series of thirty-second TV commercials that preyed on what its research had revealed to be the ultimate male fantasy: to be irresistible to not just one but several sexy women. These ads were nothing short of marketing genius. In one thirty-second spot, an army of bikini-clad female Amazons, drawn by the irresistible scent, storms an empty beach to surround and seduce a helpless, scrawny young male Axe user. In another, a naked, soapy young man is showering when suddenly the bathroom floor cracks and he tumbles (still naked and dripping with suds) into a basement filled with scantily clad young women who proceed to bump and grind lasciviously enough to make a porn star break out in hives.

  “No one wants to play with dirty equipment,” intones a woman in another less-than-subtle Axe ad, before proceeding, with the help of an assistant—“Monica, can you help me with these dirty balls?” she asks—to clean and fondle two white golf balls in her manicured hand. “If you spray it, they will come,” is the suggestive promise of another ad, in which a pair of college-aged women bodily drag another college-aged geek into what is, presumably, a waiting boudoir. In others, a gaggle of young women need only take a deep inhale of a nearby Axe man before they are immediately compelled to surrender their cell phone numbers, while in yet another, a man sprays on Axe’s Dark Temptation body spray, which immediately transforms him into a life-sized piece of chocolate—which a bevy of hot women off the street nibble at suggestively for the remainder of the thirty-second spot. The message of each of these couldn’t be clearer: use Axe and get laid. Repeatedly, by different women.

  The campaign was an instant hit, and Axe quickly became the number one male brand in the total antiperspirant/deodorant category,3 earning Unilever $71 million in sales in 2006 ($50 million more than its closest rival, Tag)4 and $186 million (excluding Walmart sales) in 2007, an increase of 14 percent from a year earlier—which was leagues ahead of its nearest rival. What’s more, sales of the brand’s other products shot up as well, because body sprays are often used as a “training fragrance,” and if a young male cottons to a brand, he’s more likely to buy other products from the same company (what we in the industry call “the halo effect”). Moreover, Axe had achieved global fame for its envelope-pushing ads, which were variously termed funny, brilliant, offensive, or outrageously sexist. Either way, it was free publicity, and it worked.

  However, the brand’s early success soon began to backfire. The problem was, the ads had worked too well in persuading the Insecure Novices and Enthusiastic Novices to buy the product. Geeks and dorks everywhere were now buying Axe by the caseload, and it was hurting the brand’s image. Eventually (in the United States, at least), to most high school and college-aged males, Axe had essentially become the brand for pathetic losers, and not surprisingly, sales took a huge hit.

  Then Axe faced another big problem. Insecure high school students had been so convincingly persuaded that Axe would make them sexually appealing that they began completely dousing themselves in it. After all, if Axe = sex, then more Axe = more sex, right? According to CBC News, “Some boys have been dousing themselves in Axe, apparently believing commercials that show a young man applying the deodorant and being immediately hit on by beautiful women.” It got to the point where the students were reeking so heavily of it that it was becoming a distraction at school. So much so that in Minnesota, school district officials attempted to ban it, claiming that “the man spray has been abused, and the aerosol stench is a hazard for students and faculty.”5 The principal of one Canadian school started actually confiscating bottles of Axe. “They spray it all over their heads and their necks,” one teacher said. “They don’t realize how powerful the odor is. . . . They have no idea how much it takes to be a walking stink bomb [which is] basically what they are.”6

  Today, Unilever is reinvigorating the brand with a series of viral videos focused more on showing men just where to spray Axe. Naturally, these too are charged with sexual innuendo; after spraying a mannequin, the spokeswoman tears off the man’s right arm and begins paddling herself while crying, “I have been naughty!”7

  Despite its few stumbles, the wild success of Axe’s ad campaign just goes to show what can happen when a brand and its clever marketers probe and plug into our most private and deeply rooted sexual fantasies and desires. And it goes to show that these days, as ever, our most deeply seeded sexual fantasies and desires can be some of the most powerful persuaders there are.

  And although some entrenched marketing techniques, like the one you just read about, remain in place, what most people don’t know is that companies and advertisers are using sex in a host of sneaky new ways. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at the provocative results of some experiments I recently did on sex in advertising, including shocking revelations of what heterosexual men really think about when they see
naked male bodies in advertising (hint: it isn’t their girlfriends) and what type of man some women won’t admit to daydreaming about (hint: check out the posters on their tween daughters’ walls). We’ll also take a look at how changing gender roles in our society are shaping the way companies are using sex appeal and beauty to brandwash the twenty-first-century man.

  Who Loves Ya’, Baby?

  The ads stretch across countless Abercrombie & Fitch storefronts and billboards from Times Square to London to Paris: doe-eyed, shirtless men with broad, smooth shoulders and six-pack abs jutting majestically out of a pair of bulging, tight-fitting jeans, arrayed in various supine poses, like wrestling in the woods or lounging languidly on a summer beach.

  It’s all very, very sexy. But when you stop and think about it for a minute, something doesn’t add up. The jeans being advertised here are for men, and the majority of Abercrombie’s customers (and target customers) are straight. If these billboards are trying to seduce customers with hot, near-naked bodies, shouldn’t they be women’s bodies? In other words, why are sexy men being used to sell jeans and underwear to heterosexual men? To begin to answer that question, we have to go back a couple of decades.

  Back in the early nineties, when Madonna Badger (then senior art director at Calvin Klein’s in-house agency and today the proprietor of Badger & Winters, her own successful New York boutique ad agency) and photographer Herb Ritts created two ads for Calvin Klein underwear, they couldn’t possibly have predicted what effect they would have. I’m sure you’ve seen these now-iconic ads. The one for men’s briefs pictured well-muscled actor and stud muffin Mark Wahlberg (back then known as rapper Marky Mark) clutching his crotch and grinning. The one for women’s skivvies featured the waifish Kate Moss hugging her bony arms to her bony chest. These homoerotic ads boosted sales of Calvin Klein underwear—both men’s and women’s—by roughly 35 percent, instantly broadcasting to the advertising world that yes, you can use male sex appeal to sell to men, and female sex appeal (albeit a boyish female) to sell to women. And for the next two decades, use it they did.

  More than twenty years later, American Apparel’s billboard ads, so racy they’ve been accused of being downright pornographic, show young men in their underwear with their legs splayed open, while the male models in Dolce & Gabbana’s cologne ads bare their glistening, rippling, tanned chests (in one controversial ad, a shirtless man leans suggestively over a woman in a skimpy black dress while other men in varying states of dress look on). Adidas advertises its sneakers with posters showing Canadian model Tym Roders baring his perfectly toned, athletic body while clutching a pair of sneakers in front of his crotch. And it’s worth noting that Men’s Health, with its monthly cover photos of shirtless men with six-packs, is among the most popular magazines in the United States. Point is, thanks in no small part to the barriers broken by those envelope-pushing late-nineties Calvin Klein ads, it’s not uncommon for advertisers to use provocative images of male sexuality to sell men on everything from clothing to cologne to sporting equipment.

  Yet most straight males would be loath to admit that these sexually charged images of attractive men with their V-shaped physiques, broad pectorals, rippling upper bodies, and bulging crotches have any effect on their buying behavior whatsoever. In the United States, at least, it’s still not considered okay for a straight man to admire another male, and in fact men are used to averting their gaze when any hint of the naked male form is present—which could explain why when a man is standing at the urinal in a public restroom, a second man who enters the bathroom will set up shop ten miles away from him, for fear of being unwittingly perceived as on the prowl.

  Yet the data doesn’t lie. These homoerotic ads do work. They work incredibly well. So what’s going on here? Dr. Belisa Vranich (a Today show psychologist who also serves as the psychologist for Gold’s Gym and is on the advisory board for Shape magazine) conjectures that men rationalize ogling these ads by telling themselves they are simply looking at a single, isolated body part—say, to see how the jeans fit around the hips or how the T‑shirt stretches across the chest—as opposed to the body itself. It’s called Playgirl marketing, Dr. Vranich tells me, referring to the monthly magazine featuring male nudes founded in 1973. “It says it’s for men trying to impress women, but it’s really men for men.”

  Based on what I’ve seen in all my years in the advertising industry, I’d long suspected that these ads of chiseled males strike a chord in heterosexual men—why else would they be so ubiquitous? When I’ve asked young men about the models in the Abercrombie ads, they’ll cheerfully admit, “Those girls are fit.” But when I ask, “What about the guys?” the discomfort in the room is palpable. Then, quite often, I get a chorus of “I didn’t really notice them” or “Why do you want to know?” as if I’m challenging their sexuality (which I’m not). But whether they cop to it or not, I believe that these ads and images that evoke male sexuality or the male body are powerful persuaders for men and influence their buying decisions more than they’d care to admit, even to themselves.

  So I decided to carry out an fMRI research study to see how the male brain was affected by this sexually stimulating imagery. I wasn’t trying to make some kind of social statement or prove some kind of point, like “All men are secretly gay.” As someone who studies branding and advertising for a living, I simply was curious as to what effect photographic imagery of the near-naked male really has on the heterosexual male consumer.

  So again with the help of San Diego–based MindSign Neuromarketing, we were ready for our research experiment to kick off. Our “underwear” study subjects consisted of sixteen males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five—eight heterosexual and eight homosexual men. The MindSign neuromarketing team scanned the volunteers’ brains under an fMRI as they viewed five images of male models stripped down to their tight white skivvies and boxer briefs. A couple of weeks later, some very provocative results came in.

  Turns out that both groups of men showed significant activation in their visual cortex—to be expected, given the visual nature of the stimulus. But far more revealing was the fact that both groups also showed activity in the area of the brain (known as the inferior lateral prefrontal gyrus) that is involved in working memory and that most often comes alive when a person is attempting to lie, manipulate a fact, or somehow convince themselves of something not quite true. As a matter of fact, you could easily dub this brain region “the deception area.” All of which indicated to the MindSign study researchers that our study subjects didn’t want to be attracted to our skivvy-clad male models . . . but in fact, they were. And more telling still, the heterosexual men’s brains’ responses to the male underwear ads—denial, followed by varying degrees of interest—were extremely similar to those of homosexual men. All strong evidence, according to the team of experts who analyzed the results, that some of the heterosexual men were equally stimulated by the ads—their brains were just working harder at denying it.

  Scent of a Woman

  In December 2004, when the global fragrance firm International Flavors & Fragrances was bidding to win the account for Calvin Klein’s new fragrance, Euphoria, it called on Erika Smyth and her then colleague Alex Moskvin, who ran IFF’s internal BrandEmotions unit. The way it works in the fragrance world is that the manufacturer—in this case Calvin Klein, then owned by Unilever—tells the fragrance companies what it wants the scent to evoke and sends them off to create it. Then, once a fragrance is submitted, the company runs focus groups to see whether it succeeds in summoning the desired associations and emotions. So Unilever first submitted to the perfumeries what’s known in the industry as a “mood-edit”—a montage of short, almost subliminal, and sexually suggestive clips from various films (like a scene in which a woman was willingly blindfolded and tied up, though in a very seductive way). Why does the industry use a film instead of simply explaining what it wants in the fragrance? Because, as David Cousino notes, “Language has a way of dulling things.”r />
  “Create a fragrance that takes a woman to this [emotional] space,” Unilever’s team told IFF (and the other bidders). Then, once the fragrance was ready, Unilever assembled a focus group of women and dabbed “juice” (the widespread name for perfume across the fragrance industry) on each woman’s skin. Then the team asked the women to close their eyes and tell the first story that came to mind that expressed what the fragrance evoked for them. Without exception, the stories the women told were romantic, sexual, and passionate. Interestingly, without exception, the fragrance seemed to evoke in every woman the same gently clashing associations: innocence alongside passion; freedom as well as capture; love that was soft and sweet while carnal and sexual at the same time. Bingo. IFF’s juice would be Calvin Klein’s new fragrance.

  But the process was just getting started. Unilever loved what IFF had come up with but wanted to refine it further. To ensure they got it just right, the Unilever team decided to carry out additional research around the same question: Where does this fragrance take you emotionally? But then they realized something: there was no way to know whether the fragrance had taken the women to that dark, sensual place until they figured out where, for these specific women, that place might be. So they decided to probe a little more deeply. This time they led each woman through a maze of corridors into various dark rooms (the rooms were dark to eliminate sensory distractions), each suffused with a different variation of the IFF fragrance. The women closed their eyes. What did they see, hear, feel? Afterward, the Unilever team pored over their responses, trying to decode “where” and to what “space” the fragrance “took” each woman. The Unilever team knew where it wanted the scent to take them—to a “dark, sexual place,” as one of the team members put it. But Unilever executives weren’t sure which of the three or four different variations of the scent, then dubbed “Alchemy,” had hit the spot.