Brandwashed Read online

  So they showed the women the same “mood-edit” they’d submitted to the fragrance houses and asked the women to jot down what they thought of when they contemplated visiting this dark, seductive “space” evoked by both the film and the fragrance. The responses ranged from “dark” to “sinister” to “scary,” yet one underlying reaction kept reemerging. The women were all drawn to the sensation of losing control sexually. It seemed the emotional response the Unilever team was after was a kind of imprisoned lust—“We wanted there to be a sense that they might lose a little bit of themselves, but at the same time, they were happy to give it up,” David Cousino recalls. But by now Unilever was torn between IFF’s Alchemy and a submission from another house. So it hired a company called Scent Analysis to conduct a sophisticated test to figure out which fragrance hit every single note the women had described—and identify the best fit between the “emotional space” and the juice. Then Unilever hired a semiotician to help it come up with a word to describe the new fragrance—an adjective that would help advertise and position the brand. That word turned out to be “melancholic.” Thus, in 2004 a sensual yet slightly mournful scent, Euphoria, was born. With the help of an ad company, Unilever rolled out a series of dark, shadowy, sensual, and—naturally—melancholic thirty-second ads, and the new Calvin Klein fragrance proceeded to fly off the shelves. In fact, even today Euphoria is the only fragrance launched in the past decade that remains in the top ten fragrances globally.

  So what does sex appeal really smell like? Turns out it smells like money.

  Robbing the Cradle

  In his book Why We Buy, retail anthropologist Paco Underhill refers to adults who pay for their children’s (or spouse’s) purchases as “the Wallet Carriers” because tweens and teens generally depend on their parents to pay for their provisions and goodies, whether they’re school supplies, clothes, cosmetics, or music downloads for their iPods. As the holder of the purse strings, the wallet-carrying adult has at least some say in what the child is buying, which, from a marketer’s point of view, poses a bit of a challenge. How to craft a marketing or advertising strategy that will persuade an adult when you’re selling a product meant for children? Very sneakily, as you’ll read in a minute.

  Today, thanks to technology, never before in the history of our species have contemporary parents had more in common with their teenage or even tween-age children. Mom, Dad, and the children all have cell phones, Facebook accounts, and a roughly similar cultural sensibility. They go to the same movies, they listen to much of the same music, they watch the same shows on TV (or iTunes or TiVo or Hulu). The result being that Hollywood and the music industry have had to find ways to develop adult content that will still be suitable for young audiences. How do they do it? By cleverly crafting semiambiguous lyrics and dialogue that have an adult—which more often than not means sexual—meaning to grown-ups but say something completely different and innocuous to an eight-year-old. Take, for example, a tune like the Black Eyed Peas’ “Pump It!” or Fergie’s solo hit “London Bridge,” with its lyrics, “How come every time you come around, my London/London bridge wanna go down” (makes you long for the innocent days of Peter, Paul & Mary’s “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” doesn’t it?).

  To see what I mean, try watching an episode of The Simpsons with an eight-year-old. You’ll both be enjoying yourselves, but the kid will likely be guffawing at the toilet humor or “Homer Simpson is a klutz” type scenes, while you’ll be chuckling inwardly at the homoerotic tension between Smithers and Mr. Burns. (In one 2000 Simpsons episode, “A Tale of Two Springfields,” after the residents of Old Springfield find gold in a nearby river, one woman exclaims, “Thanks, Mayor Simpson! From now on, we’ll all be taking golden showers!”)

  Movie franchises like Shrek and Toy Story employ this strategy as well; consider that the king in Shrek is named Farquaad, pronounced “Fuckwad,” while in Toy Story 2, Buzz’s love-struck reaction to a cowgirl named Jessie makes his wings spring rigidly erect. These scenes give a wink and nod to the wallet-carrying parents but aren’t so overtly sexual that their children will pick up on it. As the BBC points out, “Hollywood moguls didn’t get where they are without being aware that the ultimate film is one that audiences of every age and type can sit through.”8

  So successful is this strategy in the entertainment industry (behind closed doors they in fact call this the Simpsons or Shrek strategy) that companies have begun to take a page from Hollywood’s playbook, and marketers of all stripes are now employing the strategy across their brands. For example, the sandwich chain Quiznos recently came out with a new sub called the Toasty Torpedo. It’s “12 inches of flavor,” ads proclaim, just before a smoky-voiced toaster asks a chef to “say it sexy” and “put it in me.”9 Here’s hoping the eight-year-olds didn’t pick up on that one.

  But no brand (and yes, he is a brand) has enjoyed so much success from the Shrek strategy as contemporary pop singing sensation Justin Bieber.

  As anyone with a teenage daughter knows, Justin Bieber is a cherubic seventeen-year-old musician who got his start in 2007, when his mother uploaded videos of him singing in his bedroom onto YouTube. Weeks later Bieber’s videos had been viewed a hundred times, then a thousand, then ten thousand, then a million, and two years later, Bieber’s album My World 2.0 debuted at number one on Billboard. With fifty million subscribers to his YouTube channel, Time magazine dubbed Bieber “the first real teen idol of the digital age, a star whose fame can be attributed entirely to the Internet.”10 Aside from this distinction, though, Bieber merely is the latest in a long tradition of moppy-haired teenage boys whose perfect, boyish features adorn the walls of countless besotted tween and teenage girls’ bedrooms. Plump lips. Dark, soulful eyes. Smooth skin. A disarmingly sweet smile. And let’s not forget the hair flip! Incidentally, if you glance at a photo of 1970s tween idol Donny Osmond, who sang “Hey, There, Lonely Girl,” followed by a photo of Justin Bieber, one of whose hits is “One Less Lonely Girl,” you’ll be struck by the spooky similarity not just of their songs’ content but also of their facial features. No doubt about it: to girls aged ten to seventeen, the pure and innocent look is hot.

  But wait a minute. Turns out not all the millions of adoring Bieber fans are teens and tweens at all. Many are, of course, but not all. Not by a long shot. So who are they, then? Believe it or not, a significant percentage of this boyish seventeen-year-old’s most fervent admirers are actually women in their thirties and forties. That’s right, women old enough to be his mother. Now, over the years I’ve spoken to many middle-aged women who will admit to an occasional crush on a young male celebrity. Understand that I’m not referring here to anything nefarious, illegal, or perverse; I have yet to hear of any middle-aged Bieber fans ever acting on their crush (at the same time, I recognize that if a forty-seven-year-old father acknowledged lusting after a teenage girl, he would be remanded to therapy or, in the worst-case scenario, led away in shackles). Still, these women can be scary in their own way; it’s not unusual at a Bieber appearance to see eager mothers pushing their way through clusters of screaming tweens, literally shoving the young girls out of their path to the adolescent heartthrob.11

  As a marketer fascinated by the celebrity brand, I couldn’t help but wonder what this was all about. Bieber-mania among teenagers made perfect sense. After all, the teen idol phenomenon does go back decades, and Bieber is objectively cute, in a seventeen-year-old kind of way. But what was his appeal to these women twice his age? Were they sexually attracted to him? Was he simply some kind of projection of an old fantasy from their own teen years? I decided to find out. So I teamed up with Murray Hill Associates, a nationwide recruitment group, and together we assembled a focus group composed of women and mothers who, in their own teenage years, had been besotted by a teen idol—whether it was Leif Garrett or David Cassidy or Davy Jones. But before asking these women some admittedly personal questions, I first sought the insight of a female psychologist (and mother) who herself had admitted
to similar crushes now and again on good-looking, underage young men. My question intrigued and amused her.

  She paused. “It’s not necessarily sexual, Martin,” she said. Then she paused. “But it’s not unsexual, either.” Of course I had to know more.

  Which is how, on a rainy night in Chicago, I found myself sitting in a focus group with a dozen forty-five-year-old mothers gazing at me from around an oval table. “So, ladies,” I said, “I want to ask you what may seem like a strange question.” I hesitated. “As an adult, have you ever had a crush on a really, really young guy?”

  At this point I expected looks of utter outrage—maybe even a few pens or cups of coffee hurled in my face. But amazingly, no one in the room took any offense at my suggestion whatsoever! Quite the opposite. Every female beamed back at me with recognition and what could only be described as release. Clearly, I’d hit a major artery. Ever see the Saturday Night Live sketch where Tina Fey, playing Bieber’s high school teacher, mutters to herself, “I don’t know whether I want to marry him or put him in a stroller and push him around the mall”? Based on what I learned that night, this was apparently a widespread yet seldom-discussed sentiment.

  The women in the room made sport of their crushes, all the while being careful to stress that of course they never acted on them. But the sense of pent-up desire in the room was palpable. I could barely hear all the women as they all tried to speak over one another, throwing out name after name of some alluring adolescent boy or another. One woman described taking her daughter to see Eclipse, the second of the two films based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books. “I literally had to contain myself in my seat when [then eighteen-year-old] Taylor Lautner came on-screen,” she said. “Oh my God, he’s gorgeous! Though of course I couldn’t say a word, since I know my daughter would die if she heard that.”

  And so it went for the next ten minutes. Finally, one woman at the end of the table raised her hand. As a teenager she’d been a huge fan of the singer formerly known as Prince (well, back then I guess he was just Prince), she told me. Just as I began to question her taste, she said something extraordinarily insightful: “I think that women are much more attuned to beauty, and to beautiful things, than men are. And that includes boys.”

  Once the focus group wrapped up, I realized that both my theories had been partially correct. These maternal “crushes” were sexual in that they served as a way to relive the women’s own teenage sexuality, but at the same time they were more about the nostalgia than the sex, a way to recapture the heat and thrill of longing for the Paul McCartneys and David Cassidys of the women’s youth. I sensed that more than anything these women were trying to prove, perhaps to their daughters as well as to themselves, that beneath the armor of motherhood, they were still the girls they’d once been.

  More important, I’m convinced that certain marketers are acutely aware of this Bieber phenomenon, and that when they sell the next teen sensation they are deliberately if stealthily targeting the mothers of the teens they more transparently court. In fact, I’m quite certain that when marketers use sex appeal to sell wallet-carrying adults on a teenage celebrity—or any other brand ostensibly meant for children or teens, for that matter—they know exactly what they are doing. Media firms are fully aware that a middle-aged mother is liable to be watching TV shows with her daughter or listening to the daughter’s music in the car. “When you have a Millennial target” (referring to someone born between 1980 and 2000), says Jack MacKenzie, president of the Millennial Strategy Program at Frank N. Magid Associates, a consulting firm), “you necessarily have a secondary target of her mother. That’s the way it is today. Exploiting that is smart business.”12

  So husbands: Beware. Your wife, who you may think is buying that new Justin Bieber CD for your daughter, just may be concealing a shocking yet common secret that companies and marketers have known for years: gay, straight, young, or old, sex appeal comes in all shapes and sizes; and it’s a mighty powerful persuader, whether we can admit it to ourselves or not.

  I Shop Like a Woman

  Wahat it means to be a male consumer in America today is changing.

  Historically, in our culture, women have been freer to play around with the boundaries of their gender than men; for example, for many years it’s been acceptable for women to wear jeans or slacks, spray on a musky scent, or sport a masculine-looking watch, whereas most men wouldn’t have been caught dead in a pink, flowery shirt or wearing perfume or makeup. But this is changing fast. In the United States, at least, more and more boys (and men) are giving themselves permission to wear and adapt totems from the “feminine” world—whether it’s an earring, skinny jeans, cosmetics, or a fragrance (in Europe, more men wear fragrance than American females do). In fact, men today are more concerned about looking good than they’ve ever been—and more willing to shell out the dollars to do it. The global men’s grooming industry is already valued at roughly $27 billion worldwide, and fashion experts anticipate it will grow to $31 billion by 2014. And in 2009 the number of men who went so far as to undergo plastic surgery procedures increased by nine hundred thousand in the United States alone.13

  Companies and marketers are well aware of this shift, which is why they are going to new lengths to target the appearance- and beauty-conscious male. Take the recent rollout of “Dove Men + Care,” the first male-only line from a brand that’s always catered to and been associated with females. “Now that you are comfortable with who you are, isn’t it time for comfortable skin?” one ad asks.14

  This migration of the male consumer into a traditional female arena is overturning the rules of marketing and advertising for all kinds of unexpected products. Take body wash, for example. According to research data from Deutsche Bank and Information Resources, Inc., in 2009 body wash outsold bar soap ($756.3 million versus $754.2 million) for the first time in the United States. And believe it or not, this is largely due to the fact that the marketers of this historically “feminine” product are more actively going after the male customer. So why are so many boys and men amenable to using body wash all of a sudden?

  A few reasons. The first is that our worldwide preoccupation with hygiene, which I talked about in an earlier chapter, is starting to take hold among more and more men. Fearmongering marketers have managed to convince many male consumers (females generally need less convincing) that bar soap is slimy, germy, even downright dirty. A second reason is that the makers of liquid hand soaps are beginning to hook new generations of men at an early age by strategically placing dispensers in elementary school boys’ restrooms, high school and college gym shower stalls, and coed college dormitories. As a result, by the time these men are out on their own and purchasing their own hygiene products, applying a liquid soap to their hands and body feels normal, even ordinary.

  Some years ago, one maker of body wash noticed that men were resisting the product because they felt that the way it was applied—by touching one’s own body—was too feminine. So what did the company do? It invented a new type of loofah, providing men with a physical barrier of sorts between their hands and their bodies. It then distributed hundreds of thousands across the United States, and lo and behold, use of bar soap went down and sales of body wash went up.

  The third reason more men are using body wash is one even I can’t attribute to marketers: the rise in single motherhood. Today, many sons raised by single mothers have grown used to using Mom’s body wash—and as we learned in chapter 1, the products we grow accustomed to using as children tend to stick with us as adults. All of which, of course, is a boon for companies like Unilever and Procter & Gamble, since selling body wash is far more lucrative than selling bar soap.

  Seeking perspective on all this, I spoke with Rose Cameron, the chief marketing officer of EuroRSCG Chicago and a widely acknowledged expert on the male consumer. Cameron points out that as the first “Axe generation,” as she calls it (the guys who were tweens in the early noughties), is coming of age, there’s no question that the want
s and needs of the male consumer—and in turn, how he is being targeted by marketers—are changing. “They were the first male generation to have scented products that early,” she explains.

  “So what’s next, Rose?” I asked. “Where are we going with all this?”

  “The new trends I’m seeing are tattooing and the removal of body hair. Have you ever heard of ‘smoothies’?”

  “Just the drink, Rose.”

  “I’m talking about people. Men in particular.” Apparently, getting rid of all (and I mean all) of one’s body hair is a trend that started in the gay community and then caught on, albeit for a different reason, in the world of professional sports. “In some sports, body hair slows you down—at least that’s the rational justification,” Rose tells me. “It could also come from the pornography industry, since more and more men shave themselves down there, and pornography, as everyone knows, is a huge industry.”

  It’s a rather extraordinary truth, I found out from a source who works for a large consumer product company: 15 percent of all U.S. males shave their private parts (I kid you not), and it’s a growing trend. One that Gillette was quick to capitalize on by posting a video on its Web site instructing men on how to shave their groin area. It was entitled “Trim-the-Bush-to-Make-the-Tree-Look-Taller.”