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In supermarket lingo, the “shadow line” refers to the darkness that falls over the top of a package when a supermarket shelf is too deep, or when the overhead light lands at a wrong angle. The mixture of light, and how it strikes a product, tends to leave a lot of products in darkness. This same shadow line had a marked effect on what an Indian mother-in-law saw when she gazed at cereal packaging. At the same time, from her height and perspective, what she saw was, in fact, ideal. There were colors she liked and appreciated the most, the vibrant, vivid, rich-hued ones that conveyed to her that the product in front of her was “fresh.”
It was time for me to switch roles and impersonate a straight-shouldered, younger, clear-eyed 20-something Indian daughter-in-law. From her perspective, the world was entirely different. She didn’t see the bottom of packages; her glance began at the top of the package and swept downward. Gazing at the cereal packages from a daughter-in-law’s perspective, I discovered that the cereal container, flush with bright spice-like colors favored by an older generation, looked no different than a candy box, packed with chemicals and about as far from “fresh” or “natural” as it could be. In contrast, thanks to the shadow line, the mothers-in-law would be able to make out the vivid colors on the bottom, but not the top two inches of the package.
I would have to use two separate—and completely uncomplementary—color codes, and a few weeks later, the cereal manufacturer approved my template for a new package design.
Historically, when a mother-in-law went out shopping with her daughter-in-law, the two of them would disagree, squabble and often leave the store with two different varieties or brands of cereal. From now on, if the two women shopped together, they would both be enticed by the colors of the same package. My solution was to appeal first to the mothers-in-law by decorating two-thirds of the package (the bottom) with rich, bright, spice-inspired colors. I would also add a tactile dimension to one side of the package, to appeal to an older generation’s desire to handle products. The top third of the package, which the taller daughter-in-law would see, would be adorned with “natural” browns and greens, as well as a description of the cereal’s natural ingredients.
But the package couldn’t simply be made up of competing colors; it also needed people on it! In Mexico I first became aware that the experience of bonding between mothers and children is made up of a handful of isolated flashes, or pivot points. Of course, our lives in general are nothing more than moments linked together, but this structure is especially true for first-time mothers and their newborns.
Despite humans’ fraught relationship with weight and calories, infants are generally given latitude about how much they eat. A new mother wants her newborn to gain weight. It means the child is healthy and a healthy baby, in turn, tells an inexperienced mother that she is doing something right. In short, a direct correlation exists between a baby’s appetite and a new mother’s peace of mind. If infants or babies finish their bottles, or clean their plates, mothers gain points, not just in their own eyes, but in the eyes of their husbands or partners, and the culture itself. All around the world, babies are fussy about what they eat and drink, but in Mexico, if a baby rejects a meal his mother has prepared, it is the mother, and not the baby, who receives the blame from her husband. In response, mothers serve their babies even more food. The babies put on weight. If they eventually develop baby chins, all the better. Mothers win, and more to the point, the Mexican culture looks on approvingly.
Each “moment” between infants and mothers lasts around 45 seconds. Among the most potent moments is the one when infants begin to doze in their mothers’ arms (and every respondent told me he or she somehow “feels” the baby is getting heavier), followed by the moment when a baby closes his or her eyes to sleep. Other moments include the baby splashing around in the bath, and new fathers engaging or interacting with the baby, though in general dads are rarely central characters, as mothers prefer to be seen as the parent in charge of an infant. In Brazil, and across the developing world, the most popular moment, I knew, was when new mothers realize that their babies are learning new things. Needless to say, these moments are highly emotional in nature, and when I asked Mexican mothers to tell me what they were feeling, they used words like “comfort,” “harmony,” “trust” and “bond.”
From a marketing standpoint, the question was clear: Was there a way to incorporate these moments between mothers and their newborn babies into a product or even a television commercial? Could the cereal manufacturer “own” a universal moment, in the same way that Kodak used to “own” taking photographs, and America Online “owned” You’ve Got Mail, and Apple today “owns” the left-to-right “Slide to Unlock” finger-swipe, and Volvo “owns” Safety, and Google “owns” Search, and Marlboro “owns” Cowboy? I hired a creative team to help the company understand the essence, and the weight, of every single moment between mothers and their babies. Pictorially speaking, could a photo somehow convey the “heaviness” of the instant that a baby’s eyes are beginning to close?
Most cereal packaging around the world depicts a child, but India has the strictest rules against advertising in the world, and prohibits any human representation on package designs. The Indian government doesn’t want to encourage young children and mothers to eat breakfast food that is unhealthy or perceived as unhealthy, and they also believe that if products show babies on the packaging, manufacturers might mislead consumers into believing they might someday become as beautiful as the models on the pack.
When we finally rolled out the new packaging design in India, the new graphics showed a baby-sized spoon holding a spoonful of cereal. It was, in short, a Moment. In a populous country, the package emphasized whiteness, sparseness and simplicity. If you look carefully, you will also see something else: two separate sets of colors. One is designed for women anywhere between the ages of 50 and 70, while the other appeals to younger women in their late teens and early 20s. It is the exact same breakfast cereal, the exact same packaging—but unless you were wearing glasses, you would never know the difference.
Chapter 4
Getting a Bead on Weight Loss
(with Help from Fast Food, a Middle Eastern Movie Theater and a Hotel Lap Pool)
At our core, we’re all members of a tribe, or a series of tribes, starting with our nationalities and families, and extending to the towns or cities where we live. Our tribal membership and loyalties include where we went to school; the clubs, if any, of which we’re members; our neighborhoods; and the region of a country we call home. Gender is tribal. Profession is tribal. Political affiliation is tribal. Religious belief is tribal. Our friend groups are tribal, as is our age and even our appearance.
Friendship may be tribal, but it works the other way around, too. The bodies of our friends can affect our own physical appearance. A nearly ten-year-old study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that “obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus . . . When one person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight too.”1 Explains Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis, a principal investigator in the new study, “One explanation is that friends affect each others’ perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.” In short, the New York Times article on the study concludes that we alter our concept of what an acceptable body type is on the basis of the people surrounding us.2
As everybody knows, the obesity epidemic is increasing worldwide. A decade ago, according to statistics published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average American woman weighed 166.2 pounds, which is only slightly less than the average American man weighed in the 1960s. During this same period from 1960 to 2002, the average American male put on 30 pounds on his own.3 Popular reasons include that Americans are exercising less, and also consuming more cheap, higher-calorie foods; often a single meal contains as many calories as most of us need in a day. Still, in spite of widesprea
d media attention around childhood obesity, a recent New York Times article about overweight children noted that, in the United States at least, “Parents increasingly seem to be turning a blind eye as their children put on pounds,” adding that around 70 percent of parents of obese daughters “described their children as ‘about the right weight,’” a phenomenon that Dr. David Katz, the director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, dubbed “oblivobesity.”4
Americans spend more than $100 billion annually on fast food, and fast-food chains have become a big part of everyday life in Europe and the Far East. On my frequent visits to Japan, I’ve begun seeing a striking number of overweight children, which would have been unheard of 20 years ago. The popularity of McDonald’s in Japan, where it has over 3,000 franchises, is likely its affordable “100-yen menu”—US$0.81 at current exchange rates. Such an irresistible bargain has even chipped away at the nation’s historic predilection for seafood over meat.
That said, probably the two most overweight regions of the world are Saudi Arabia and Mexico. The tacit cultural connection between a baby’s weight and his or her health and happiness is one reason why obesity levels are as high as they are across Mexico and, for that matter, across all of Latin America. In 2013, Mexico overtook the United States as the “most obese country” in the world, with approximately 70 percent of the Mexican adult population considered overweight, including 30 percent of all schoolchildren, and one-sixth of the adult population, or around 10 million people, diagnosed with diabetes. These figures proved to be so alarming that Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto introduced a nationwide soda tax in 2013 to discourage consumers from bingeing on empty calories.5
In Saudi Arabia, no such measures exist. Earlier, I mentioned that the Mutaween, or religious police, enforce the country’s nationwide dress code. In public, Saudi women are required to wear an abaya that covers everything but their face and their hands, and a niqab, or face veil. Saudi males of all ages wear a white thobe, and often a cloak, as well as a headdress. These not only satisfy the standards of the Mutaween, but also serve a secondary effect of camouflaging people’s shapes, which, in turn, detach them not just from their own bodies but from the everyday judgment of others. In cultures that require people to live their lives costumed in loose-fitting clothing, there is little social pressure to keep healthy or fit.
Along with Mexico, the Middle East has one of the globe’s highest rates of adult-onset diabetes, with nearly half the overall population expected to be diagnosed before 2030. Middle Eastern culture is sedentary, and the local diet is mostly sugar-based, made up of blended sweet foods, minced meats, breads and hummus. Restricted by the year-round hot climate, which discourages exercise or most outdoor activities—the heat is so relentless I typically pack two pairs of shoes in my suitcase, knowing that at some point the soles of one pair will melt—the Middle East also claims the world’s highest consumption of computer and screen-based games. Moreover, Saudi women have been traditionally dissuaded from exercising, in contrast to Saudi men, who are “allowed” to appear in public and even jog. In 2015, Saudi women and girls were granted their own exercise and sports programs at school, but not without controversy. According to National Public Radio, some religious conservatives believed that exercising for girls “is a Westernizing influence . . . that could lead to adultery and prostitution.”6
The weight problem has trickled down to the younger generation. According to The Wall Street Journal, an estimated 9.3 percent of school-age Saudi Arabian children meet the World Health Organization’s body-mass-index criteria for obesity.”7 Most Saudi schools lack physical fitness programs for children, leaving kids with nothing else to do but sit at home or in the backseat of cars or play at their computer consoles.
America and Europe, on the other hand, have a notoriously fraught relationship with weight. The Western diet book industry is huge and, along with the beauty industry, is predicated on a recurring cycle of hope and discouragement. Westerners will attempt a new dietary regime—or facial moisturizer, or lipstick—for, on average, three weeks to a month. When it doesn’t “work”—i.e., deliver instant results, or even transform identity—they move along briskly to the next diet, or brand. The South Beach Diet, the Paleo Diet, the Atkins Diet, the Hormone Reset Diet, the Belly Burn Plan, the Gluten-Free Diet, the No More Excuses Diet—how different are these from applying a Clarins facial moisturizer, followed by creams made by Shiseido, Clinique, La Mer, Jurlique and La Prairie? Another issue, across America at least, is that overweight people often eat sparingly in public, but at home, feeling hungry and deprived, they’ll reward themselves with a second calorie-laden meal.
Whenever I visit consumers’ homes, I always make it a point to scope out the insides of refrigerators, knowing the owners have prepared for my arrival and that I’m in the presence of a choreographed scene. The interiors of most consumer fridges—including my own—are beautifully and carefully arranged. Objects sparkle and sweat. There are bowls of celery, carrots, radishes or cherry tomatoes. But by their very nature, shame and secrecy are private, a perspective that becomes clear when I get down on my knees in a consumer’s kitchen and look at what sits on a refrigerator’s bottom shelves.
The lower shelves are where the “bad stuff” resides—the cheese, the cold cuts, the breads, the alcohol, the chocolate bars. By keeping unhealthy food out of sight, consumers can convince themselves they eat more healthily than they actually do. Over the years, I’ve found six-packs of soda buried among shoes, potato chips concealed in storage rooms and, in one case, a huge stock of chocolate and Gummi Bears hidden underneath someone’s bedroom floorboards. Consumers often justify the presence of a case of Pepsi or a dozen bags of corn chips by reminding me that it is more cost-effective to buy in bulk, which is true. At the same time, studies show that the more soda and snacks we buy, the more likely we are to consume them.
Along with studying the insides of refrigerators and the food caches hidden in cabinets, sometimes I’ll go so far as to ask whether I can go through someone’s garbage. One aspect of my job that I especially enjoy is talking with local garbage collectors. No matter where they live in the world, they get to see, and smell, privileged information. When most of us toss something in the garbage and tie it up, we seldom think about it again. The evidence of our recent history, and our habits, good or bad, is rendered neutral and harmless once we toss it away, or at least this is what we want to believe. One garbage collector in Sweden told me he could tell a lot about people from the way they sealed their garbage bags. His more self-confident customers never placed separate plastic ties around their bags; they simply maneuvered the plastic into a knot. The more insecure the person, he said, the more knots or ties there tended to be.
What’s inside garbage cans—“the blend,” as another garbage collector I interviewed called it—can also communicate a lot about their owners. If someone crushes a tube of toothpaste and tosses it away capless, experience tells me they are prudent about saving money, though at the end of the day they will spend money on themselves, as if to compensate for their earlier inattention. Consumers who discard a toothpaste tube with its cap screwed down tightly seldom allow themselves to relax, and are reluctant to expose who they really are, or to indulge themselves with a luxury. Consumers who throw away a half-full toothpaste tube are, in general, less secure than people who wait until the tube is depleted. All this and more . . . from a simple garbage bin.
A few years ago, I got a close-up perspective on obesity and fast food when McDonald’s Europe asked me to help them create a new, healthier Happy Meal. The job began in France, spread across the European Union and migrated to the United States—where, I might add, the concept I came up with was roundly rejected. The idea later bounced back to Europe, where Germany and a handful of other countries eventually implemented it.
First, some context. As the world’s largest food chain, McDonald’s has 35,000 franchises in 11
8 countries and territories, and serves 68 million customers every day. But a decade or so ago, McDonald’s was facing a public relations firestorm. In 2001, journalist Eric Schlosser published Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, a best-selling expose of the fast-food industry, which revealed many unsavory details its main players would have liked to keep undercover. Three years later, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock released the documentary Super Size Me, chronicling his decision to consume only McDonald’s food three times a day for an entire month, and the consequences of a fast-food diet on both his physical and psychological well-being. By the end of his experiment, Spurlock had gained 25 pounds and was depressed and lethargic. His cholesterol had skyrocketed, and he had heart palpitations. When studies were published around that same time showing that obesity levels across Europe had more than doubled over the past two decades, McDonald’s found itself on the defensive about the ways in which its menu contributed to the epidemic, and poor eating habits overall. It was at this perilous moment that the chief marketing officer of McDonald’s Europe asked whether I might be able to come up with some ideas to reinvent the concept of the Happy Meal.
McDonald’s biggest markets in Europe are Germany, England and France—and it was there I launched my Subtext Research. In France, McDonald’s bears little resemblance to its American counterpart. French McDonald’s are more elegant, the chairs more comfortable, the tables less flimsy, the décor more subtly upscale, with the brash yellows and reds Americans are accustomed to exchanged for darker, muted forest-greens. The French are renowned for loving “McDo,” and with its 1,200 French locations, France is McDonald’s most profitable country outside the United States. Of course, in a nation with high taxes, inflation and unemployment, and an expensive capital city, Paris, whose outskirts are home to some of the poorest people in the world, McDonald’s is also a comparative bargain.