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  In the marketing world, it’s long been accepted that when a typical woman chooses a product, 80 percent of the reason is emotional and only 20 percent is rational. Women will generally respond to an entreaty for a conditioner, a new brand of makeup, or even a laundry detergent from an emotional perspective, as in My mother always used this brand or The family down the street drives this car, before buttressing her emotional decision with a rational argument. This is why most advertising aimed at women tends to play to emotions, like nostalgia or fear or envy. For men, the conventional wisdom in marketing circles has always been that this ratio is reversed, that 20 percent of a man’s decision is emotional and 80 percent rational. But I don’t believe that for a second! Men and women are both emotional beings, the difference being that men need to disguise their emotional drivers under features and specs. Men’s decision making is 80/20, too—I simply call their internal process “emorational,” meaning that the practical features of a product permit men to disguise their own emotional natures. And manufacturers are well aware of this, too. Ever notice that marketers of products aimed at men tend to stress specs and numbers, like a 20-gigabyte hard drive or a 14.1-megapixel camera (yes, that does make a difference) or an Optimax 225 Sport XS engine, and so on? That’s because these numbers provide a rational, quantifiable justification for choosing that product over another (usually cheaper) model. According to Time magazine, “Product specifications disproportionately sway our decisions as shoppers, even when our own experiences tell us they don’t matter,”15 and this is generally true more for men than for women.

  Yet, the male consumer is changing and so are all the time-tested strategies for marketing to them. These days, if you look in the cosmetics aisle at the products aimed at males, you’ll notice their macho names like “Ripped Fuel,” “Edge,” “Facial Fuel,” and “Axe,” which evoke associations of sporty, “manly” things like extreme sports, motorcycles, even war. This is because marketers know full well that these tough-guy names allow them to still feel tough and athletic even when buying a product that’s in fact all about “beauty,” a traditional no-no for most straight males. Advertisers tread carefully around this issue. Even Mënaji, a spectacularly successful online male cosmetics company that offers a full line of natural products including a face mask, a concealer, and an under-eye treatment, gives its products aggressive names like “Camo” and “Eraser.” Axe has even rolled out an all-black bottle constructed to look like a grenade, complete with indentations for a young man’s fingertips. The underlying emotional promise these brands are making is to smooth out the rough edges and make him look good while still being rugged and masculine at the same time.

  This upsurge in male vanity is why men are increasingly falling prey to a cunning trick that retailers used to reserve for women. Ever been shopping for a pair of khakis or jeans, and when you finally find a pair that fits, you are delighted to discover that your size hasn’t changed since you were back in graduate school? I have some bad news for you. You’ve likely fallen victim to “vanity sizing,” a devious ploy by which stores make clothes bigger so we think we can fit into a smaller size.16 Many retailers have been doing this with women’s clothes for years, but the tactic is now starting to creep into the men’s sections of stores as well. When Esquire magazine sent reporter Abram Sauer into various stores with a tape measure, he found that pairs of men’s pants with so-called 36-inch waists actually ranged in size from 37 inches (at H&M) to 38.5 inches (at Calvin Klein) to 39 inches (at the Gap, Haggar, and Dockers) to a generous 41 inches at Old Navy.17 It used to be that the typical man couldn’t care less what the size of his waistband was, but today experts know full well that both genders will be more likely to buy a product that makes them feel trim and svelte.

  There’s no question that marketers are making a pretty penny by exploiting the fact that it’s becoming more and more socially acceptable for men to take an active role in maintaining their appearance. In 1995, 53 percent of men shopped for themselves. By 2009 that figure had risen to 75 percent. As Wendy Liebmann, the founder and CEO of WSL Strategic Retail, a marketing consulting firm, observes, the era of a man needing a woman’s opinion before he buys something may be on the way out. “Part of what we’re witnessing is a cultural shift,” Liebmann says. “Men are marrying later in life and they’re living on their own longer.”18 Which means that when men finally decide to walk down the aisle, they already know which brands they like, sometimes even bringing the brands they love into the marriage and influencing what their wives buy. Unlike the males of yesteryear, who went straight from under their mothers’ wings to under their wives’, today’s bachelors have to know how to do more when it comes to shopping, like how to get fitted for a suit, how to pick out sheets with the best thread count, and so on.

  This goes a long way toward explaining why one smart store, the San Antonio–based supermarket H-E-B, has created a “Men’s Zone,” a safe haven set apart from the rest of the store, where beauty-conscious men can shop for personal-care items to their hearts’ content while still feeling macho and masculine. Adorned with sci-fi blue floor lighting and flat-screen TVs, this stand-alone man cave offers 534 items that promise to do everything from soothe tired skin to tighten baggy eyelids to keep a guy smelling like fresh lemons all day, while five touch screens provide “grooming tips and product advice.”19 And just in case it all starts to feel a little too girly, soccer, car racing, basketball, and other sports play continuously on the flat screens.20

  Similarly, Procter & Gamble is now ensuring that men’s and women’s cosmetics will be shelved in different aisles in stores, so that the independent male shopper won’t feel uncomfortable or emasculated picking out a facial cream or under-eye smoother as the woman beside him chooses a shade of lipstick. How do these companies know that shelving the men’s products separately will increase sales? Thanks to the shadowy investigations they conduct in the dead of the night.

  Very few people know this, but most major consumer-goods companies, including Unilever, Kraft, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola, among others, have set up “fake supermarkets,” typically in abandoned warehouses in industrial parts of town. They stock the shelves with their own products as well as their competitors’, then late at night, under the cover of darkness, they invite people to come and, well, shop. While they’re browsing the aisles, cameras and in some extreme cases brain-scanning equipment are measuring what happens in real time as they select and reject various brands and items. Not unlike in the film Minority Report, these “supermarkets” generally have a control room lined with TV screens on which reps can actually measure the changes in consumers’ brain waves as they encounter different positioning of products. Based on this data, the company develops what in the business is called a “planogram,” a model showing where each product should be placed on the shelves to generate the highest sales, then buys shelf space in supermarkets and drugstores accordingly.

  As it turns out, the reason that shelving men’s “beauty” products separately is such a booster of sales is that even though gender roles may be changing, many men still don’t want fellow customers watching them lingering over the grooming shelves. But if they feel like they can browse freely without the scrutiny of other people’s stares, they’re more likely to go for the higher-end items or pick up an extra item.

  So can brands traditionally aimed at women (with extremely feminine, ladylike names like “Dove”) make a successful crossover to guys? Well, when you consider that Marlboro began as a filtered cigarette marketed to women back in the 1920s, that Nair rolled out a chest and back hair exfoliant for men in 2002, and that Ugg was advertised as a men’s brand long before it became known as a must-have female boot, the odds are looking pretty good. And for an example of how even traditionally male brands are catering to men’s “feminine sides,” recently Dutch electronics giant Philips decided that men wanted “a more robust, heavy-duty tool to tackle hampers of laundry. Something with a larger grip and a more masculine look.”
So it created the GC4490, which offers “more power, more steam, more performance.”

  What exactly is this manly item? It’s an iron.

  Sure, sex in advertising may be one of the oldest tricks in the book, but from what I’ve seen in my work, one thing couldn’t be more clear: whether it’s by probing our deepest and darkest sexual fantasies, by engineering nostalgia for the sexual heyday of our youth, or by covertly selling the promise to make us more sexually attractive, today’s marketers and advertisers have all kinds of new ways of tapping into our most basic and primal human desire—and making a whole lot of money in the process.

  CHAPTER 5

  In 1931, a dedicated bird-watcher named Edward Selous started pondering a curious phenomenon he’d been observing for years. How, Selous wondered, could so many species of birds—rooks, gulls, lapwings, geese, starlings, you name it—rise from a field in complete synchrony, as though doing a choreographed dance? Everyone knew birds aren’t that bright and have no way of communicating with one another, so how could they possibly coordinate their actions in such a seamless manner? It must be mind reading, he concluded. At the time, no one gave Selous’s ESP theory credence. After all, he had no proof, and the scientific community then, just as now, preferred facts over speculation. Still, back in the 1930s no one could come up with a better explanation.

  As it later turned out, Selous wasn’t completely crazy. The birds’ behavior was the result of a mind meld of sorts. The birds weren’t reading one another’s minds, of course, but they were, in a sense, acting as if they shared one collective brain. This phenomenon isn’t unique to birds. The animal kingdom is rife with examples of it. Even termites—yes, those nasty little creatures that were put on earth to gnaw down structures and cause the foundations of houses to buckle—are capable of a collective consciousness. To put it not so kindly, a single termite is spectacularly dumb; its brain doesn’t contain enough neurons even to conceive of what it’s doing. Yet a million termites have enough collective brainpower to build giant, complex structures, some as high as thirty feet tall: the termite mound. The question is how.

  It wasn’t until the late 1950s that science came up with an explanation. When biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse observed many groups of termites during the early phase of building, he found that each little fellow appeared to be carrying out three simple steps.

  First, the termite would chew a mouthful of earth and mold it into a pellet with its saliva.

  Second, the termite would wander around directionlessly, and as soon as it stumbled upon an elevated area, it would dump the pellet, just as a golden retriever might drop a spit-covered tennis ball.

  Third, the termite would repeat steps one and two over and over.

  It’s hard to comprehend how these dim-witted insects can eventually construct a giant, well-designed structure through this achingly slow, seemingly random and uncoordinated process. But they can. The more earth pellets the termites drop into place, the higher the ground becomes. And the higher the ground becomes, the greater the chance that all the other aimlessly meandering termites will bash into it, allowing it to grow even more. When these few mounds, or pillars, reach a certain height, Grasse explains, “a new behavior kicks in and the termites start to build arches between them. The whole elaborate termite mound with its chambers and tunnels and sophisticated air circulation channels arises from the work of thousands of termites with no central coordination at all, just a few simple rules.”1 The name Grasse gave to this bizarre phenomenon was “cooperation without communication.”

  In short, no big-cheese termite queen issued any orders. There was no strategic planning, no formal organizing intelligence telling the termites what to do. They simply created a world by operating as if they were tiny, singular cells in one enormous termite brain.2

  The process can be explained by a theory known as “complex adaptive systems,” which says that many systems in nature (like birds taking simultaneous flight or termites painstakingly constructing a colossal mound) are inherently “emergent” and “nondeterministic,” which means, in plain English, that the whole is mightier than the sum of its parts and that you can’t predict the collective results simply by looking at the individual actions (like a single termite holding a saliva-drenched bit of sand or one bird about to take flight). According to this theory, although the process might be invisible to the human eye, termites are actually able to intuit “when and where to add to the structure by maintaining a high degree of connectivity to others in the colony.”3 In other words, only by observing and mimicking the behavior of its neighbors can a termite figure out what it should be doing.

  We as consumers, I’ve observed time and again, act in much the same way. Just like those birds and those termites, we, too, are wired with a collective consciousness in that we size up what those around us are doing and modify our own actions and behaviors accordingly. In a 2008 experiment conducted by researchers at Leeds University, groups of people were instructed to walk aimlessly around a large hall, without conversing with one another. But first the researchers gave just a few of the people detailed instructions on where, precisely, they should walk. When they observed the resulting behavior, they found that no matter how large or small the group, everyone in it blindly followed that handful of people who appeared to have some idea where they were going. As the scientists put it, “(The) research suggests that humans flock like sheep and birds, subconsciously following a minority of individuals,”4 and that it takes a mere 5 percent of “informed individuals” to influence the direction of a crowd of up to two hundred people. The other 95 percent of us trail along without even being aware of it.5

  According to Professor Jens Krause, who engineered the study, “What’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision, despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another.” Just like those termites, “in most cases the participants didn’t realize they were being led by others.”6

  Want more evidence that it takes only a few people in a group to steer the direction of others around them? In a study conducted in Cologne, Germany, a crowd of two hundred people clustered in the center of a large circle that was numbered like a clock. Researchers then handed out slips of paper to ten “informed individuals” that read, “Go to nine o’clock, but do not leave the group.” The others were given no specific instructions, just notes that read, “Stay with the group.” For a while, the group seemed to mix and mingle fairly randomly. But soon enough, the “informed individuals” had led all the others to the designated nine o’clock target.7

  In 2007, the Washington Post rolled out an intriguing and now-famous experiment. The newspaper hired one of the best musicians in the world to play a $3.5 million Stradivarius violin on a subway platform during morning rush hour in America’s capital city. Most if not all commuters walked right by and ignored him. Just another downtrodden street musician after my loose change, they undoubtedly thought. The violinist’s final take for the entire morning: $32.17—just a fraction of what a single ticket to one of his performances would cost. On the face of it, it might seem these commuters were just philistines who wouldn’t know musical talent if it hit them over the head. But I believe this was an example of our collective consciousness, our herd mentality, at work. Think about it. One harried commuter ignores the performer (maybe she was in a particular hurry that morning or is tone-deaf), and so the commuter behind her, assuming there must not be anything to see here, rushes past him as well. So does the person behind her, and the ten people behind him, and so on and so forth until the entire mass of morning commuters is brushing past a world-class performer whom, under other circumstances, they might have happily paid hundreds of dollars to see perform at the Kennedy Center or Carnegie Hall.8

  Standing out, or being different from everyone else, causes most of us great discomfort. Sometimes even literally. I’ll never forget a Unilever focus group I once observed, where consumers were discussing shampo
os. As soon as the moderator brought up the topic of itching, everyone in the room began scratching their scalps. Did they all suddenly develop a head of lice? Of course not. They were simply, and utterly unconsciously, mimicking the behaviors of others in the room.

  Over the years, I’ve noticed another interesting phenomenon. When you show people a stack of photos from a party or an album of pictures just uploaded onto Facebook, the first thing they do is pause and look at the picture of themselves. Not so surprising—we’re a vain species. But what’s the second thing they do? Pause and look at the pictures of people surrounding them. Why? Because once they’ve taken note of how they appear, they need to analyze how they appear compared to others: Do they look as though they belong? Are they making the right impression? Are others looking on at them approvingly? This is telling. It shows that we as human beings never assess ourselves, our behaviors, or our decisions in a vacuum; we assess them in relation to everyone else.

  The point is, we’re a social species, wired to display this kind of herd behavior. Even fourteen-month-old babies show evidence of it. In a series of studies, researchers trained fourteen-month-olds to play with five distinctive toys. These same children later demonstrated their newly won toy-playing skills to other fourteen-month-old children at a day care, children who’d never seen these particular toys before. Two days later, one of the researchers brought the same toys to each of these second children’s homes. Without hesitation, the children began playing with the toys in the exact same way they’d witnessed at the day-care center. The conclusion? Fourteen-month-old babies automatically imitate behaviors carried out by peers and bring what they’ve learned home with them, even forty-eight hours later.9