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  But this still doesn’t explain precisely why our buying decisions are so unduly influenced by a brand’s supposed popularity. So the authors of the study decided to use an fMRI to see what was really going on in these impressionable teenagers’ brains when they succumbed to peer pressure. They had twelve- to seventeen-year-olds rate fifteen-second clips of songs downloaded from MySpace. Then they revealed to some the songs’ overall popularity. The results showed that when the participants’ own ratings of the music matched up with what they had been told about the song (e.g., if they liked a popular song), there tended to be activity in the caudate nucleus, an area of the brain connected to rewards. When there was a mismatch, however (e.g., the teen liked the song but discovered it was unpopular), areas associated with anxiety lit up. The researchers concluded that “this mismatch anxiety motivates people to switch their choices in the direction of the consensus, suggesting that this is a major force behind conformity observed in music tastes in teenagers.”24

  Early popularity is so closely tied to a brand or product’s ultimate success that even Hollywood is leveraging the predictive power of the teeming hordes. According to New Scientist, one of the most widespread new techniques for predicting the box-office performance of a film is by using something called “artificial markets.” On one, dubbed “the Hollywood Stock Exchange,” movie fans can buy and sell virtual shares in celebrities and in forthcoming or recently released films. This virtual market, which operates with a virtual currency called Hollywood Dollars, uses these predictions to create a stock rating reflecting the aggregate view of each film’s popularity or likely popularity (obviously, people only buy virtual shares in things they expect to be hits). “This is currently the gold standard in the industry for predicting likely box office receipts,” says Bernardo Huberman at HP Laboratories in Palo Alto,”25 and amazingly, the method has been so accurate that it’s now even being used to predict the outcomes of political campaigns.

  Of course, we aren’t always consciously aware that it’s perceived popularity that’s driving our preferences. Recently, I asked a focus group of ten female Louis Vuitton fans, “Why do you love the brand so much?” Each one spoke of the quality of the zipper, the leather, and finally, the brand’s timelessness. I was skeptical. So we took these same ten women and scanned their brains using fMRI. In each case, when the women were shown pictures of Louis Vuitton products, the Brodmann area 10, the region of the brain that’s activated when respondents are observing something they perceive as “cool,” lit up. The women had rationalized their purchases by telling themselves that they liked the brand for its good quality, but their brains knew that they really chose it for its “coolness.”

  The fact that even our brains can’t seem to bear for us to be left out seems to suggest that whether it’s the “hit” song, the “it” gift, or the “in” designer handbag, in the end what we buy really has little to do with what we want and more to do with what we think we should want.26 Even marketers themselves fall for this. For instance, every advertising agency “planner” (a term used in most European ad agencies for the person who conducts consumer research) of my acquaintance owns a fancy Moleskine leather notebook. They don’t give these out in orientation; it’s simply become an unspoken rule that every ad agency planner has to own and use one. If you don’t, it implies you’re on the outside, not a member of the “in crowd.”

  These marketers make their living dreaming up ways to prey on consumers’ fear of being left out, but subconsciously they (or may I say we) are just as vulnerable to peer pressure as the rest of us.

  I’ve Just Seen a Face

  In an earlier chapter, I wrote about how, in our society, cell phones and smart phones have fed a fear of being alone or of being perceived as alone; how, paradoxically, our ability to be constantly connected with others has ignited the fear we have of being unpopular and even unloved.

  The Internet, and in particular social-networking sites, have also revealed the extent to which many of us fear that our opinion, and very existence, might not matter. Just as the ability to be connected all the time gives rise to the fear that we are actually alone, the ability to comment, pontificate, and broadcast ourselves all the time gives rise to the fear that no one actually cares what we have to say. I believe it’s this insecurity, this feeling of being left out, that’s contributed to one of the most contagious social phenomena of our times: Facebook.

  First, a few facts and figures about Facebook. As of 2011, Facebook has close to seven hundred million active users, which translates into 22 percent of everyone on the Internet, and it’s still growing by 5 percent a month.27 According to Time, “If the website were granted terra firma, it would be the world’s third largest country by population, two-thirds bigger than the U.S.”28 Fifty percent of those users log on to Facebook at least once a day, while more than thirty-five million users update their statuses daily, creating a total of over sixty million daily status updates.29

  But the question is, how did Facebook become the global phenomenon it is today? How did it rise above all other social-networking sites out there (and believe me, there are plenty) to become the one online universe we simply “had” to be a part of? Quite simply because it’s where everyone is. It’s where invitations are sent, party pictures posted, messages exchanged. Increasingly, it’s also where we conduct our social lives. Who wouldn’t feel left out of a world where more than twenty-five billion pieces of information are shared a month and where photos are added at a speed of nearly one billion unique images a week?30 To not be on Facebook would guarantee complete social isolation; it would be like moving to a hut in the Shetland Islands.

  Most people are more or less aware of this. But what is less known is the extent to which companies are leveraging the persuasive power of connections on Facebook to cleverly advertise and market their products. Take, for example, the feature on Facebook known as the “like” button, formerly known as the “become a fan” button. Originally, people used this to “like” their friends’ status updates; it was a way to indicate our approval of the fact that, say, Jenny had just eaten a ham-and-cheese sandwich or Billy had had a great time in Aruba. But increasingly, the site has been encouraging users to “like” their favorite bands, books, movies, brands, and products—so successfully that the site processes a staggering one hundred million clicks of the “like” button daily.31 Do you happen to enjoy the TV show Friday Night Lights? If you go to that show’s Facebook page, it will tell you how many friends of yours also “like” the show. Wait, Erica likes Friday Night Lights, too? You think Erica is pretty cool and have now received what marketers call “social proof” that it’s okay to like the show, giving you a mandate to recommend the show to your best friends, so before you know it, you click the “like” button—which has conveniently popped right up on the bottom of the page—too. This will then show up in the newsfeed for all your friends to see, and they in turn may well reach for the “like” button, and so on and so forth until any Facebook user who comes across a mention of the show will spy a little message popping up saying, “Bob and Fred and Martin and 712,563 Facebook users like Friday Night Lights.” This is peer-pressure advertising at its best, and it works. According to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, marketers have known this for a really long time. “I’m much more likely to do [or buy] something that’s recommended by a friend,” she’s been quoted as saying.32

  Facebook isn’t the only social-media site out there that’s making guerrilla marketers and advertisers out of us, either. Take Foursquare, the popular location-based social-networking game we talked about earlier. Thanks to portable GPS apps, it knows where you are at any given time, so all you have to do is tap the Foursquare app on your iPhone or BlackBerry and it will automatically show you a list of nearby restaurants, bars, stores, and shops. But this is more than just a real-time, location-tracking version of Zagat. The point of the game is to “check in” to as many of these establishments as you can, wher
eupon Foursquare will automatically broadcast your whereabouts to other Foursquare users, and you can also elect to have your Twitter or Facebook feeds immediately updated when you check in to a restaurant, bar, café, or store (which most users do). You earn points for each place you check in, and the user who visits an establishment most is dubbed its “mayor.” Not only is this game surprisingly addictive (as we discussed in chapter 3), and not only does it get you to regularly spend money at establishments you might not have otherwise frequented, but because it broadcasts your location to all your fellow Foursquare players, Facebook friends, and Twitter followers, it provides a boatload of free advertising for every establishment you set foot in. As Twitter founder Evan Williams has said, “Many of the great businesses of the next decade will be about making information about our [consumer] behaviors more visible.”33

  Marketers and Mean Girls

  It’s well known that our culture glorifies the teenage years—just look at how many contemporary movies and TV shows revolve around high school. But rosy retrospection aside, who over the age of thirty would want to relive that torment of uncertainty, self-consciousness . . . and peer pressure? While it’s clear by now that peer pressure exists well beyond the high school cafeteria, it’s also true that there is no demographic more susceptible to peer pressure than teens and tweens (and it’s worth noting here that adolescents today spend five times more money than their parents did at the same age). Why? Largely because teenagers don’t know who they truly are yet, so they sport the brands they do as a backup form of ID. In 2010 a longitudinal study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that our brains don’t become fully mature until age twenty-five (and sometimes not until later), indicating that in our teen years, our cognitive abilities, and thus our sense of self, are still miles from their final development.

  Studies have shown that when tweens ask for a pair of Hollister jeans or the latest hot Wii game for Christmas, they’re asking for more than the latest, hippest product; what they’re really asking for is a dose of self-esteem. Deborah Roedder John at the University of Minnesota recruited 250 kids ages eight through eighteen and asked them to select among one hundred words and images and create a collage answering the question “What makes me happy?” When she looked at the results, she found that the children with higher self-esteem chose words that represented nonmaterial activities and achievements, like getting good grades or skateboarding with friends, whereas the children with lower levels of self-esteem chose possessions, like new clothes or an iPod.34

  Thanks to the deliberate marketing strategies by purveyors of everything from cigarettes (look at those smiling, laughing, white-toothed smokers surrounded by friends and having a grand old time!) to razors (if you shave with the Venus razor, the ads suggest, you, too, can end up with a hot, hunky boyfriend) these days, many children are socialized to believe they can buy themselves into popularity and acceptance. Approximately 60 percent of the 2,035 teenagers we polled in our national SIS study for this book believed that wearing or owning the right brand of clothes, gadgets, or cars could help them “buy” happiness. Moreover, compared to adults, teens were more likely to buy famous brands, more likely to believe that having the right clothes, gadgets, and cars could help them become more popular, and more likely to display expensive items such as makeup and perfume conspicuously in their bedrooms and bathrooms. While teens believed that their favorite brands made them feel cool, confident, friendly, self-expressive, creative, and passionate—they couldn’t have cared less about whether a brand actually did!—the adults said their favorite brands made them feel more reliable, practical, effective, and—yes—nostalgic. According to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, “Starting at 11 or 12, children begin to understand so much about the complex meanings of products and brands, and that is the exact time when their self-esteem drops. They’re thinking, ‘I don’t think I’m so popular. I don’t think kids like me. How do I solve that? Well, I know that popular kids wear Gap clothes and Nike shoes. So if I wear those, then I’ll be popular.’ ”35 In short, the less confidence or self-esteem they had, the more they seemed to be dependent on brands. (One might even conclude from this that the larger the logo we wear, the less self-esteem we have.) In a way, it makes sense; it’s easier, after all, to fit in with your peer group by buying the same brand of sneakers than it is to transform your personality. According to Amanda Grum, a psychologist who specializes in play and parenting, peer pressure “is most effective in children aged five to 12, as they are starting to develop their own identity. . . . Belonging is a powerful urge for young children, especially before their sense of self is fully developed. By aligning themselves with an external force, they are able to use the attributes of that object or group to help define themselves.”36

  According to a poll of 112,000 teenagers in thirty countries, just under half of all teenagers factor in the brand when making purchase decisions, with Nike, Lacoste, Adidas, Sony, and Apple being the most popular among the boys, and Zara, H&M, and Roxy among the girls. What’s more, just under half of all the teens said if there was no visible branding, they wouldn’t buy an item of clothing at all.37

  In a focus group I recently conducted (in conjunction with the Murray Hill Center) with female teens and tweens, I found that the more popular a brand, the more aware these young women are of its high cost. Hollister and Abercrombie weren’t just “cool girl” brands by virtue of how they looked; they were “cool girl” brands because they cost more than other brands. Clearly, companies know that teens (and often adults) are willing to pay more for brands they deem cool or popular—which is why Apple can get away with charging $229 for the iPhone 4 and Abercrombie can charge forty dollars for a tank top.

  The widespread belief that expensive, high-end brands will bring popularity, acceptance, or status goes a long way toward explaining the universe of knockoff clothing sold on the streets of many cities. Ironically, while we may often buy those fake Coaches, Versaces, Pradas, and Ray-Bans to feel better about ourselves, recent research shows they may in fact have the opposite effect. Three psychologists—Francesca Gino of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely of Duke University—gave a large sampling of women what appeared to be Chloé sunglasses, then told half the women they were fake and the other half they were real. Then they had the women carry out complex math puzzles, grade themselves on the honor system, and take money for each correct answer. Well, it turns out the women wearing the “fake” Chloé glasses (in reality, of course, they were all fake) cheated a whole lot more; a whopping “70 percent inflated their performance . . . and in effect stole cash from the coffer.”38 The authors concluded that “wearing counterfeit glasses not only fails to bolster our ego and self-image the way we hope, it actually undermines our internal sense of authenticity. ‘Faking it’ makes us feel like phonies and cheaters on the inside.”39 I guess it’s true what adman David Ogilvy once said: “A fake Rolex will fool everyone but you.”

  Lacoste is another high-end brand that has been extremely successful in using peer pressure to draw teenagers and college-aged kids to its products. Three decades ago, that little crocodile was one of the hottest logos in Europe and the United States. Everyone wanted to wear it. Then Bangkok-manufactured “fakes” began swamping the market, and the brand’s reputation went down the drain (Lacoste came close to filing for bankruptcy). So to resurrect its image, it gave out free shirts to cool-looking people at colleges and universities (as well as famous tennis players) and paid for product placements on MTV . . . and suddenly the brand was back in action. Today—go figure—Lacoste is as popular as it was thirty years ago.

  As many people know, few brands have shrewdly amassed a more cultlike, almost religious following than Apple (and in fact, in an experiment I conducted for my last book, when I studied the brains of Apple fanatics using an fMRI, I found that their brain activity was similar to that of those de
voted to Christianity), and peer pressure has been central to many of its strategies. One such strategy is early recruitment, or in other words, very deliberately marketing to kids aged thirteen to seventeen. This campaign has been so effective that today a staggering 46 percent of Americans in that age range own an iPod, the product teens talk to one another about most is the iPod, and one survey found that 82 percent of high school students who own a portable music player own an iPod.40

  Once these kids get to college, Apple even starts “recruiting” officially, going so far as to hire kids to become “Apple campus reps” and turning entire sections of college bookstores into mini Apple emporiums. “This is a great opportunity to represent Apple and to have some fun,” says the online recruiting ad. The job description includes hosting workshops, throwing events, and building relationships with students, faculty, and parents, and to top it off, “You’ll collaborate with the Apple team to run marketing programs on campus, from sales promotions to increasing awareness of Apple products. . . . It takes a leader, someone who can inspire peers and work with campus organizations.”41 This is a clever touch: who doesn’t want to think of him- or herself as a leader, a trendsetter, a person who inspires peers? (I might add here that if you are a frequent moviegoer, you would probably assume everyone on earth uses an Apple—a triumph of product placement and peer pressure all in one. In 2009 nearly one in two popular Hollywood movies—roughly 46 percent—featured Apple or its products. Though it’s generally agreed that no money changed hands, Apple couldn’t have bought better advertising or brand exposure.)