Brandwashed Page 16
Kids and teens want what the popular kids have, plain and simple. A colleague once told me an intriguing story about a computer game that was released in California not too long ago. Instead of advertising the product in a traditional way, the game’s savvy developer simply identified the hundred most popular kids in a high school in Southern California, gave them free versions of the game, then sat back to watch it catch on like wildfire.
There’s an actual biological reason for why kids are so drawn to the classmates they deem more popular. Years ago, the BBC carried out a fascinating study. It showed kids a stack of photos of other kids who were either laughing or smiling and asked them to pick out the kids they would most like to be around. Every single person picked the laughing kids. On the face of it this seems obvious. Who wouldn’t want to be around someone who’s laughing and appears to be having a good time? But there’s another reason behind it; laughing actually makes us feel good on a physiological level. When we laugh, we’re flooding our brains, organs, and tissues with oxygen, which is one of the “primary catalysts for biological energy in the human body.”42 So the popular kids at school didn’t just get that way because of their personalities; they got that way because it physically feels good to be around them.
That said, as powerful as peer pressure is in persuading teens to buy, when a brand becomes too popular, too widespread, it can backfire. From studies I’ve conducted over the years, it’s become clear that young people will always deny being “a part of” any new trend. What’s more, I’ve found that once an older generation catches on to a new brand or trend, it becomes unhip, and fast. It’s what I call the “generation lap” problem, because it’s what happens when the younger kids jump ship in an attempt to create the “generation lap”—meaning a psychological distance between them and older generations.
The generation lap, though, is in itself a form of peer pressure; a reverse peer pressure, if you will. Take what happened with the Levi’s brand. In the eighties, Levi’s were the jeans to have. Anyone who was anyone wore Levi’s. But by 2001 the brand had taken a major hit. Its revenue was slashed in half and market share had dropped to 12.1 percent, from 18.7 percent in 1986.43 Levi’s was suddenly the brand that no one cool would be caught dead in. Why?
It’s a rite of passage for every child to pass through a rebellious phase. (That said, a study has shown that men and women both recognize that they are similar to their parents, or accept the strength of their parents’ influence, by the time they turn thirty-five.) Many companies, knowing this, often market their brands and products to seem “bad” or “subversive.” Which is what Levi’s did . . . only a little too well.
Levi’s was the brand of rebellion for the baby boomer generation. That rebel without a cause, James Dean, wore them. In the sixties they were practically the uniform of hippies and protesters. In the seventies they were among the first brands to introduce bell-bottoms. But once the boomers grew up and started having kids of their own, the generation lap set in. No rebellious youth wants to be seen wearing the same jeans as his dad. How can you distance yourself from your parents’ generation if your parents are into the same trend? So the kids started wearing other jeans, ones different enough to distinguish them from their parents. (Now you know what skinny jeans are all about—this style is adult-proof. Let’s face it, the trendiest adult on earth knows he can’t fit his fortysomething legs into those pipe-cleaner holes.)
This is exactly why I recommend that companies create more and more “brand disapproved” concepts—ideas or products or gadgets deliberately built to court parental disapproval. A concept so outrageous, so provocative, so different, so . . . anything! . . . that adults will react against it. This is harder to do than you might imagine, yet my research has shown that once such a concept has been identified, there’s almost a 90 percent chance that it will turn out to be a success among the younger set.
Peer pressure may sometimes work in backward ways, but the psychology behind it—the desire for acceptance—remains the same. I’ve seen again and again that there’s a certain type of consumer who will run away from what’s popular, even among the people in their own generation. If their peers start to like “indie bands,” they’ll turn up their noses. If their friends are decked out in Abercrombie & Fitch, they’ll head for the local Goodwill or Salvation Army. If they go to a school that champions the football team, they’ll spend their Saturdays playing the xylophone, or maybe just sit in their rooms scowling and smoking. They presume that anything that’s popular, that’s universally adored, or that involves long lines snaking around a block is probably substandard, populist swill. To them, it’s cool to be uncool.
But this isn’t really as counterintuitive as it seems. Because these people tend to flock together with people who feel exactly the same way. So when one of them bashes the band Arcade Fire for being “sellouts” or declares that Converse sneakers are for “posers,” it’s likely because he’s observed those around him doing the same. In the end, nonconformity is a form of conformity as well.
Peering Overseas
In all my years in the marketing world, I’ve consistently found one fact to be true: nowhere in the world are people more easily brandwashed than in Asia. In Asian countries, it’s perfectly normal for a man to own half a dozen expensive Swiss watches or for a woman to carefully put aside a month’s salary for a pair of Prada shoes. In Asia, more so than even in the United States, a person is what he or she wears. But the really interesting thing about this is how socially contagious brand preference is over there. Most Asian women who carry a Louis Vuitton bag don’t do so because they’re enamored of the brand. As one expert explained, “The ability or need to fit in is a strong driver. Asians are a collectivist society, and group identity is important. So in Japan, if one office lady carries a Louis Vuitton bag, then it means that to fit in, the rest would do the same.”44
Louis Vuitton has very cleverly capitalized on the herd mentality of Asian culture by playing on a dream that is common to 78 percent of Japanese women: getting married in Paris. How? By playing up its “Frenchness” in its marketing, advertising, and stores. First off, in Japan, even more than elsewhere, the store design is made to look French-inspired—with its glamorous, old-fashioned Parisian street scenes and paintings of iconic French landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe. Store managers in Japan are often French-born (with accents that typically manage to outdo even Maurice Chevalier’s), and the brand’s suitcases, or “trunks,” are embossed with French name tags and placed conspicuously in the foyers of the company’s flagship stores (the stores even serve French-made Moët & Chandon champagne to their best customers). The photos in the Louis Vuitton catalogs are also set against Parisian backdrops, and even in Japan the models are never, ever Japanese. They’re either ambiguously ethnic or stylishly “French looking.” And no matter what country you’re surfing the Web in, when you go to the Louis Vuitton Web site, you’ll immediately be asked if you want to read the site in French—even though globally, French consumers are responsible for only a minuscule percentage of Vuitton sales (fact is, the French elite largely eschew the brand). And finally, even though Louis Vuitton in fact manufactures a number of its products in India, it continues to manufacture the luggage it sends to the Japanese market in France, just to keep up that “French” image.
Based on what I’ve seen in my travels, it’s also fair to say that in places where money is relatively new—like China and Russia—you’ll find the greatest obsession with brands. I believe that this, too, comes back to insecurity and the desire to fit in. For a long time, both China and the Soviet Union felt like the underdogs of the global economy—many of their residents have felt as though the rest of the world doesn’t yet accept or respect them. So they tend to overcompensate for this national lack of self-esteem by buying brands—the louder, bolder, and more in-your-face expensive the better.
I won’t ever forget a story a Russian man once told at a
conference. He was recalling the first time he received special permission to travel from his home state to America. At the Dublin airport, where he was changing planes, he dashed into a small kiosk and, using the only money he had on him, bought a can of Coke. But the snap top broke off, and he couldn’t open the can. When he tried punching a hole in the top and the whole thing exploded, he didn’t care. He didn’t care about actually drinking the beverage. The point was, he’d bought an original can of Coca-Cola, and for him, that Coke symbolized nothing less than America.
Scol! Nastrovia!
To leave you with one final story of how marketers engineer viral trends, let’s take a trip to Russia, where last year Greg Tucker and Chris Lukehurst of the UK’s Marketing Clinic and I were summoned to develop a market-leading brand of (what else?) vodka. I remember the first time I set eyes on the vodka section of a Russian supermarket. There weren’t tens or even hundreds but thousands of varieties of vodka (and this wasn’t a monstrous superstore, either). Later I learned that Russia boasts roughly three thousand different vodka brands and five thousand different vodka flavors. Greg’s and my challenge was to create brand number 3,001 and somehow turn it into the market leader.
I had another mission, too—to transform the Russian population’s drinking habits. I’m sure you’re familiar with the place’s reputation. It’s mostly true. And the amount of drinking that goes on there has caused major societal damage, which the Russian government has been struggling to combat for many years. Now you might wonder (and rightly so) why a vodka company would want to figure out a way to get Russian citizens to drink less. Good question. The company’s reasons were twofold. The first was that cognacs are making significant inroads in Russia and becoming serious competitors to the long-standing Russian vodka industry. The second is a twist on the generation-lap problem—the rampant drinking among the older generation of Russians is turning off the younger generation, who look at their soused parents and think, Dude, I don’t want to end up like that.
So I was tasked to travel around the country and find out why Russians drink as much as they did, and whether there was anything I could do about it. And paradoxically, at the same time could I help create a successful new vodka brand? To me these missions seemed incompatible, if not impossible. That is, until one night when I discovered something about why Russians drink as much as they do.
Not completely unlike the viral drinking game “icing” we talked about earlier in the chapter, it all comes down to a socially contagious ritual, only this one is a century old. The scol ritual begins with pouring vodka into a large—typically fifty-milliliter—glass. Then, all at once, everyone downs the stuff and cries out “Nastrovia!” No sipping here, either—you have to drink it down straight. This is one of Russia’s oldest and most widespread customs, and it’s a major part of every occasion or celebration, from birthdays to dinner parties to funerals. (Not doing it, in fact, is considered bad luck.) But once I began talking to hundreds of Russians in cities and villages across the country, I discovered something surprising. Most Russians hate the taste of vodka and hate the accompanying ritual (they even have to scarf down food afterward to get rid of the burning taste in their throats). In other words, they don’t do it because they enjoy it—they do it because it’s simply what everyone else does—it generates a sense of belonging and camaraderie. Plus, there were no alternative rituals.
Which is when I thought, Huh.
By introducing a new drinking ritual, one that people actually enjoyed, maybe I could not only gain awareness for a new brand but also show the Russians a new (and healthier) way to drink vodka.
Now, the thing about the scol ritual is that it requires that everyone drink at exactly the same speed: fast (which was actually bad for the vodka company, because a person who drinks too much too fast will also be on the floor that much more quickly, thus reducing overall vodka intake). This countrywide ritual was like a fraternity during hazing week; it was creating peer pressure to binge drink. By altering the ritual, my hope was that we could change at least the speed of drinking.
This turned out to be just what many Russians had been waiting for but no one had ever dared to say aloud. In the rough-and-tumble Russian culture, sipping a drink slowly is generally perceived as weak, overdelicate, and effete. No red-blooded Russian man would ever dare take the risk. The key, therefore, would be to introduce a whole new masculine way of drinking vodka, this time slowly and out of a small glass, that would still be perceived as “Russian.” So I borrowed from a country that many Russians respect and admire—Finland.
By setting up hundreds of testing groups and analyzing consumers’ taste palates across Russia, we crafted a vodka product that lacked the harsh burn everyone loathed—and by combining this new taste with a newfound ritual of drinking out of a smaller glass (and I’m afraid I’m contractually bound to secrecy, so I can’t divulge anything more), a new vodka brand hit the market. Time will tell whether the brand will take off, and whether we actually managed to create a healthier kind of peer pressure.
CHAPTER 6
An American woman I know who spent her childhood years in Paris is obsessed with the taste of Mars bars. Not American Mars bars. Just French Mars bars. She will raise her right hand and swear that the U.S. version cannot compare with the taste of the Mars bars she snacked on growing up. She can’t explain why. When pressed, she’ll say only that the chocolate tastes sweeter and the caramel tastes creamier. When friends visit France, she begs them to bring her back supplies.
I have to admit, I feel as fondly about my memories of the holidays I spent growing up in Denmark, though I haven’t lived there for years. The snow coming down outside, the smells drifting out of the kitchen, the family members gathered around the tree. The simplicity of a time that, looking back, seems so far superior to the strident commercial machinery that defines the holidays today. Though I’ve had fantastic holidays in recent years, in my mind none compare to the ones I had when I was a child.
While we’re on the topic of the past, wasn’t the music you grew up listening to and the TV shows you liked to watch way back when all frankly better than the newfangled bands and songs and shows that are on TV and the radio today? Or have you noticed that 99 percent of the time we derive the most pleasure from our first experience of something? That the original version of a song or movie is the best; that the house we grew up in is better and more attractive than any future home; that a story is more enjoyable and more believable the first time we hear it than the second or third time (in fact, I once conducted a study to investigate that last one and indeed found that 72 percent of people believed that the first source of a story was more authentic than subsequent retellings).
Sometimes the first experiences were objectively better, though not as a rule. But objectively better or not, they always seem better in hindsight. That’s because as humans (and consumers) we’ve been fooled into thinking the past was perfect, and by our own brains, too. The culprit? A simple and very powerful psychological persuader known as nostalgia—one that marketers know all too well.
Case in point: the 2009 Super Bowl, an event that’s almost become better known for its high-priced commercials than for the game itself (some of us can’t remember who played, others don’t care, but almost all of us can remember which commercial we liked best). During this particular Super Bowl, 151.6 million people,1 the largest TV audience ever, sat back and watched ads starring Don Rickles (for the flower company Teleflora), Abe Vigoda and Betty White (for Snickers chocolate bars), Stevie Wonder (for Volkswagen), and an antique sock monkey (for a new model of Kia).
What’s more, the soundtrack accompanying the commercials that spanned the roughly three-hour show featured songs by seventies funk stylists Kool & the Gang (for the Honda Accord Crossover); the classic rock band Cheap Trick (for Audi); the British symphonic rockers Electric Light Orchestra, whose global fame peaked in the midseventies (for Select 55 beer); and seventies singer-songwriter Bill Withers (for Electronic
Arts’ Dante’s Inferno video game). During the halftime show, the eighties sensation Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band came out and performed “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Born to Run,” “Working on a Dream,” and “Glory Days.”
What decade were we in, anyway? What was going on here?
Nostalgic for Nostalgia
The word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek compounds nostos— meaning “to come home”—and algos, or pain. It was coined in 1688 by a Swiss physician, Johannes Hofer, in reference to a bizarre malady affecting Swiss nationals stationed overseas (homesickness, basically) that Dr. Hofer believed could ultimately lead to widespread desertions and even death. In our modern parlance, however, it’s generally used to refer to, as Webster’s puts it, “a wistful or excessive sentimental yearning or return to some past period.”
In a 2006 study carried out at the University of Southampton in the UK, 79 percent of the 172 students polled claimed they experience nostalgic thoughts at least once a week, while 16 percent reported having such fond moments daily. Turns out there’s a reason we as humans are prone to these thoughts; nostalgia is good for us. According to Scientific American, “Rather than being a waste of time or an unhealthful indulgence, basking in memories elevates mood, increases self-esteem and strengthens relationships. In short, nostalgia is a source of psychological well-being.”2 What’s more, when the same researchers asked those subjects to assess their social competence in three areas (their capacity to build relationships, their ability to be candid with others about their feelings, and whether or not they could offer their friends emotional support), they found that “the participants most likely to engage in nostalgic thinking did better in all three measures of social skills than those in the control group,”3 concluding that “nostalgic thinking . . . breeds happier moods.”4