Brandwashed Page 18

  The point is, whether or not we’ve actually set foot on an old-time farm stand in our lives, emotionally we associate things like old wooden boxes, flowers, and hand-scrawled signs with authenticity, history, and a better, simpler time (as well as with freshness, as we saw in chapter 2); in other words, everything that the modern-looking Whole Foods is not. Or is it? It might not be obvious at first, but the ingenious marketers who designed Whole Foods did so very carefully, to trigger these very associations of a simpler era.

  For example, about a dozen feet into the store sit a dozen stacked cardboard boxes with anywhere from eight to ten fresh cantaloupes packed inside each one. These boxes could have been unpacked easily, of course, by any one of Whole Foods’ unionized employees, but they’re left that way on purpose. Why? For that rustic, aw-shucks touch. In other words, it’s a symbolic to reinforce the idea of old-time simplicity—as if our mythical farmer ran out of cantaloupe crates and had to make do with used cartons.

  But wait, something about these boxes looks off. Let’s move in and take a closer look. Funny, upon close inspection, this stack of crates looks like one giant cardboard box. It can’t be, can it? It is. In fact, it’s one humongous cardboard box with fissures cut carefully down the side that faces consumers (most likely by some industrial machinery at a factory in China) to make it appear as though this one giant cardboard box is made up of multiple stacked boxes. It’s ingenious in its ability to evoke the image of Grapes of Wrath–era laborers piling box after box of fresh fruit into the store. But like a lot of what goes on at Whole Foods, this image in false.

  In the industry, these cardboard boxes are known as “dummies.” And for good reason! We’ve been punked by nostalgia again.

  Whole Foods’ ongoing salute to the roadside stand of bygone days continues with a display of apples perched atop a wooden crate. The crate is deliberately distressed looking and grainy gray, suggesting that the apples on display were shipped to this store in a dirty flatbed, as they might have been in the 1940s. The Apples of Wrath! This crate is another symbolic, as are the two bottles of organic apple juice perched behind the apples, like Ma and Pa Apple overseeing a litter of baby Granny Smiths. Only a person with six-foot-long arms could ever hope to actually reach these bottles. But that’s not the point. Organic apple juice steers our brains to the old-fashioned notion of homemade cider—yet another marketing trick designed to recall a time when life was simpler and better and more delicious.

  Yet there’s an interesting paradox at play here. The past is perfect, and so is its produce, right? Well, not exactly. Because what I’ve found in all my years of studying consumers and their responses to branding is that one essential component of the nostalgia factor is authenticity, and nothing authentic is truly perfect, is it?

  A bruise on the apple. A chip in the china. A scratch in the veneer on an old armoire. Just enough imperfection to create that authentic, slightly “used” feel can go a long way in evoking memories of that battered old toy we dug out from the attic or the scuffed bracelet we inherited from our grandmother. Have you noticed the market for “prewashed” T‑shirts? Rationally, we tell ourselves that we buy them because they don’t shrink in the washer or dryer, but emotionally, it has more to do with their “authentic,” tattered look. Goodwill and the Salvation Army are among the most popular destinations nowadays among teenage girls, for whom it’s become cool to doubt the “authenticity” of such manipulated clothing emporiums as Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, and American Apparel.

  I recently visited a Trader Joe’s where they were having a sale on the luxury chocolate Ghirardelli. But the usual fancy wrappers and glitz boxes were nowhere in sight. Instead, they were selling “bulk” Ghirardelli chocolate chunks packed in large brown paper bags branded with old-fashioned handwriting. Inside were bits of chocolate cut into uneven pieces—as though a chocolate maker at a mom-and-pop candy shop had chopped them by hand. There was no doubt that this looked as authentic as could be—until I happened to buy two bags and coincidentally discovered that the pieces were identical. The broken chunks were not hand cut at all; they were molded by a machine to look like randomly broken pieces.

  Most consumers are drawn to small imperfections, and companies know it. It’s an aesthetic the Japanese term wabi-sabi, which can be translated as the art of finding beauty in nature, whether it’s a brown spot on a banana or a knot in the bark of a tree. To illustrate, I have a friend whose father was the Australian ambassador to Japan. One day, she told me, her father was seated in his garden in the middle of Tokyo, sipping tea. Fifty feet away from him, a gardener was going around picking up fallen leaves. It took him two full hours to complete the job. Then, when there was not a single leaf remaining on the ground, the gardener disappeared for twenty minutes, came back, and started carefully and tenderly placing leaves randomly onto the lawn. One here, two over there, and so on. Why? Because the leafless lawn looked unnatural. It looked too perfect.

  Perfection makes us as consumers leery. As everyone knows, nothing is truly perfect, ever, and so when it appears to be, we subconsciously seek out the flaw, the inauthenticity. We glimpse a perfectly shaped hamburger in the supermarket, and it suddenly reminds us that we’re eating mass-produced beef from an industrial slaughterhouse. We see a wall at Old Navy lined with impeccably stitched and identically dyed pairs of jeans, and we can all but picture them rolling off the assembly line in a Chinese sweatshop. We’re sick and tired of picture-perfect babies and flawless models. Why do we love YouTube videos so much? Because they’re imperfect, amateurish, and the people in them remind us of us. Recently there’s been a trend of using “real” people in mainstream movies and TV shows, and it’s one I predict will get bigger and bigger. According to a 2010 article in the New York Times, “Television executives at Fox Broadcasting, for example, say they have begun recruiting more natural-looking actors from Australia and Britain because the amply endowed, freakishly young-looking crowd that shows up for auditions in Los Angeles suffers from too much sameness.”13

  But what is “authentic,” anyway? Webster’s defines it as “worthy of acceptance and belief,” but when it comes to the shady corners of the marketing and advertising world, that can mean a lot of different things. Is canned laughter authentic? Is the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas authentic? Is the sweater from H&M or the skirt from Zara that looks just like the one we saw on the runways during Fashion Week (but at quadruple the price) authentic? I would answer technically yes, as in all cases each one is true to what it intends to be. But at the same time, one could also argue these are mere imitations, clever ploys to trick our brains into thinking we’re getting “the real thing.”

  These kinds of strategies are old hat for marketers and advertisers, but I’ve recently begun to notice an interesting shift. These days many marketers are introducing tiny, subtle imperfections into their products in an attempt to create the impression of authenticity, or what I call “inauthentic authenticity.” This is why, in places like Whole Foods, we’re seeing more and more Brussels sprouts and tomatoes still tethered to their stalks, many with dirt still clinging to the roots and leaves still hanging from the stalks. We’re seeing more handwritten signs that mimic the messy scrawl of a roadside fruit and vegetable stand; more dusty wooden crates; more rustic cardboard boxes; more packages that look as though they were wrapped casually, messily, by loving human hands (when in fact a machine packaged these containers, in some cases with the sticker deliberately attached crookedly, in an overseas factory). And all in the service of pushing our nostalgia buttons, evoking a rosy remembrance of a simpler time that may or may not have ever existed.

  But the tricks Whole Foods plays aren’t the only ones companies have in their nostalgia playbooks. So let’s focus now on another variant of nostalgia marketing: the old-fashioned kind.

  Haven’t I Seen You Somewhere Before?

  One of the classic (literally)—and most effective—ways companies create the nostalgia factor is by dusting off and rerelea
sing commercials, slogans, or ad campaigns from the past. Few have pulled this off better than Heinz did in 2009, when it revived its famous 1970s tagline, “Beanz meanz Heinz.”14 Heinz’s new (or rather, old) advertisement features loving mothers feeding their kids plates heaped with Heinz Beans to the backdrop of catchy slogans, like “Sometimes when I’m feeling sad my mum will read the signs. She knows the thing to cheer me up and she knows that beanz meanz Heinz.” This ad was so memorable, it was voted the most popular slogan by the Advertising Hall of Fame nearly three decades after its original launch.

  The British company Hovis has adapted an identical approach. In one advertisement, consumers see a retake of Ridley Scott’s original 1973 ad showing a “boy on a bike” riding through dodgy eras in British history, from the Blitz to the miners’ strikes. The implicit message: no matter what we’ve been through, Hovis has always been there for us.15 It worked in 1973 and worked again in 2009—so well that it boosted sales 11 percent.16

  Even banks and tire makers have gotten into the slogan-repurposing act. Citigroup has recently brought back its original 1978 tagline, “The Citi never sleeps,” in an attempt to seem safer and more trustworthy by harkening back to a time before just about everybody hated and distrusted banks. And Michelin is bringing back its celebrated icon, the Michelin Man, created way back in 1898 (though in its latest incarnation, bowing to contemporary health concerns, he’s slimmed down).17 Allstate insurance’s new TV ads feature a spokesperson strolling through a montage of Great Depression–era photographs while intoning, “Nineteen thirty-one was not exactly a great year to start a business, but that’s when Allstate opened its doors. And through the twelve recessions since, they’ve noticed that after the fears subside, a funny thing happens. People start enjoying the small things in life. It’s back to basics, and the basics are good. Protect them. Put them in good hands.”18

  I began working for Pepsi around the time the company launched its retro-inspired “real sugar” versions of two of its most beloved drinks, which it decided to nostalgically dub “Mountain Dew Throwback” and “Pepsi Throwback.” Using all-natural sweeteners popular during the 1960s and ’70s, the “throwback” campaign even included a Facebook app designed to make a Facebook user’s photo “retro” or pose him or her behind a retro-looking template. Well, the viral buzz was absolutely staggering, garnering “over 2 million website mentions, 24,000 blog posts, hundreds of YouTube videos combined with a whirlwind of Facebook and Twitter activity.”19

  On the luxury side, Louis Vuitton recently rolled out nostalgic ads featuring Sean Connery and Catherine Deneuve, symbols of the lacquered glamour of Old Hollywood. Another Vuitton ad recalls a bygone era by featuring astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride, and Jim Lovell, each representing a past generation of space explorers. They’re perched in a secondhand Western pickup truck, gazing up at the night sky, but they might as well be glancing back, awestruck, at history itself.

  When you think about it, this strategy is really quite brilliant. By rereleasing ads and commercials from our youth (or in the case of Michelin, our grandparents’ youth), companies are not only triggering our nostalgia for that time; they’re creating an association in our brains between our rosy memories of the era and their product. It doesn’t matter if we never once ate Heinz beans or banked at Citibank in our lives. Those old ads still trigger memories of all the other things we lovingly remember from that time (while at the same time costing the company next to nothing).

  In Boynton Beach, Florida, a town populated mostly by retirees, a new free publication entitled Nostalgic America attempts to hook senior citizens by pairing local ads with iconic images from yesteryear. For example, a photograph of the Beatles’ 1964 Ed Sullivan Show appearance accompanies an ad for a long-term-care facility, and a photo of Gene Kelly crooning “Singin’ in the Rain” is pictured alongside a business selling “final-expense insurance.”20 What about the 1951 ad for the debut of the TV classic I Love Lucy situated next to a reverse-mortgage pitch? Still, few crafty advertising campaigns aimed at seniors can compare with the Social Security Administration tapping musician Chubby Checker to promote its program in ads that feature a black-and-white video of Checker doing the twist with dancers dressed in 1960s attire. As Mr. Checker comes into color, he says, “A new twist in the law makes it easier than ever to save on your Medicare prescription drug plans.”21

  It might not surprise you to learn that your everyday supermarket, not just those high-end megastores like Whole Foods, is lousy with examples of nostalgia marketing. Let’s look at cereals. Note that the iconic Tony the Tiger—who has been around since 1952—on the box of Frosted Flakes is appealing to the child buried inside the adult who dreamed of growing up to be strong and powerful. Similarly, the Australian brand Neutragrain, most commonly consumed by males between the ages of forty and fifty, is aggressively marketed to the little boy who wants to someday grow up to become an Iron Man hunk (the brand is the official sponsor of the 2011 Iron Man series, and if you go to the Web site, you’ll be assaulted by photos of youthful, ripped athletes). I would also argue that cereal in and of itself is a nostalgia product. Go to any college or university cafeteria and you’ll find a surprising number of homesick students shoveling the stuff into their mouths. Why? Sure, they might like the taste, but it’s also a lifeline to their parents, to comfort, and to the familiarity of childhood. Cheerios, Trix, and Cocoa Puffs have all undergone a 180-degree retro repackaging and are sold nowadays in vintage boxes. And if you really want to step into a time machine, watch one of those “new” black-and-white Rice Krispies commercials in which Mom, Dad, Grandma, and their precious band of little ones mix up some Rice Krispies treat memories.

  The retro food marketing trend doesn’t stop with cereal. In 2009 Nabisco brought out vintage renditions of Ritz crackers and Oreo cookies, while Hawaiian Punch has brought back its classic tagline, “How about a nice Hawaiian Punch?” and Jiffy Pop popcorn tells consumers, “Some things are even better than you remember.” And a few years ago, Anheuser-Busch rolled out a reproduction of its first-ever Budweiser can from 1936, complete with a three-step illustration showing consumers how to drink the thing (back in those days, beer in a can was unheard of). Speaking of dated beverages, could that possibly be Tab on the soda shelf? Tab, the favorite soft drink of countless female dieters from the 1970s, is still around? You bet, and its original lettering in an oversize, jutting font has even been retained. It’s straight out of That Girl or The Partridge Family.

  Past the soda aisle, we make our way toward a vast selection of chocolates. Whitman’s Samplers? Funny, the box looks like a patchwork quilt, just like the one Grandma used to have. Werther’s caramels? Anyone remember the TV ads where Robert Rockwell played the kindly grandfather lovingly offering a caramel to his sweet, innocent-looking grandson? Talk about nostalgia.

  And in 2007, the frozen food brand Swanson, rebranding itself as “Swanson classics,” relaunched a line of “original TV dinners,” which included such 1950s staples as chicken pot pie, Salisbury steak with corn and mashed potatoes, and meatloaf—all served in that iconic, segmented Styrofoam tray of our youth, of course.

  Marketers know that we as consumers are hungry for any relic of our past, and not just when it comes to food. When we buy a Monopoly or Parcheesi set or a Rubik’s cube, for example, we aren’t just buying a toy or a game; we’re purchasing a trip back to our childhood. This is why Target has reintroduced what the chain calls “selected retro toys,” including sock monkeys and gumball machines. We’re even more likely to buy a game that a brand rolled out last week but that looks like a relic of our youth. Take the popular Hasbro game Taboo. It was introduced in the late nineties but includes an old-school hourglass instead of a timer (which always makes me think of The Wizard of Oz, another childhood classic) and has a very simple, retro look.

  Nostalgia is also one reason why Best Buy, the giant electronics retailer, has recently devoted shelf space in one hundred stores around the United Sta
tes to LP records (yes, you read that right, LPs, those bizarre black spinning things that make a crackling sound when the needle reaches the end). Despite the fact that most CD stores have closed to make way for the MP3 generation, vinyl is making a serious comeback. Go on eBay and you’ll find people auctioning off thousands of old records—sometimes for hundreds of dollars or more. Facebook groups and fan sites for lovers of vinyl abound, and Best Buy has deemed its vinyl experiment an unqualified success.

  Some brands and products are even going so far as to make up a past they don’t have. How old do you think Baileys, the Irish whiskey-and-cream-based liqueur, is? A hundred? A hundred and fifty? After all, it terms itself “The Original” and comes in an “authentic-looking” bottle designed to denote the good old days. But in reality, Baileys Irish Cream will turn a mere thirty-seven this year. And those brands unwilling to invent a history can buy one; in an auction held last year in New York, defunct names like Lucky Whip, Handi-Wrap plastic wrap, and Snow Crop orange juice—and even such old-time media names as Collier’s magazine and Saturday Review—came up for sale.22 The winners not only bought a trusted, time-tested brand name; they purchased the memories of an entire generation.

  Even places designed to recall the texture of a bygone era can be extraordinarily seductive. Think about your favorite restaurant or watering hole. Does it have the thick oak bar and wood paneling of a twenties saloon? The chrome booths, fluorescent lighting, and tabletop jukebox of a fifties diner? The dark mahogany and leather of an old eighteenth-century steakhouse? Does it actually date back to the era it’s meant to re-create? Probably not. More likely some smart marketer knew that making it look and feel “old-fashioned” would help lure in crowds—and dollars. As a recent New York Times article reported, this has become a trend in New York’s hip West Village neighborhood, where “a pride of reincarnated restaurants . . . each taking a different area of history for inspiration,” have turned the neighborhood into a “theme park of the past.” As the article goes on to note, “designers say it is important to give a room a detailed storyline that harks back to a more intimate way of life.”23