Brandwashed Read online

  Twenty-four hours later, I was debarking in Milan, Italy, the fashion capital of the world. Let me tell you: this is not a place you want to be if you’re trying to give up brands. Wouldn’t you know it, but there happened to be a huge furniture sale in a store not far from my hotel! Fantastic handcrafted stuff, too! Sold to the little blond guy in the I CYPRUS T‑shirt! From then on, I was buying San Pellegrino water, Wrigley’s gum, and minibar M&Ms by the caseload. Then there was the black Cole Haan winter jacket I bought in New York, and . . . the list goes on. Over the next few weeks and months, I couldn’t stop. You could have sold me roadkill so long as it had a label and a logo on it. All because of one lost suitcase and one cheap replacement T‑shirt.

  Yes, I make my living helping companies build and strengthen brands, and in the end, even I couldn’t resist my own medicine.

  That’s when I realized I had been brandwashed.

  The New Generation of Hidden Persuaders

  When I was first approached to write this book as a follow-up to my previous book, Buyology, the world was still digging out from economic free fall. Did anyone really want to read a book about brands and products, I wondered, at a time when the vast majority of our wallets and handbags were either empty or zippered shut? Then it struck me: could there actually be a better time to write a book exposing how companies trick, seduce, and persuade us into buying more unnecessary stuff?

  In 1957 a journalist named Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders, a book that pulled back the curtain on all the psychological tricks and tactics companies and their marketers and advertisers were using to manipulate people’s minds and persuade them to buy. It was shocking. It was groundbreaking. It was controversial. And it’s nothing compared to what’s going on in the marketing and advertising worlds today.

  Nearly six decades later, businesses, marketers, advertisers, and retailers have gotten far craftier, savvier, and more sinister. Today, thanks to all the sophisticated new tools and technologies they have at their disposal and all the new research in the fields of consumer behavior, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, companies know more about what makes us tick than Vance Packard ever could have imagined. They scan our brains and uncover our deepest subconscious fears, dreams, vulnerabilities, and desires. They mine the digital footprints we leave behind each time we swipe a loyalty card at the drugstore, charge something with a credit card, or view a product online, and then they use that information to target us with offers tailored to our unique psychological profiles. They hijack information from our own computers, cell phones, and even Facebook profiles and run it through sophisticated algorithms to predict who we are and what we might buy.

  They know more than they ever have before about what inspires us, scares us, soothes us, seduces us. What alleviates our guilt or makes us feel less alone, more connected to the scattered human tribe. What makes us feel more confident, more beloved, more secure, more nostalgic, more spiritually fulfilled. And they know far more about how to use all this information to obscure the truth, manipulate our minds, and persuade us to buy.

  In the pages ahead, we’ll learn all about what they know, how they know it, and how they turn around and use that knowledge to seduce us and take our dollars. We’ll pull back the curtain on how specific companies have crafted the most successful ad campaigns, viral marketing plans, and product launches in recent memory, including how Axe probed the sexual fantasies of thousands of male consumers in preparation for rolling out its infamous body spray campaign, how Calvin Klein rolled out its best-selling fragrance, Euphoria, how a marketing campaign for a popular brand of vodka transformed an entire country’s drinking habits, and more.

  We’ll look at the subtle yet powerful ways companies use peer pressure to persuade us. We’ll see how they stealthily play on our fear, guilt, nostalgia, and celebrity worship, often in ways that hit us beneath our conscious awareness. We’ll see examples of how some particularly devious companies have figured out how to physically and psychologically addict us to their products and how certain popular Web sites are actually rewiring our brains to hook us on the act of shopping and buying. We’ll look at the new ways sex is being used to sell to us, including the results of an fMRI study that reveals something shocking about how heterosexual men really respond to sexually provocative images of attractive men and surprising findings about who marketers are really selling to when they “brand” the newest sixteen-year-old teen heartthrob.

  We’ll see all the underhanded ways companies are collecting information without our knowledge, not just about our buying habits but about everything about us—our race and sexual orientation; our address, phone number, and real-time location; our education level, approximate income, and family size; our favorite movies and books; our friends’ favorite books and movies; and much more—then turning around and using this information to sell us even more stuff. We’ll explore the techniques advertisers and marketers are using to reach and influence children at a younger and younger age and read about alarming research revealing that not only do these techniques work, but children’s lifelong preferences for brands can be shaped and set and at a much younger age than ever imagined.

  I’ll also be revealing the results of a revolutionary guerrilla marketing experiment I carried out in service of this book. The inspiration for it was the 2009 David Duchovny and Demi Moore movie The Joneses, about a picture-perfect family that moves into a suburban neighborhood. As the movie unfolds, it turns out they’re not a real family at all but a group of covert marketers who are attempting to persuade their neighbors to adapt new products. Intrigued by this premise, I decided to stage my own reality television show, The Morgensons. I picked a family, armed them with a bunch of brands and products, and let them loose on their neighbors in an upscale Southern California gated community. The questions going in were: How powerfully can word of mouth influence our buying habits? Can simply seeing another person drink a certain type of beer, apply a certain line of mascara, spray a certain brand of perfume, type on a certain make of computer, or use the latest environmentally conscious product persuade us to do the same?

  You’ll find out in the last chapter of this book. And should you pick up the enhanced e-book version of this book (and have a video-enabled reading device), you’ll get to see the Morgensons in action; throughout the book you’ll encounter countless video clips of actual footage from the experiment.

  My goal is that by understanding just how today’s newest hidden persuaders are conspiring to brandwash us, we as consumers can battle back. The purpose of this book is not to get you to stop buying—I’ve proved that is frankly impossible. The purpose is to educate and empower you to make smarter, sounder, more informed decisions about what we’re buying and why. After all, enough is enough.

  Martin Lindstrom

  New York

  CHAPTER 1

  Located in Paris, CEW France, short for Cosmetic Executive Women, is a group of 270 female beauty-business professionals whose avowed mission is to show the world that beauty products not only are more than a trivial indulgence but can actually be used to improve people’s lives. To that end, in 1996, CEW set up its first-ever Center of Beauty at one of Europe’s most prestigious hospitals, with the goal of providing emotional and psychological support to patients afflicted by trauma or disease.

  Many of the patients at the center suffer from dementia or from amnesia caused by brain traumas resulting from car, motorcycle, skiing, and other accidents. Some are comatose. Many are alert but can no longer speak. Most can’t remember any details of their accidents, how they ended up in the hospital, or in many cases even their names.

  Which is why the professionals at the Center of Beauty, led by former psychotherapist Marie-France Archambault, decided to enter their patients’ pasts through their noses. Teaming up with the international fragrance company International Flavors and Fragrances, Archambault’s team has bottled more than 150 distinct aromas, including the forest, grass, rain, the ocean, chocol
ate, and many others, and then run what they call olfactive workshops, in which they use these fragrances to help patients regain memories they’ve lost.

  CEW works closely with hospital medical teams and language therapists and also brings in family members and close friends to create a portrait of the life a patient was leading before his or her accident took place. Where did he grow up? In the country? In the city? What were the smells of his childhood? What were his youthful passions, his hobbies? His favorite foods and drinks? What smells might be most familiar? Then they design fragrances to trigger those memories.

  CEW worked with one former cosmetics company executive who had suffered a serious stroke. When probed by doctors, he remembered almost nothing about his past. Yet once the CEW team placed the smell of strawberry under his nose, the patient began speaking haltingly about his youth. For another severely impaired patient who had no recollection of his motorcycle accident, the mere smell of street pavement was enough to “unfreeze” his brain. Just murmuring the words “tar, motorcycle” after sniffing the scent helped him take his first cognitive steps toward recovery.

  The team has also worked with geriatric and Alzheimer’s patients who, after being exposed to fragrances from their childhoods, have shown radical improvements in recalling who they were and are.

  What this goes to show is that certain associations and memories from our childhoods are resilient enough to survive even the most debilitating of brain traumas. When I first heard about this amazing CEW program, it confirmed a suspicion I’d had for a long time, namely, that most of our adult tastes and preferences—whether for food, drink, clothes, shoes, cosmetics, shampoos, or anything else—are actually rooted in our early childhoods. After all, if a childhood love for the smell of strawberry can survive a serious stroke, the preference must be pretty deeply ingrained, right?

  Studies have indeed shown that a majority of our brand and product preferences (and in some cases the values that they represent) are pretty firmly embedded in us by the age of seven. But based on what I’ve seen in my line of work, I’d posit that, thanks in no small part to the tricks and manipulations of probing marketers, stealth advertisers, and profit-driven companies that you’ll be reading about throughout this book, our brand preferences are set in stone even before that—by the age of four or five. In fact, based on some new research I’ve uncovered, I’d even go so far to suggest that some of the cleverest manufacturers in the world are at work trying to manipulate our taste preferences even earlier. Much earlier. Like before we’re even born.

  Born to Buy

  When I was very young, my parents loved the sound of bossa nova. Stan Getz. Astrud Gilberto. “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Corcovado,” “So Danco Samba,” and all the others. There was one long, dreary winter when they played bossa nova practically nonstop. So I suppose it’s little wonder I grew up to be completely in love with its sound (as I still am today).

  Only thing is, my mother was seven months pregnant with me that winter.

  Scientists have known for years that maternal speech is audible in utero; in other words, a fetus can actually hear the mother’s voice from inside the womb. But more recent research has found that a developing fetus can hear a far broader range of tones that come from outside the mother’s body as well. It used to be assumed that the mother’s internal bodily sounds (the beat of the heart, the swooshing of the amniotic fluid) drowned out all external noises—like music. But studies reveal this isn’t quite true; in fact, not only can soon-to-be babies hear music from inside the womb, but the music they hear leaves a powerful and lasting impression that can actually shape their adult tastes. Says Minna Huotilainen, a research fellow at the Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, “Music is very powerful in producing fetal memories. When the mother frequently listens to music, the fetus will learn to recognize and prefer that same music compared to other music.” What’s more, she adds, “The fetus will build the same musical taste with his/her mother automatically, since all the hormones of the mother are shared by the fetus.”1 I guess that may explain why I still have so many bossa nova CDs in my collection. And on my iPod.

  In and of itself, this seems pretty harmless, even kind of sweet. After all, who wouldn’t feel a little warm and fuzzy inside knowing that their adult love of the Beatles or Norah Jones may be rooted in the fact that Mom listened to Abbey Road and “Don’t Know Why” over and over while she was pregnant? But when you think about how many tunes, sounds, and jingles are linked to brands and products, this all starts to seem a whole lot more sinister. And there is indeed evidence to indicate that hearing tunes and jingles in the womb favorably disposes us to those jingles—and possibly the brands with which they are associated—later on.

  In one study, Professor Peter Hepper of the Queen’s University, Belfast, found that newborn babies will actually show a preference for a TV theme song (the more basic and repetitive the better) that was heard frequently by their mothers during their pregnancies. When newborns—just two to four days old—whose mothers had watched the long-running Australian TV soap opera Neighbours during pregnancy were played that show’s theme song, they became more alert and less agitated, stopped squirming, and had a decreased heart rate—signs that they were orienting well to their environment. And it wasn’t just because music in general has soothing qualities; as Hepper reported, those same infants “showed no such reaction to other, unfamiliar tunes.”2

  How can we explain this striking finding? Says another globally recognized fetal researcher, who chooses to remain anonymous, “While it is very difficult to test newborn babies, and the studies to date have been done on small numbers of children, it is possible that fetuses could develop a response to sounds heard repeatedly while they were in the womb, especially if those sounds were associated with a change in the mother’s emotional state. So if, for example, the mother heard a catchy jingle every day while pregnant and the mother had a pleasant or relaxing response to the jingle, the fetus, and later the newborn, could have a conditioned response to that sound pattern and attend to it differently than other unfamiliar sounds.” In other words, the minute we’re born, we may already be biologically programmed to like the sounds and music we were exposed to in utero.

  Shrewd marketers have begun to cook up all kinds of ways to capitalize on this. For one, a few years ago, a major Asian shopping mall chain realized that since pregnant mothers spent a great deal of time shopping, the potential for “priming” these women was significant. Pregnancy, after all, is among the most primal, emotional periods in women’s lives. Between the hormonal changes and the nervous anticipation of bringing another life into the world, it’s also one of the times when women are most vulnerable to suggestion. So the shopping mall chain began experimenting with the unconscious power of smells and sounds. First, it began spraying Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder in every area of the mall where clothing was sold. Then it infused the fragrance of cherry across areas of the mall where one could buy food and beverages. Then it started playing soothing music from the era when these women were born (in order to evoke positive memories from their own childhoods, a popular tactic you’ll read more about later on).

  The mall executives were hoping this would boost sales among pregnant mothers (which it did). But to everyone’s surprise, it also had another far more unexpected result. A year or so into the sensory experiment, the chain began to be inundated by letters from mothers attesting to the spellbinding effect the shopping center had on their now newborns. Turns out the moment they entered the mall, their babies calmed down. If they were fussing and crying, they simmered down at once, an effect that 60 percent of these women claimed they’d experienced nowhere else, not even places where they were exposed to equally pleasant smells and sounds. After analyzing these perplexing findings, the mall management finally concluded that the baby powder and cherry scents and the comforting, soothing sounds (including these mothers’ own heartbeats, the sound of children giggling, and a care
fully choreographed selection of instruments and repetitive rhythms) had infiltrated the womb. As a result, a whole new generation of Asian consumers were drawn—subconsciously, of course—to that shopping mall. And though management hasn’t been able to measure the long-term effects of these “primed” baby shoppers, some evidence indicates that these shopping mall experiments may have a potent effect on the shopping habits of the next generation for years to come.

  You Are What Mom Eats

  Pregnant women the world over know that what they consume has a profound effect on their unborn child. The typical mother-to-be kicks off the pregnancy diet the moment the doctor gives her the joyous news. From now on, no more pinot grigio at dinner. If she snuck a cigarette every now and then, well, those days are over. But what many pregnant women don’t know is that what they consume doesn’t just affect the baby’s development while it’s in the womb; it actually influences the baby’s adult habits.

  It’s been found that when mothers smoke during pregnancy, their children are more likely to become smokers by the age of twenty-two.3 Similarly, when mothers consume a lot of junk food during pregnancy, children are more likely to later have a strong affinity for junk food. In a study published in 2007 in the British Journal of Nutrition, Stephanie Bayol and her team at the Royal Veterinary College in London fed groups of pregnant and lactating rats two different diets; one was a normal rat diet, and the other included copious amounts of junk food: jelly doughnuts, potato chips, muffins, marshmallows, you name it. It turned out that the baby rats whose mothers had consumed all that junk food were 95 percent more likely to overeat than those whose mothers had eaten rat chow alone (and they later grew up to become 25 percent fatter than the other little fellows).