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  How did I know this? Well, because I called upon ChatThreads, a company that specializes in capturing data on how, when, and where consumers notice specific brands in their day-to-day lives, then analyzing how these encounters impact buying behavior. Both before and after the experiment, the ChatThreads team interviewed Gina’s friends about their buying behavior (the “before” interviews were under the guise of a random survey) and were thus able to analyze exactly how exposure to the brands they’d encountered had influenced their subsequent buying behavior. Plus, once the experiment had wrapped up, Gina’s friends were asked to text-message whenever they came across the brand, saying how they felt about and interacted with it. DSW came up numerous times. Perhaps even more telling, in later scenes, two of Gina’s friends showed up at the Morgensons’ house wearing the shoes they’d bought on the expedition, and on hidden camera, one of the friends even boasted about her $30 shoes, adding, “I love them—they are the most comfortable heels I own.”

  What else did I observe on that shopping trip? Well, for one thing, that Gina’s friends seemed very reluctant to buy an item unless their friends approved of their purchase beforehand. At one point, two of the friends opted to buy the same style of shoes as the other (whereupon one of the women was heard to gleefully use the word “samesies”)—another testament to the power of peer influence, especially given that there are hundreds of different shoe styles in the store. In addition, I noticed that a woman’s friends could sway or change her choice up until the very last second; at one point, Gina talked a friend into changing her purchase while the clerk was scanning the product behind the cash register.

  We saw similar effects of peer pressure again and again. At one point during our filming, Gina invited a dozen or so friends over for a champagne brunch (more like one long infomercial disguised as a champagne brunch). First everyone was served Taltarni, a sparkling wine from Australia. “Isn’t it yummy?” Gina asked at one point, repeatedly dropping the name of the brand (which her friends continued to describe as “yummy” for the rest of the evening). Then she went on to show her friends the amazing new Pandora brand jewelry she was wearing—“Isn’t it spectacular?” she asked. Gina explained that Pandora’s Web site allowed her to customize her new charms and that she especially loved the breast cancer charm that the company had created in honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Gina was so skilled at pushing this particular jewelry line on her friends that one even asked her to write down the name of the brand so she could visit the Web site once she got home. Bingo!

  But Gina wasn’t done. After all, she needed to tell her friends that she’d recently replaced every single one of her beauty soaps and lotions with a brand of natural products called Kiss My Face, which sells everything from toothpaste to mouthwash to shaving cream. She even loved the brand so much, she told them, that she’d decided to give every single one of her guests a gift bag that included Kiss My Face soaps and lip balms. Later on, she popped open a few bottles of Clos Du Val wine—from a Napa winery “known for their fantastic reds,” she told her guests.

  Oh, and by the way, had everyone seen her exquisite new bag, created by the London company knomo—a “stylish, modern briefcase that would be perfect for all you corporate girls”?

  So how did Gina’s friends respond? Well, we first witnessed the impact of Gina’s influence two weeks later, when three of her friends showed up at a Laguna Beach party newly adorned in bracelets, charms, and earrings all created by the jewelry company Gina had trumpeted.

  Later on, ChatThreads’ interviews revealed that after the brunch a handful of Gina’s friends had gone out and actually bought knomo bags, along with a whole bunch of Kiss My Face products. In subsequent interviews one friend actually stated that using these products at Gina’s house made her “really impressed at how great the products are. I thought because they are so low-priced that they would not be so great. Now I love the products and because of the low price and accessibility, I will definitely start using them.” Clos Du Val, our branded California wine, too, had caught on—the women started buying it in bulk, and in later scenes several women told Gina how much they liked the taste. One stated later in an interview, “I really enjoy wine. I am reluctant to purchase wine that I have not tasted—I have not had a ‘tasting’ of that particular brand—but I was happy to hear that a friend I trust has given her seal of approval . . . so I would be more apt to purchase it when I come across it.”

  Turned out the power of word of mouth extends even beyond footwear and jewelry choices. Among women, at least, it seemed that a preference for even the most personal of personal products can spread like wildfire. At one point during our filming, Gina brought out a box of Libresse, a Swedish brand of tampons unavailable (as of writing) in the United States (which allowed us to ensure that Gina’s friends didn’t have prior knowledge of the product). What’s so amazingly different about Libresse? Among other things, it’s hard to tell at first glance what the box contains. Gina’s friends went crazy for the brand, also proving that as far as certain products are concerned, subtle packaging is an irresistible selling point.

  What else did this experiment reveal about the power of guerrilla marketing, particularly among women? Well, it seems if a female is actually wearing or using the brand or product in question—a new line of jewelry, a brand of skin-care products, a pair of boots, or a stylish new bag—her influence over her peers is that much more formidable. What’s more, if a friend is impressed enough to write down the name of a brand on a piece of paper, it’s pretty much a slam-dunk certainty that she is going to later buy the thing.

  “Now I’m Going to Get Fat”

  So what about Mr. Morgenson? Was he able to sway his friends’ and neighbors’ brand choices as effectively as his wife was?

  Here’s where the genders go their separate ways a little. It turns out that Eric’s male buddies were actually more likely to come right out and challenge him when he recommended a brand or a product. What makes you the expert? was the unspoken and default male response. (In one scene, for example, a friend visibly bristled when Eric suggested he try a certain brand of barbecue marinade.) My guess? Many men experience these kinds of suggestions as an assault on their authority—as if Eric were implying he knew better.)

  Yet we did come across some exceptions to this rule. Turns out Eric’s male friends were happy to accept a word-of-mouth recommendation about a brand or a product that was aspirational and that signaled money, power, and worldly success—say, a new Jaguar or a state-of-the-art grill or an expensive bottle of wine. That said, they would only accept this kind of word-of-mouth recommendation if it came from another male whose opinion and expertise they respected: like Eric. Without that, as our footage clearly showed, another man’s recommendation carries no impact whatsoever. In our experiment, we saw evidence of this in the mere words people used to describe a product. In one scene, when one neighbor, who was clearly not a member of Eric and his friends’ inner circle, used the word “super-cool” to describe one of the Kiss My Face products, the gang was visibly dismissive of his recommendation. But when one of Eric’s other friends who clearly was in the inner circle used the term “funky,” the term caught on among the group like wildfire.

  Another surprising thing I noticed from the Morgensons’ footage was that the men in the Morgensons’ circle seemed to be more easily influenced by their peers’ food and dietary choices than the women. At one point during the filming, Eric went so far as to change his drink order when a friend reminded him of the drink’s caloric content (and not because he was scripted this way, either—remember, there was no script). “There’s a ham sandwich in a glass of dark beer,” Eric remarked after his friend suggested he switch to a vodka and cranberry juice, adding, “Now I’m going to get fat.”

  The Junior Morgensons

  Earlier we talked about how susceptible teens and tweens are to peer pressure—and the Morgenson sons’ friends were no exception. Part of their influence
over their peers had to do with the aura of confidence Jack, Sam, and Max exuded; the Morgenson boys always seemed to know exactly what they were talking about (and it helped that they were cool and handsome). At one point Jack was telling his friend about an environmentally friendly snowboard he was trying out and planned to buy. His friend was clearly impressed and immediately wanted one. “Hey, I’ll look into it when I get my own board,” he said, completely unprompted.

  It seemed that the boys’ influence persisted even across ages and genders; when Jack told his college-age female cousin (who was not in on the experiment) about Stinky Stink (the brand of body spray marketed to teen boys that I mentioned in chapter 1) and gave her a whiff, she commented that the young men in her dorm should use the stuff.

  Interestingly, though, it turned out that as much brandwashing power as the Morgenson kids had on their friends and peers, the people they ended up having the most persuasive power over were their own parents. At one point during our filming, forgetting the cameras were running, Eric and Gina took their three sons shoe shopping. Over and over again, Eric approached his sons with one brand of sneaker after another. “Would you ever wear something like this?” he would ask. It should come as no surprise, given how brand-obsessed most teenagers are, that Jack, Sam, and Max made it clear that unless the sneaker was made by Nike, Vans, or etnie, they weren’t interested. In the end? In an obvious (and somewhat sweet) attempt to gain their children’s approval, Eric and Gina ended up buying exactly those brands.

  The Sounds of Science

  After watching the hundreds of hours of footage, I could come to only one conclusion: whether it’s shoes, jewelry, barbecue tools, or sports equipment, there’s nothing quite so persuasive as observing someone we respect or admire using a brand or product. Still, as convincing as the Morgensons footage was, I wasn’t completely satisfied with this anecdotal data. I wanted to empirically measure and validate our findings. So we had ChatThreads analyze the data. This revealed a couple of interesting trends.

  The first was that whether Gina was telling her friends about a great spa where she’d just spent a week or simply drinking a new brand of coffee in front of them, the Morgensons’ friends were by a long shot most likely to be susceptible to guerrilla advertising in the mornings, specifically between the hours of eight and ten. Why? Because in the wake of our dreams, mornings are when we tend to be most vulnerable to influence, persuasion, and suggestion. My guess is that mornings are also the time when we haven’t yet been exposed to marketing messages. Thus, our “filters” haven’t yet been activated.

  At the same time, it’s worth noting that not a single person we spoke to in the show recalled even one TV commercial they’d seen over the past month. Not one! Yet when we asked the Morgensons’ friends to reel off a few random brand names, practically everyone came up with the brands that Eric and Gina had recommended. It was as though they’d stored these “Morgenson-approved” brands in an easily recallable “personal” place in their brains (as opposed to a “corporate” or “commercial” region that usually puts our brains on the defensive).

  The brands the Morgensons advocated had another effect, as well: they went viral faster. Perhaps more important, they also carried a “halo effect” (meaning they became safe, preapproved, and inured to any possible criticism). Consequently, roughly one third of the Morgensons’ friends began promoting and even flaunting these same brands to their friends and acquaintances. (It even reached the point that when several of Gina’s friends came home raving at such length about the brands the Morgensons had recommended, the location producer suspected he was the victim of a setup. These women sounded like walking, talking TV commercials! Later, he discovered that the women were simply enthusiastically repeating what Gina had said to them, even using her exact same phrases and words.)

  Might I take a moment here to add that during our four-week shoot, none—I mean, not one—of the Morgensons’ friends ever suspected anything, even when Gina drove an hour and a half out of her way to go shoe-shopping? (Gina later told me she’d never driven this far to any store.) At times, Eric and Gina both felt they were pushing the products too hard—that is, until they realized just how much many people’s natural, everyday conversations actually do revolve around brands.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, ChatThreads also found that the brands the Morgensons’ peers were most likely to go out and buy at the Morgensons’ subtle suggestion were the bigger and better-known ones. Which confirmed my theory that conventional marketing and the more covert variety work best together, that the most persuasive of advertising strategies become that much more so when amplified by word-of-mouth advertising.

  In the end, even I was genuinely flabbergasted by the power of word-of-mouth marketing. Going in, my paranoid fear had been that perhaps I’d overestimated the power of peer pressure. What if no matter how much the Morgensons promoted this or that brand, none of their friends actually went out and bought anything—or at best, just bought a single brand now and again? Turns out I needn’t have worried. The fact that the Morgensons’ friends actually ended up buying an average per person of three brands recommended by the Morgensons blew my mind. More amazing still? The impact the experiment had on the buying habits of the Morgenson family themselves. Once our reality show wrapped, Eric, Gina, and their boys continued using and buying six out of the ten brands they’d spent the last month touting.

  A few more things took me aback. I was surprised to learn that, according to ChatThreads’ analysis, even off-camera, more than 50 percent of people’s everyday conversations revolve around brands. I was surprised by the extent to which people “show off” brands in their homes (both consciously and unconsciously). As one woman told me, “I guess I wanted to display the brand because it gave me something to talk with all my friends about.” Finally, I was surprised that when we told Eric and Gina’s friends and acquaintances that the whole thing was a hoax, and a reality show, no one was angry or upset or cared even slightly that they had been duped.

  Let me reiterate this last point. When I finally revealed the truth about the reality-show experiment, the Morgensons’ friends were at first disbelieving—come on, who wouldn’t be? But when I asked them if they minded that two of their closest friends had betrayed them in order to convince them to buy brands, it was my turn to be shocked. It was okay, they said. If the Morgensons told us a brand was good, it was totally okay. “But what if the brands the Morgensons recommended weren’t ones they liked?” I asked. The answer? Even if the Morgensons recommended brands they disliked, I’d still buy them. And what’s more, not one person felt that our reality-show experiment had been unethical or wrong.

  Strange, huh?

  I kept asking questions. When asked if they could measure how influenced they were by the Morgensons’ recommendations on a scale of one to ten, Eric and Gina’s friends unanimously answered, “Ten out of ten.” What’s more, when I asked one man, a corporate speaker, whether he had ever mentioned the Morgenson-approved brands onstage, he told me he’d probably passed on the names of the brands to “thousands” of audience members. Assuming I’d misheard him, I asked him to repeat the figure. “Thousands,” he repeated, adding, “I just happen to love the shoes they recommended.”

  In some instances, the persuasive effect was unconscious. In these cases it was only after multiple promptings that the Morgensons’ friends did admit that yes—come to think of it—they’d altered their purchase patterns by buying precisely the products the Morgensons had recommended. More than once, one of Gina’s friends volunteered that her favorite cosmetics brand was Kiss My Face, and that she’d heard about it, well, seems she couldn’t remember where. When asked to recall the date she first started using the brand, it turns out it was the day after she’d had dinner at the Morgensons.

  At another point, that same woman mentioned how thrilled she was that her twelve-year-old had picked up his childhood LEGO obsession. “Why did he suddenly start playing with LEGO again?” I asked
. The woman confessed she had no idea, but finally revealed that something had (literally) snapped into place “after we had dinner at the Morgensons.” Talk about unconscious! Eric and Gina had never even promoted the brand by name. But upstairs, while the adults were at dinner, this woman’s son had spent a half hour playing LEGO with the Morgenson boys.

  Clearly, the Morgensons had exerted a very powerful influence—on both conscious and subconscious levels.

  Still, I wanted to learn more. So now it was time to measure precisely just how much guerrilla marketing can amplify the persuasive power of a marketing or advertising strategy by carrying out an fMRI research study.

  My goal? To compare the power and effectiveness of personal, word-of-mouth recommendations to the blizzard of other media pushing and persuading us to buy stuff, whether it’s a TV commercial, an Internet campaign, or a fashion-magazine spread touting the latest miracle cosmetic.

  Six weeks later, after analyzing millions of pieces of fMRI data, the research team sent me the results—allowing me to put into words finally why the Morgensons held in their hands the most irresistible tool of persuasion there is.