Brandwashed Page 4
So how do companies get their products talked about among the Miley Cyrus set? One technique is hiring the Girls Intelligence Agency, which recruits a stable of forty thousand girls from across the United States to act as guerrilla marketers. The agency gives these girls exclusive offers for products, events, and free online fashion consultations and then sends them into the world to talk up the products to their friends and classmates. The GIA even organizes events it calls “Slumber Parties in a Box,” “innocent” overnight parties these tween brand ambassadors host for eleven friends. Naturally, the point is for the GIA to pass out assorted free items, including new DVDs and cosmetics. Moreover, “GIA instructs the girls to ‘be slick and find out some sly scoop on your friends,’ such as what they think is currently fashionable.”25
Welcome to Adulthood
Marketers aren’t just pulling these kinds of stunts on the girls, either. Though figures vary from company to company, my research shows larger and larger portions of marketing budgets are being devoted to brandwashing the next generation of male customers at as young an age as possible. You can hardly blame them; Gillette’s internal “war team” (an internal research team whose main purpose is to keep a close eye on the company’s key competitor, Wilkinson) found that once a boy has tried a Gillette shaver twice, there is a staggering 92 percent chance he will continue using the brand as an adult. Upon which Gillette began sending out special “Welcome to Adulthood” packs to young men on their birthday (the age varies according to state regulations) or high school graduation, according to one man I interviewed.
The upstart company Stinky Stink courts the tween boy set with a new body spray that mimics the distinctly adolescent scents of snowboard wax, rubber on skateboard wheels, the pine of skateboards themselves, and even the smell of a new PlayStation 3 or Wii gaming machine. “My happiest moment?” company founder Chris Sellers told me, “was when one thirteen-year-old boy told me, ‘This smells like my life.’ ” And when Gatorade (owned by PepsiCo) rolled out its new “G series” of drinks, its marketers established a “Mission Control” team, which tweets words of encouragement to high school athletes before big games and maintains a presence on Facebook, “where it answers queries from body-conscious teenagers about things like when it’s best to gulp down the new protein drink.”26 According to the Wall Street Journal, “Gatorade staffers monitor social-media posts 24 hours a day . . . hoping what they see and learn will help the company more effectively promote” its new line to Facebook- and Twitter-obsessed tweens and teens.27
Boy or girl, once your eighteenth birthday rolls around, you’re likely to receive a present from a very unlikely sender: a tobacco company. Kool’s birthday gift, for example, contains an expensive-looking silver box full of coupons and even vouchers for this popular brand of menthol cigarettes, CDs of several up-and-coming rock bands, and an invitation to go online and create your own playlist (cigarette companies have found music to be a potent inroad for hooking smokers, which is why they so heavily promote at clubs and concerts). Since you’re not a smoker, you throw most of this stuff away. A month later, a second identical entreaty comes. Then another. If by the third or fourth attempt you don’t bite, the cigarette company knows you’re a lost cause—as studies have shown that by the third pack, a typical smoker is hooked—and moves on to the next victim.
Would you believe even gas companies and car manufacturers are starting to target kids? Shell gasoline’s marketing department has a long-standing partnership with LEGO to affix the Shell brand to LEGO toys, and in one animated BP commercial, children pull up to the pump in a BP station wagon while singing a catchy jingle in unison.28 In a TV advertisement for Porsche, a little boy sits in a classroom, daydreaming about adulthood, speed, and Porsches. In his daydream, he shows up at a Porsche dealership, asks to see Porsche’s 911 model, perches in it for a significant moment, then asks for the salesman’s business card. “I’ll see you in about twenty years,” the boy says. Cue the voice-over: “It’s a funny thing about a Porsche. There’s the moment you know you want one; there’s the moment you first own one; and for the truly afflicted, there’s the decade or two that passes in between.”29
Porsche is hardly the only automaker with its eye on these future consumers. Car manufacturer Audi makes a line of teddy bears, as well as “Rob the gecko,” a cartoon lizard featured in plush toys and baby items.30 Nissan sponsors the American Youth Soccer Organization, while Chrysler doles out hundreds of thousands of pop-up promotional books via snail mail to appeal to children.
Even Starbucks has acknowledged that the younger set is a big part of its demographic. According to the New York Times, “Starbucks is considering whether to add new drinks or drink sizes that better meet the needs of kids or tweens. ‘We need to be realistic about who comes into our stores, so if we have children who are coming into our stores on their own, we want to make sure we have products that are appropriate to that age group,’ ” Starbucks spokesman Brandon Borrman said.31 The same article goes on to say that the baristas at one local Starbucks refer to steamed milk as a “babyccino.”
The Chicken or the Egg
The younger we are when we start using a brand or product, the more likely we are to keep using it for years to come. But that’s not the only reason companies are aiming their marketing and advertising younger and younger. Another is that children can be a marketing tool in and of themselves, thanks to what I call their “pester power”—meaning their ability to influence their parents’ purchases. As James U. McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M University, puts it, “75 percent of spontaneous food purchases can be traced to a nagging child. And one out of two mothers will buy a food simply because her child requests it. To trigger desire in a child is to trigger desire in the whole family.”32 Kids “have power over spending in the household, they have power over the grandparents, they have power over the babysitter, and on and on and on,” Professor McNeal recently told the New York Times.
I’ve found that children’s “persuasion” techniques are universal: negotiation (“If you buy me that chocolate, I’ll clean my room”); making a scene (which is self-explanatory); setting parents up against each other, which works especially well for children of divorce (“Dad got me Odwalla—why won’t you?”); and sneaking into the supermarket basket a product Mom doesn’t discover until she’s at the cash register, at which point she’ll let it go for fear of making a scene or appearing cheap or withholding.
At the same time, the persuasion also works in the other direction; parents are directly and indirectly responsible for influencing the lifelong tastes and preferences of their children. This increasingly common phenomenon is known in the industry as “hand-me-down influence,” and it tends to happen extremely early in the child’s life. Which raises the question: which comes first—the child’s influence or the parent’s? The short answer is both.
Here’s what I mean: Most families have strong cultures, attitudes, beliefs, values, and habits that a child grows up believing are the norm, and this includes everything from what they wear, to what they eat, to what brands and products they buy.33 To see how the cycle of influence works, take, for example, Tropicana orange juice, a staple of many children’s households. The child who observes his parents buying bottle after bottle of the stuff grows up believing Tropicana is the only orange juice in the universe. So when that kid goes with Mom to the grocery store, guess what brand of juice he or she will pester Mom to put in her cart? So Mom keeps buying Tropicana, and by the time that kid is older and doing her own grocery shopping, she just grabs that brand out of sheer habit. Thus a lifelong preference is born (by the way, since it’s usually the mother who takes the kid grocery shopping, mothers tend to influence adolescents’ purchases more strongly than fathers do, particularly for household products like soaps, condiments, cleaners, and laundry detergents).34
Oftentimes, our adult preference for a brand we used as a child is about nostalgia—often planted in our brains by th
e subtle yet clever manipulations of marketers, as we’ll read more about later on. Marketers see to it that we subconsciously link the brand with warm memories of home and family, so that using that brand becomes a way to reconnect both with our past and with our loved ones. I have a friend who insists on using Crest toothpaste and Crest toothpaste only. When I asked him why, he thought for a moment. “Because,” he said, “I feel somehow as though I would be betraying my parents if I used another toothpaste.”
Yet like most of the hidden persuaders we’ll be talking about throughout the book, “hand-me-down” influence doesn’t happen by accident. Far from it. Companies and retailers work hard to get us to pass on our brand preferences to our children; it’s part of their strategy, in fact. This is why so many brands are creating mini versions of their adult products for children and even infants in the hopes that the brand will stick. This is the calculus behind babyGap and J. Crew’s Crewcuts, and it’s why there even exists a Harley-Davidson line of onesies (for that tiny motorcycle mama in your life).
Oh, and if you’ve dropped by an Apple store lately, did you happen to notice it resembled an international day care? That’s because Apple, a favorite brand among children (as the New York Times pointed out in 2010, Apple’s iPhone “has . . . become the most effective tool in human history to mollify a fussy toddler”), offers all kinds of baby-friendly apps, like Toddler Teasers, Baby Fun!, Infant Arcade, Peek-A-Boo, Pocket Zoo, and more. Sure, these apps are a godsend to many tired parents, keeping the kid busy so Mom and Dad can have a bit of peace and quiet, but they are also one of Apple’s many stealth strategies (you’ll read about others later on) for recruiting the next generation of customers. Apple’s “back-to-school” offer of an iPod Touch free with your new laptop is another. Sounds generous, but what’s really going on is slightly more calculated than that. I have no doubt that Apple’s marketers know full well that once Mom or Dad passes along the iPod Touch to their child, the kid can’t help but get hooked on the gizmo and will eventually be asking for a high-priced Apple computer of his or her own.35 (And there’s evidence to suggest children’s obsessions with Apple products start much, much earlier. I once conducted an experiment in which I handed a group of one-year-old children BlackBerrys—only to watch each one of them immediately swipe their fingers over it as though it were an Apple touch screen.)
The point is that one of the main reasons all these strategies targeting children are so effective is that they pack a one-two punch: not only do our earliest preferences and impressions as children stay with us for life, but we’re also drawn to products that capture and allow us to relive the feeling of being young. In fact, as you’ll read later on, nostalgia is one of the most powerful hidden persuaders around, and it’s being used in all kinds of ways to brandwash us.
CHAPTER 2
The most recent outbreak of the H1N1 influenza virus, better known as swine flu, was first detected in Veracruz, Mexico, in the spring of 2009. Both the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control termed the outbreak a pandemic. Millions of people all over the world panicked, and although swine flu never became the kind of global catastrophe the 1918 flu did, it has been blamed for roughly fourteen thousand deaths.
Six years earlier, in 2003, another potentially fatal flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, caused a similar global panic. SARS originated in southern China but spread to infect citizens in roughly forty countries. By the time the virus was contained in 2006, it was thought to be responsible for nearly eight hundred deaths—and people all over the world were going to heroic lengths to protect themselves and their children from exposure.
For doctors, CDC workers, and other health officials, a well-publicized global contagion spells a nightmare scenario: stockpiling and administering gallons of vaccines, diagnosing and treating thousands of patients, and spending countless hours and dollars trying to allay widespread panic. For a number of companies and marketers, however, it spells something entirely different: a golden opportunity.
Can anyone say “hand gel”?
Thanks in large part to these two global health scares, today we’ve welcomed antibacterial hand sanitizers into our lives as a cheap, everyday, utterly essential staple. Expected to exceed $402 million in profits a mere five years from now (and that’s just in the United States,)1 containers of the soaps and hand gels can now be found at virtually every airport, hotel, restaurant, public restroom, newspaper kiosk, grocery store, and kitchen and bathroom sink across the globe. Millions of women, men, teenagers, and children won’t leave home without a small bottle or spritz canister in their purse or pocket. Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret have even devised hand sanitizers as fashion accessories. Recently, while I was on a layover in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, a voice over the loudspeaker alerted me repeatedly to the presence of hallway soap dispensers. In short, our war on this unseen enemy—a terrorist cell of germs, so to speak—has become a global family affair.
Turns out, though, that neither swine flu nor SARS can be prevented by the use of antibacterial cleansing gels. Both viruses are spread via tiny droplets in the air that are sneezed or coughed by people who are already infected (or, though this is far less common, by making contact with an infected surface, then rubbing your eyes or your nose). Nevertheless, the idea of an unseen, potentially fatal contagion has driven us into nothing short of an antibacterial mania, one that has helped sales of Purell, the top-selling hand sanitizer, to jump by 50 percent2 and Clorox disinfecting wipes 23 percent since the 2009 panic.3
But our near addiction to these overpriced germ killers isn’t just a happy accident for the companies that make them. The advertisers and marketers at brands like Purell, Germ-X, Germ Out, and Lysol have worked extremely hard to make us believe that using their product is the only surefire way to stave off grave and deadly disease. How? Well, first they capitalized on the global panic during the swine flu scare by releasing an onslaught of new products and redoubling their efforts to stress the importance of hygiene in staving off disease. “We want to make sure that people understand that effective hand washing is the best way to keep yourself and your family healthy,” echoed a spokesperson for Dial, the soap manufacturer. Purell then posted on their Web site: “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one of the ways you can help protect yourself from Swine Flu is by practicing good hand hygiene. Specific CDC recommendations include keeping your hands clean by washing with soap and water, or using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer when soap and water may not be available.”4
The disinfectant brand Lysol, too, updated its home page with information on swine flu, asserting that although it is not yet clear how the virus spreads, “following proper hygiene routines can help prevent the spread of illness.”5 Of course, what they are trying to insinuate is that their product is the key to good hygiene—and in turn instrumental in staying healthy. Only they can’t say that because, well, it would be a lie; in fact, hand sanitizers have not been found, by the CDC or anyone else, to be effective in fighting airborne disease.
It wasn’t just makers of soap and hygiene products who saw serious marketing opportunities in the swine flu panic. Kleenex very swiftly rolled out a line of “antiviral” tissues, which allegedly “have a specially treated middle layer that helps stop cold and flu viruses” and that “kills 99.9% of cold and flu viruses in the tissue within 15 minutes” and are “virucidal against Rhinoviruses Type 1A and 2; Influenza A and B; and Respiratory Syncytial Virus.”6
Major online retailers such as Amazon.com and ReStockIt.com also got into the game, taking the opportunity to manufacture and market swine flu protection kits, swine flu safety DVDs, ionic air purifiers (ranging in price from fifty dollars to six hundred dollars) and hundred-dollar designer face masks.7 “The spread of swine flu is of global concern and we want to do our part to help contain it,” said Jennifer DiMotta, VP of marketing at ReStockIt.com. “These products really work to help curb
the spread of germs and disease,” she added.8
What’s in a swine flu protection kit, you ask? Why, hand sanitizer and bacterial wipes, among other useless items designed to give us the illusion of protection and safety. None of these kits, some of which came with surgical masks and a light blue garment that looks uncannily like a hospital gown, were endorsed or distributed by the World Health Organization or any other health organization. But it was no coincidence that they were designed and packaged to have a decidedly clinical, medical feel.
Even some of the food companies tossed their hat into the ring of paranoia. A few months after those first swine flu cases began to appear in the headlines, Kellogg’s, in an attempt to tap into the growing misconception (fed largely by the opportunity to profit off it, of course) that a healthy immune system was the key to staying swine flu free, introduced a new variant of Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies loaded with “antioxidants and nutrients that help the body’s immune system.” Too bad it was also loaded with 40 percent sugar. Just a few months later, the company’s health claims were so widely criticized for being bogus that it decided to pull the words “helps support your child’s immunity” from all boxes. (The word “immunity,” it should be noted, appeared in giant, boldfaced letters that could practically be seen from Jupiter.)9
Kellogg’s denied preying on swine flu fear, claiming that it had begun work on its revamped Rice Krispies a year before the H1N1 virus peaked. Still, one has to question the company’s motives, given that in November 2009 it bowed to the negative publicity, announcing that “given the public attention on H1N1,” it would no longer sell the antioxidant-enriched cereal, though “we will continue to respond to the desire for improved nutrition.”10
Companies are equally quick to prey on public panic over food contamination scares. For example, in 2010, when over half a billion eggs were recalled due to reports of salmonella, the marketers of brands like Egg Beaters and Davidson’s sprang into action, adding sections to their Web sites boasting that their products were uncontaminated. Davidson’s even bought the Google adwords for the searches “pasteurized eggs” and “safe eggs,” so that panicked egg lovers looking online for information on the recall would most likely find themselves on the Davidson’s Web site, where they were immediately assured, “Our pasteurized eggs eliminate the risk of food borne illness and cross-contamination of your kitchen from shell eggs.”11