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  These same “Farmgate” tactics are behind the coolers of chipped ice planted everywhere you look. Ever notice that there’s ice everywhere in this store? Why? Does hummus really need to be kept ice-cold? What about cucumber-and-yogurt dip? No and no. This ice is another “symbolic”—an unconscious suggestion that what’s before us is bursting with freshness. To our irrational, germ-fearing minds, tortillas, hot dogs, pickles, and other nonperishables must be fresher—and thus safer to eat—when they’re sitting on a bed of ice, especially when the soda or juice perspires a little, a phenomenon the industry dubs “sweat” (the refrigerators in most juice and milk aisles are deliberately kept at the exact temperature needed for this “sweating” to occur). Similarly, for years now supermarkets have been sprinkling select vegetables with regular dew drops of water—a trend that came out of Denmark. Why? Like ice displays, those sprinklerlike drops serve as a symbolic, albeit a bogus one, of freshness and purity. (Ironically, that same dewy mist makes the vegetables rot more quickly than they would otherwise. So much for perception versus reality.)

  When carrying out experiments on consumer behavior across the world, I often ask people a truly obnoxious question: would they mind emptying the contents of their fridge and freezer onto the kitchen table, then, one by one, ranking and replacing the items depending on how “fresh” they perceive the products as being?

  You would be surprised at how the extraordinarily persuasive effects of advertising play into people’s perceptions of freshness. The one product consistently at the top of people’s lists? Heinz ketchup. That’s right, consumers rank bottled ketchup as being fresher than lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and so on. “Why Heinz?” I always ask, noting that the expiration date on the bottle isn’t for another six months. “You’re right,” the majority reply after a moment. “I have no idea why I put that there.”

  So what’s behind this bizarre impression that ketchup is fresh? It’s all in the way it’s marketed. Heinz subtly plays up the “tomato-ness” of ketchup, with its deep red color—the shade of a picked-right-off-the-vine beefsteak tomato—even though it’s actually made from tomato concentrate. Moreover, Heinz does not, in fact, have to be refrigerated once the seal is broken, as we are led to believe. That’s yet another illusion meant to trick us into thinking the product is fresh.

  My extensive work for McDonald’s shows that symbolics like these can alter our perception of everything from freshness to value or even quality. I once helped McDonald’s incorporate symbolics of freshness in its restaurants throughout Europe. We painted green leaves on the insides of the lamps and even went so far as to display fresh tomatoes and vegetables behind glass displays. In France, McDonald’s went so far as to transform its fabled logo from yellow to a dark, leafy green. And trust me, it worked.

  Another powerful “symbolic” of purity and freshness? Fruit. In the juice world, it’s a general rule of thumb that the more fruit a manufacturer displays on the side of the juice carton, the greater will be our perception of freshness. Note the spill of kiwis, oranges, mangoes, strawberries, and raspberries that blanket most juice cartons. Would it surprise you to find out that many of these blends contain only the tiniest trace amounts of the more expensive, exotic fruits like kiwi and mango, and are typically more water and sugar than actual fruit juice? (By the way, even though you might think of brands like Dole, Minute Maid, Just Juice, and Odwalla as “natural” brands, in fact they are owned by Coca-Cola, while Pepsi owns Tropicana. And guess who has a true monopoly on the entire category of fruit juices, not to mention milk, buttermilk, and lemonade? A Swedish conglomerate called Tetra Pak, the global manufacturer of those rectangular plastic containers in which our juices and milks are packaged.)

  This reminds me of the time a couple of decades ago when I was asked to develop a “cheese ball” snack—a round version of Cheetos. On my preliminary package design, I placed five cheese balls in a minimalist, Stonehenge-like pattern. The person who hired me had a fit. “Who would buy only five cheese balls?” he asked. “We need to see tons of cheese balls on that package!” Over the years I’ve realized how right he was, and across all categories, too. I redesigned the package to show seemingly hundreds of those cheese balls. Why? Because it seduces us into thinking we are getting that much more in the package. This may have nothing to do with freshness (after all, even the smartest marketers out there would be hard-pressed to fool any consumer into thinking that Cheetos are remotely fresh), but it goes to show why, despite the minimal amount of actual fruit inside most fruit juices, their containers picture a veritable cornucopia of kiwis, mangoes, and so on.

  Speaking of fruit, you may think a banana is just a banana, but it’s not. Dole and other banana growers have made the creation of a banana into a mini science, in part to manipulate perceptions of freshness. In fact, they’ve issued a “banana guide” to greengrocers, illustrating the various color stages a banana can attain during its life cycle. Each color represents the sales potential for the banana in question. For example, sales records show that bananas with Pantone color 13-0858 (otherwise known as Vibrant Yellow) are less likely to sell than bananas with Pantone color 12-0752 (also called Buttercup), which is one grade warmer, visually, and seems to imply a riper, fresher fruit. Companies like Dole have analyzed the sales effects of all varieties of color and, as a result, plant their crops under conditions most ideal to creating the right “color.” And as for apples? Believe it or not, my research found that while it may look fresh, the average apple you see in the supermarket is actually fourteen months old.

  Knowing that even just the suggestion of fruit evokes such powerful associations of health, freshness, and cleanliness, brands across all category lines have gone fruity on us, infusing everything from shampoos to hair conditioners to baby soaps to bottled waters to nicotine chewing gum to lip balm to teas to vitamins to cosmetics and even to furniture polish with pineapple, oranges, peaches, passion fruit, and banana fragrances, engineered in a chemist’s laboratory, of course. Mango-papaya conditioner, anyone? Lemon lip gloss? Orange-scented Pine-Sol? Will these products get your hair or your floors any cleaner than the regular versions? Of course not. But the scent of fruit evokes strong associations of cleanliness for germophobic consumers, and that’s really all that matters. We’ve reached a point where our shampoos are so fruity we almost want to guzzle them down.

  Shampoo companies also realize that the sheer volume of bubbles a shampoo generates can evoke associations of freshness and cleanliness—bubbles signal that the shampoo is strong and invigorating (just as the “sting” of an aftershave or the bubbles hitting our throat when we down sparkling water “inform” us that the product is fresh and uncontaminated). Some companies I know have even gone so far as to create a chemical that accelerates the appearance and quality of bubbles, to make unwitting bathers feel as though their hair is getting cleaner faster. I call this a “perceived justification symbol”—a moment designed to reassure us that we made the right purchase (and, of course, ensure that we’ll stay loyal to that product in the future).

  Similarly, ever wonder why Aquafresh toothpaste looks the way it does? There’s a good reason each squirt is a rainbow of colors. The white is meant to be a symbolic for whiter teeth, the red a symbolic for protecting the gums, and the blue a symbolic for fresh breath. And it works. In one experiment, I asked two groups of consumers to try two different versions of the toothpaste—one the regular version and one that had been dyed just one color. Sure enough, the group using the paste with the three colors not only reported that the toothpaste worked 73 percent better, they even claimed they believed that their teeth looked whiter.

  Back at Whole Foods, as I round the corner, a decidedly nonfruity smell hits me. Seafood! There are whole fish, eyes, scales, and all, laid out on yet another cold bed of “symbolic” ice, again suggesting that the fish in this store were reeled in just this morning. But the fish you actually buy sit behind a glass counter in individual plastic containers and have already be
en beheaded, deboned, and pared down to a more manageable size—you’ll never actually take home one of those four whole fish lying balefully across their ice coffin. In fact, these are probably the only four intact fish in the entire store, and they probably aren’t even fresh at all, as they’ve been lying out there in the open all day, if not longer. Yet again, our brains have been tricked into believing that everything in the store was fished, trucked in, and hand-delivered just this morning.

  I was once called in to advise the owner of a Dubai fish market who had attempted to sell frozen fish. At first, very few customers showed any interest. Then the manager decided to place the store’s supply of frozen fish atop coolers of ice cubes. Suddenly (and irrationally), sales of the fish—the frozen fish, remember—rose by 74 percent. Why? It was perceived as fresher simply because it was displayed on blocks of ice. Interestingly, in France consumers actually believe frozen foods are “fresher” than fresh fruits and vegetables. I credit an ingenious frozen-food industry for stressing in its marketing and advertising how long it takes fresh produce to make its way from the farm to the production facility to the supermarket to a consumer’s refrigerator. Why, that fresh bunch of spinach could easily be weeks old! Whereas, they inform consumers, frozen food is conserved and preserved on the spot!

  A final fish story. A friend of mine once worked on the small island of Tenerife, largest of the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain. He was a fisherman, and his very best customer was a popular local restaurant known as Los Abrigos. But the restaurant owners had specific instructions. Once my friend and the other fishermen had caught their day’s supply of seafood, Los Abrigos’s management asked them to deliver the fish to a small nearby port, where it was then transferred onto a traditional-looking fisherman’s boat (the kind no one, including my friend, uses anymore). When customers would arrive for lunch between noon and 3:00 p.m., the fisherman’s boat would putter into the harbor, and everyone would look on as a grizzled old Spanish fisherman would step out and hand over the fish, ostensibly reeled in just moments earlier, to the waiting restaurant staff. It was all completely staged, but people fell for it, and soon the restaurant had to turn away a daily overflow of customers.

  So whether it’s germs or disease or some feared version of a future self, marketers are amazingly adept at identifying a fear out of the zeitgeist, activating it, amplifying it, and preying on it in ways that hit us at the deepest subconscious level.

  As you read on, you’ll learn that fear is far from the only psychological tool companies and marketers are surreptitiously using to persuade us.

  Which may be the scariest thing of all.

  CHAPTER 3

  Your cell phone’s ringing! Is it a colleague checking in? News of a canceled meeting? A sick child? A death, a birth, an emergency? Without this lifeline in your hand, where would you be? Lost. Distracted. Cut off. Alone.

  I know a man whose iPhone sits in a bedside dock beside him at night. Most nights, he wakes up involuntarily at 1:00 a.m. to check his e‑mail. Then again at three. Then again at five. In the morning, his phone awakens him with a soft but audible rendition of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Can’t We Be Friends.” By the time he’s kissed his wife good morning or roused his kids, he’s already sent three text messages, checked his three e‑mail accounts, scanned the headlines of the New York Times, and watched a highlight reel from last night’s Knicks game on ESPN.com. As he gets ready for the day, his phone goes with him everywhere. To the bathroom while he takes his morning shower. Outside when he takes the dog out for a quick walk. While driving to work, he recharges it in the passenger seat, lest the battery run out before he makes it to his office (where he has a backup). As he drives, his GPS app tells him which route has the least traffic. He checks the day’s weather on it, not to mention the temperatures in Paris, New York, and five other cities. At work, he plugs it into his computer. In idle moments, he plays Angry Birds, Tetris, and Super Mario Kart on it. Sometimes he squints to read a book on the Kindle app. He uses his smart phone as a stopwatch, a flashlight, a calculator, a calendar, a camera, a stock checker, a note taker, and more.

  More than once he’s misplaced it. At those times he felt as though his very identity had been stripped from him. The feeling, he tells me, was similar to that of a smoker who knows there’s got to be one more cigarette around here somewhere, or a junkie who knows there’s one more fix stashed in a drawer, if only he could find it. And in this behavior he is far from alone. A recent study of two hundred students at Stanford University revealed that 34 percent rated themselves as addicted to their phones, while 32 percent worried they someday would be addicted. The way things are trending, I suspect this number is only going to grow. Think about how many times you check your phone throughout the course of the day. Twenty-five? Fifty? Two hundred? Now think about that sick, uneasy feeling you get when you discover that not a soul has called, texted, e‑mailed, or written on your Facebook wall (at least not since you last checked five minutes ago). Let me ask you another question: Where do you keep your cell phone when you go to sleep at night? On your nightstand, within arm’s reach? In bed with you, tucked away soundly, inches from your snoring spouse’s pillow? You wouldn’t be alone; as a recent New York Times article put it, “After six to eight hours of network deprivation—also known as sleep—people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cell phones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.”1

  I was once dining at an elegant restaurant in Paris. Two tables away sat an American couple. It was lunchtime. I glanced over as the familiar digital choreography—what I call the “cell phone dance”—got under way. Lowering his head, the man drew his hand to his pants pocket, surreptitiously slid out his phone, and cocked his eyes down at the small, glowing screen. A moment passed. Then the man excused himself and went to the bathroom. I followed him in, simply because I wanted to prove he was there for no other reason than to check his e‑mails and texts. I was right. The moment he returned to the table, the woman, who had undoubtedly taken his absence as an opportunity to check her own phone, rose to use the bathroom herself. I imagine the same routine took place in the ladies’ room (a female executive once told me about a time when she was having lunch with her boss and excused herself to use the bathroom—where she found herself trading text messages with her seated boss).

  These days, we’re tapping away at our phones and handhelds while eating breakfast with our families, during our kids’ soccer games, and apparently from the bathrooms of fancy Parisian bistros. Tucking our recharged cell phones into our purses or pockets before leaving the house in the morning has become a ritualized step of arming ourselves against the day. A poll conducted by USA Today asked WiFi users how long they could last before they started getting “antsy” about checking their e‑mail in-box, instant messages, or social-networking sites. Forty-seven percent replied, “One hour or less.”

  I recently conducted an experiment in conjunction with global audio identity experts Elias Arts to identify the fifty most powerful and addictive sounds in the world. The third-place winner? The sound of a vibrating phone. Be it an iPhone, a BlackBerry, or an Android, there’s no question that the vast majority of us are extremely attached to our phones. But addicted? Really? Isn’t that a bit much?2

  Not really. While it’s true that most of us wouldn’t meet the American Psychological Association’s definition of an addict, some psychologists have argued that smart phones may tap into the same associative learning pathways in the brain that make other compulsive behaviors—like gambling—so addictive.”3 In other words, when we use our phones, our brains create a powerfully positive associative memory—in effect conditioning us to crave that activity again. Just as with addiction to drugs or cigarettes or food, the chemical driver of this process is dopamine, that feel-good neurotransmitter. Some psychologists have asserted that when we receive a new e‑mail or text, our brains release a shot o
f dopamine, and thus we learn to associate that pleasurable feeling with the act of checking our phones. So like an alcoholic who craves that euphoric feeling he gets from drinking, we’re left craving that rush we get from seeing that text message pop up.

  Still, the theory that behavior like that of my iPhone-obsessed friend is driven by the same neurological processes as drug or alcohol addiction remains unproven and controversial. So I decided to conduct an fMRI study to find out whether smart phones—iPhones and BlackBerrys—are really, truly addictive.

  With the help of MindSign, a neuromarketing firm based in San Diego, California, whose brain-activating methodology shows companies what consumers are thinking when they’re using products and viewing ads, we enlisted eight males and eight females between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. As the study got under way, researchers screened both audio and video of a ringing and a vibrating iPhone. Researchers then screened these audiovisual images to our volunteers three times in a row.

  Were iPhones really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping, or video games?

  Two weeks later, the MindSign research team rang me up with the results. First, a straightforward observation: The audio and the video of the iPhone both ringing and vibrating activated both the audio and visual cortices of our study subjects—in other words their brains had visual, not just auditory, associations with the sound of the ring tone. What was more surprising, though, was that there was also a flurry of activation in the brain’s insula—which is connected to feelings of love and compassion.