Brandwashed (19 page)

Now imagine it’s two weeks before Christmas and you have yet to buy a gift for your young child. Not surprisingly, as was the case with previous Christmases, there appears to be one “it” present that you’ve read and heard about and that every parent on the playground has already bought (or plans to buy) for their little darling. Those of us with durable memories can cast our minds back to recent
Christmas toy
fads ranging from Furbys to Beanie Babies to Razor scooters to
Tamagotchis to Tickle Me Elmo, the “it gift” of 1996, which inspired such mania that desperate mothers around America were “duking it out in store aisles.”
¹⁰
In each case, the furor and pursuit of these must-have toys reached the scale of a full-fledged social epidemic, meaning a social trend that spreads quickly and widely, like some kind of consumer virus.

In 2009 the hottest must-have Christmas toy on every child’s wish list was the
Zhu Zhu pet hamster. Though the actual price was $10, so extraordinary (and, frankly, bizarre) was the national demand that the toy was being sold on Amazon for three times that, and before long people were bidding up to five times its value on eBay. Clearly, fads like this are extremely contagious, and as we’ve read, when it comes to what we buy for our children, guilt can also play a part. Still, the question remains: what determines which fads catch on and which die, or which brands and products become social epidemics and which don’t? Why the Zhu Zhu pet hamster and not some other toy or gizmo? After all, the toy doesn’t do anything special. It doesn’t sing or dance or grant wishes. It makes a variety of odd sounds, like chirping, beeping, and mooing, but that’s about it. Yet by the end of 2009,
Cepia LLC, the St. Louis company that created and distributed the hamsters, had sold tens of millions of dollars’ worth of the furry things. Turns out this wasn’t just a happy accident.

How Cepia made its bizarre product the “it” Christmas toy is a fascinating example of the art and craft of
viral marketing—in other words, peer pressure. First, the company staged “hamster giveaways” at hospitals, zoos, and Major League Baseball games. Next, it sponsored roughly three hundred invitation-only “hamster parties” where “influential mommy bloggers” were the fortunate recipients of the toys (as well as Habitrails and a recipe for “hamster crunch,” whatever that is). It also hosted a live, nine-thousand-tweet “interconnected Twitter” party (complete with party prizes) on the popular Mom Talk Radio channel, where host Maria Bailey oversaw an interactive discussion in which “fans across the Zhu-niverse share[d] what [made] Zhu Zhu pets so special to them.”
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The result was that soon mothers around the country were hearing and reading about the toy everywhere they went, creating a phenomenon so contagious and a heat so intense that Zhu Zhu hamsters sold out all across the United States.

Then Cepia did something ingenious—and extremely commonplace. It started manufacturing fewer Zhu Zhu pets. That’s right,
fewer.
Why? Because deliberately limiting inventory makes us think that a product is even more in demand; if “everyone” wants one, in our minds, it becomes more valuable.
¹²
Creating a sense of scarcity stimulates our pack mentality, our fear of missing out.
¹³
It’s human nature to covet what others have.

This fear of missing out on something being gobbled up by our peers is what drives rabid crowds of shoppers to line up at 4:00 a.m. to get their hands on the newly launched iPad 2 or a pair of Uggs in a hard-to-come-by color,
¹⁴
and it’s why a few years back a bargain hunter was trampled to death outside a Long Island Walmart on Black Friday. If you’ve ever bid for an item on eBay, you’ve probably unwittingly fallen prey to this same trap. With a supply of only one (there can be only one penguin tea set in the world), the panic that some other person might walk away with the matching set of orange-beaked mugs is what can drive people to raise their bid exponentially—and pay far more than what the product is worth.
¹⁵

Once social contagion sets in, it can take on a life of its own. Take another rather bizarre example, a fad called “
icing” that caught on a few years ago among college students and males in their midtwenties. No, I’m not talking about the sugary stuff on top of birthday cakes. I’m talking about a phenomenon that the
New York Times
dubbed “the world’s biggest viral drinking game.” Never played? Lucky you. Here’s how it works. First, you give a friend a can of
Smirnoff Ice malt beverage. Said friend then has to balance the can on his knee and drink the whole thing at once. The only way to avoid becoming a victim of this uncertain fate is to carry a bottle yourself, in which case you have to drink both bottles—before, of course, going out and “icing” someone else. Sounds absolutely awful, yet somehow this game quickly infected college campuses around the country, spawned several Web sites, and, according to the
New York Times
, “explode[d] from obscurity . . . into a bizarre pastime for college kids, Wall Streeters and minor celebrities.”
¹⁶

Smirnoff has emphatically denied that it bears any responsibility for “icing” (and I believe it’s telling the truth), but regardless, it’s been quite lucrative for the company. As the
Times
reports, the phenomenon has
not only raised awareness of the brand but also extended it to young men who formerly saw Ice as “girly” and feminine. And sales of Ice products almost immediately took off in some Southern college towns, where the game took early root. The point is, whether it emerges organically or is deliberately orchestrated by marketers, peer pressure delivers a windfall for brands and companies.

This is exactly why companies of all stripes have become so skilled at planting the seeds of social epidemics and then sitting back to watch them grow (as Smirnoff was accused of doing in this case). As we’ll read more about in the last chapter, the most persuasive marketing messages aren’t magazine ads or TV commercials or billboards; they’re the ones that come from—or at least seem to come from—our peers. In fact, one of the most effective—and sneakiest—viral marketing strategies is for a company to create a blog or
YouTube video that is so extreme, funny, outrageous, provocative, or frightening (or a combination of the above) that it raises the question, Is this a joke, or is it real? Among the most successful and talked-about viral marketing campaigns of all time were ones created by John West Salmon (in which a man and a bear grapple over a fish),
Trojan
condoms (which in 2003 launched the Trojan Games, a sequence of Olympics-like championships based on sexual performance),
Levi’s (in which men athletically sprang and backflipped themselves into their blue jeans), and surfing apparel manufacturer Quiksilver (which released a memorably phony Internet video showing a group of kids hurling dynamite into a river, then surfing the giant wave it created).

Still, few companies were as downright crafty—or as downright double-talking—in their use of viral videos as
Viacom, the media conglomerate. In a 2010 suit against
Google (which owns YouTube), Viacom, which has long railed against TV and movie piracy, claimed that YouTube had knowingly allowed its users to post clips they’d illegally downloaded (i.e., stolen) from Viacom’s copyrighted movies and TV shows in order to boost traffic and sales. Google countersued, alleging that Viacom had surreptitiously uploaded many of the clips itself—and also manufactured phony YouTube comments—in an attempt to create phony “grassroots” viral marketing campaigns for its TV shows and movies. In fact, Google had evidence that Viacom mandated that its
clips “should definitely not be associated with the studio—should appear as if a fan created and posted it.”
¹⁷
How did the studio manage this? According to unsealed courtroom documents, by hiring at least eighteen third-party marketing agents, who used untraceable YouTube accounts with no connection to Viacom, and by deliberately altering the clips to make them look pirated or stolen. Then marketing agents uploaded the videos from untraceable computers and locations, such as the local Kinko’s.
¹⁸

Though YouTube (and Google) won the case when a federal judge ruled the site was protected under U.S. copyright law,
¹⁹
one thing is certain: these video clips wouldn’t have become the viral sensation they did if YouTube viewers had known they were uploaded by marketers rather than by their own peers.

M
any of us spend our days—at least parts of them—quietly cursing our fellow human beings. The guy in the Hummer who cuts us off at the intersection. The old woman in the supermarket line counting out pennies one by one. The teenagers in blue hoodies perched in front of the convenience store, blocking our path to our cars. They may be annoying, but when all is said and done, we actually rely on these people, and others like them, to help dictate our purchasing choices—with more than a little help from companies and marketers, of course.

When it comes to the things we buy, what other people think matters. A lot. Even when these people are complete strangers. A recent survey by Opinion Research shows that “61 percent of respondents said they had checked online reviews, blogs and other online customer feedback before buying a new product or service,”
²⁰
and a similar February 2008 study commissioned by PowerReviews showed that “nearly half of U.S. consumers who shopped online four or more times per year and spent at least $500 said they needed four to seven
customer reviews before making a purchase decision.”
²¹
So persuasive are the opinions of others that though most of us are well aware that
at least
25 percent of these reviews are fakes written by friends, company staffers, marketers,
and so forth, we
purposely
overlook this. As the
Times
of London points out, we are born to believe, in part because a collective belief helps us to bond with others. In short, we
want
to trust in these messages, even when we may also be deeply skeptical.

To see just how powerfully complete strangers’ preferences and purchases can sway our decisions, consider the phenomenon of
best-seller lists. Imagine that you’re entering a big chain bookstore, where you’re confronted by square footage that rivals a football field. Given the sheer number of choices, the risk of shelling out $27.99 for a novel or a memoir that you will later deem unreadable is considerable. But wait, what’s on that stand-alone shelf directly to your right? This week’s “
New York Times
Bestsellers,” both fiction and nonfiction, perhaps two dozen books in all. Subconsciously you think,
If so many people are buying this book, then it must be good.
Followed shortly by
If so many people are reading this book, won’t I be left out if I don’t read it, too?
Now not only are you spared the ordeal of wading through the four floors of books and the anxiety of confronting all that choice, but you have a solid endorsement from your book-buying peers.

This is no happy accident for the publishing industry. In fact, despite what publishers might like you to believe, the main reason best-seller lists exist in the first place isn’t just to track sales but also to make us think these titles have been “preapproved”—in other words, to imply that if we don’t read what everyone else is reading, we’ll be uncultured, irrelevant, and excluded from the national conversation.

Best-seller lists work so well in persuading us that they’ve migrated well beyond book publishing to other products and industries—from Sephora’s list of best-selling cosmetics to
Entertainment Weekly
’s Ten Most Popular TV shows to
Variety
’s list of the ten highest-grossing movies of the week to the Apple
iTunes music store’s list of best-selling or recommended (which, as we’ll see in a minute, eventually become one and the same) singles, albums, movies, and music videos. Let’s talk for a moment about the latter. Not unlike a Barnes & Noble superstore, the iTunes start page is a cluttered, chaotic place teeming with choices. Luckily for the overwhelmed shopper, however, these endless offerings are organized into tidy recommended categories like “What
We’re Watching,” “What’s Hot,” “What We’re Listening To,” “New and Noteworthy,” and, of course, “Top Songs” and “Top Albums.”

Two things of interest are going on here. First, I am convinced Apple did this not to make life easier for the casual browser but rather to imply that its team of
music experts have spent the past month parsing through thousands of albums and that the dozen or so highlighted on the start page represent their carefully considered picks—the cream of this month’s crop. Nothing could be further from the truth. Chances are good that in fact a good deal of money changed hands; in a twenty-first-century version of the old, reviled practice of “payola,” record companies pay Apple hefty sums to get these songs and albums featured on the home page (just as publishers, incidentally, pay bookstores to feature their new books on those tables you see when you enter the bookstore). Regardless, the lists on these start pages lead us to believe that an expert, or a team of experts, has waded through the seemingly infinite number of choices and made a discriminating decision on our behalf.

The second thing that’s going on here is the classic
blockbuster effect. Essentially, a two-tier system is being created, one that puts a small number of brands (in this case, brands being musical artists) on the path to success, while setting up the majority of others for failure. Think about it. Due to the sheer exposure, and the fact the customers believe these are the songs that have been preapproved as the “best,” don’t many (if not all) of the albums and artists featured on the start page
end up
making
the top-songs list? They do—I’ve seen it happen time and again. And once a song or album makes the best-selling list, that’s yet another stamp of approval, and our impressionable minds kick into high gear again:
What do other people know that I don’t know? I’m missing out!