Brandwashed (37 page)

The one exception to the women-buy-condoms rule? It comes in a box similar to the others, except nowhere on its packaging does it mention the words “sensitive” or “thin.” Instead, its packaging features what at first glance appears to be a Roman soldier’s helmet, or, wait, could that actually be the engorged head of a penis? The words on the box say it all: “Extra Large
Trojan Condoms.” That’s right, had I picked up a box of Extra Large Trojans, Sparky’s data miners would have instantly revised their assumption about my gender, as swaggering (often hopeful) males, not females, are the ones who buy “extra-large” condoms (and I tip my hat to the marketing whiz who thought up
that
one).

At the cash register, I give the cashier my Sparky’s card and pay, though not before grabbing a bag of those new pretzel M&Ms—a small impulse buy telling the data-mining company that I’m amenable to
trying new products and therefore a good target for future coupons on newly rolled-out products.

Next, the second the cashier swipes my loyalty card, Sparky’s database will know exactly what I’ve purchased and how much and will nail my demographic as an educated, health-conscious, sexually active African American ex-smoker between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four who has a young daughter. Then the company will add my purchases to its databank, where its computers will crunch that data (and the data generated by every other card-wielding customer who walked into the store that day) to make all kinds of conclusions and predictions about who I am and what my preferences are. Then it will turn right around and sell the results not just to the companies that make the products that I bought but also to the companies that make the products my profile indicates I am
likely
to buy. It will do so for each and every subsequent visit, just as it will for the thousands of other shoppers in my particular zip code. And based on what the companies now know about me—and us—they will reformulate their marketing messages, rethink their inventory, and, sneakiest of all, start targeting each and every one of us with advertising so tailored, so personalized, that we’re powerless to resist it.

Believe me, in the future
supermarkets will get even smarter and more invasive. Recordant is an Atlanta-based in-store monitoring company that provides digital audio recorders to capture all customers’ conversations with store employees. Sophisticated software then analyzes these recordings to isolate recurring words or phrases. Then there’s Brickstream, whose clients include Toys “R” Us, Office Depot, and Walgreens and which uses dual-lens cameras to amass information about where and for how long people shop, as well as how they respond to various products.
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And PathTracker is an electronic monitoring system that combines buying data with the paths of shopping carts through supermarkets. How? It wires carts and baskets with a location-tracking device that emits an inaudible signal every few seconds. At which point “an array of antennae around the store’s perimeter captures the signal, which is then analyzed for individual shoppers as well as aggregated to provide composite views of shopping in the store.”
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Yikes.

B
ut wait, that’s not all that’s going on at Sparky’s. As I meander out of the store, I catch myself humming the Paul McCartney song that was playing overhead while I was shopping. Think this is just some random selection? It’s not. It’s actually a very carefully and deliberately selected track of
Muzak, a type—and in fact a brand—of
music that has expanded beyond the insides of elevators and today serenades some one hundred million people a day
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inside Gaps, McDonald’s, Barnes & Nobles, and countless other restaurants and stores. So how does a store decide what tune to play overhead? Well, first, one of Muzak’s “audio architects”—a term for someone who’s trained in the physiological and psychological applications of music—pays a visit to a retailer or restaurant and looks at the store’s data-mining research to figure out what demographic shops or eats there. Then the audio architect carefully selects a playlist targeted at that demographic, a practice known in the biz as “
narrowcasting.”

It’s in this way that Muzak has designed seventy-four music programs in ten categories, ranging from indie rock to hip-hop to classical. Mapped out in fifteen-minute cycles that rise and fall in intensity using a technique known as “stimulus progression,” the speed and pacing of each individual playlist are carefully designed to have a certain psychological impact. Ever notice that the Muzak playing in
supermarkets and grocery stores is much slower than the Muzak playing in restaurants? Well, again, it’s because research shows that slow music makes us move more slowly, and the longer we hang around in a store, the more likely we are to buy something. According to
Douglas Rushkoff, author of
Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say
, in U.S. department stores, customers exposed to Muzak with a slow tempo shop 18 percent longer and make 17 percent more purchases, and in grocery stores, shoppers make a whopping 38 percent more purchases when slow Muzak is overhead. On the other hand, says Rushkoff, fast-food restaurants play Muzak with more beats per minute “to increase the rate at which a person chews.”
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Thus, they get us out of there sooner and can serve more customers and earn more money.

Thanks to narrowcasting, Muzak can even tweak its selections to
subconsciously persuade us to buy different items depending on what day of the week it is. Saturdays? The music will be more romantic, suggesting,
Buy her something—like roses or jewelry.
This technique has been found to be so effective that some Japanese supermarkets have split their stores into zones, each one serenading consumers with sounds designed to optimize spending per minute. In the fresh-fruits-and-vegetables department, water drips, birds sing, and the wind blows from overhead speakers; in the confectionery department, childish songs are interspersed with the sounds of children giggling, while over at the butcher’s a steak sizzles overhead.

As if that weren’t enough, Muzak also offers retailers a more subtle service dubbed “
atmospherics,” designed to hit us on an even deeper level.
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Imagine you’re a sixteen-year-old girl walking into a clothing store in Middle America. The mood and the decor are silvery, sexy, and urban. The employees are uniformly hip and attractive. Now add the seductive beat of fast-paced electronic music. Does this environment create a fantasy for a starry-eyed young girl who’s always dreamed of moving out of her small town and into the big city? I’ll say. On a subconscious level, the music allows the girl to imagine herself as the cool, sophisticated city dweller she’d like to be—then buy those shirts and pants to complete the picture. Believe me when I tell you that stores do this deliberately. When the Gap was rolling out a new sweater line, for example, Muzak vice president
Alvin Collis determined that since sweaters represented friendship, family, security, and protection, the stores should play music that evoked fuzzy, cozy feelings. Among the songs Muzak selected to create this “atmospheric”? Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World.”
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A South American banking chain once tasked me to help it transform the widespread public perception of its having shoddy, second-rate customer service and long waiting times. When I analyzed the customer experience, including how long people had to wait, I realized that the wait wasn’t actually that long; because people anticipated that their visit to the bank would be long and frustrating, they felt as if they were in line longer than they actually were. So using the data compiled by companies like Muzak, we carefully choreographed the rhythms of the music playing overhead and created what was essentially a three-act
soundtrack. At the door of the bank, the music serenading consumers was slow and welcoming (in fact, it was a beat slower than the average human heartbeat). As they came closer to the counter, the music would gradually increase in tempo, culminating with a fast beat as they carried out their transactions. The result? Customers “perceived” customer service as being twice as good as before—and incidentally, the bank’s revenue increased by 10 percent—all thanks to the speed of the music playing overhead. The good news? The service was already great—yet it took music to convince the customers of it.

H
ave you noticed that those traditional printed price tags on the shelves of
supermarkets and big-box stores like Costco and Walmart are slowly being replaced by digital
pricing displays? You probably assumed this was for the sake of efficiency; after all, why have employees waste time walking around the store changing those prices every day or week when it can be done electronically? And sure, there’s some truth to this explanation . . . but it’s far from the whole story.

Have you also noticed how, not unlike highways and commuter trains, supermarkets have their peak traffic times? Swing by the store at 5:00 p.m., and it will be jam-packed. Stop by at eleven in the morning, on a weekday, at least, and it will be nearly deserted (except for maybe that elderly couple buying a cantaloupe). No big shock here; everyone knows that the vast majority of people do their grocery shopping when they get off work, if not on Saturday or Sunday. But what you probably didn’t know is that now these stores can, in keeping with the traffic metaphor here, change the price of the toll depending on what time of day you’re driving. Have you ever felt that uncontrollable craving for an ice cream sundae at midnight and realized you were out of whipped cream? Such an urge is too powerful to be denied, so you gun your car to the nearest twenty-four-hour supermarket to buy some. I’m guessing that you’re willing to pay more for that can of whipped cream than you would have paid at the 5:00 p.m. peak shopping time. Now you can!

Companies and retailers know full well that our price sensitivity varies across the day, week, month, and year. Sometimes we enter a store determined to find a bargain, while other times, like when we’re in a pinch or a hurry, we couldn’t care less. Well, guess what? Thanks to data-mining technology, in some countries supermarkets and other large retailers know exactly when we’re willing to shell out more for products—and are altering their prices accordingly.

Enter digital signage! In Scandinavia, some supermarkets are already switching their prices daily, and across Japan some are even doing so on an hourly basis. The factors that currently determine the price of an item include weather (bad weather means that prices go up) and the density of customers in the store (lots of customers means prices decrease). I can promise you that this trend can lead to one thing and one thing only: in the future, prices will begin fluctuating like the stock market, creating a sort of game (remember the addictive quality of games) out of getting the lowest prices for your everyday stuff.

Companies are using
data mining to play on our price sensitivities in other ways, too. Over the past year, a whole new data-mining tool has taken flight, and many Fortune 100 companies are embedding it into their Web sites as we speak. It’s called
Predicta.net
, and its purpose is simple: Predicta allows Web sites to identify then segment shoppers based on what they do and where they go online, then direct highly specific advertising and marketing tailored to how much they’re willing to spend.

Let’s say that just this morning you were perusing a sale on Best
Buy.com
for a digital camera. If the Best Buy site is enabled with Predicta (whose clients include Visa, Philips, and Hewlett-Packard),
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it immediately knows two things: that you’re in the market for a digital camera and that you’re a true bargain hunter. Thus it serves you up a “personalized” coupon that offers a shockingly good discount on—yes!—that very same camera you’ve been hunting down all morning. There’s only one catch: you’ll have to visit the store to buy it (where you may spot and be unable to resist that laptop you’ve had your eye on). In short, based on what online searches you have made or Web sites you’ve visited, Predicta will ensure that the entire home page of the store you coincidentally decided to visit is redesigned in a split second to feature—guess
what?—the camera you’ve been checking out all morning. This is known as “behavioral targeting,” and as data-mining technologies become cheaper and easier to use, it’s becoming an increasingly popular tactic among marketers of all stripes.

Let’s take a slightly different scenario: Say your friend spent the morning searching for a premium camera on the Canon or Nikon home page. This time the Predicta-enabled site realizes in a split second that a bargain offer isn’t for her and that she’s willing to pay a high price for all the bells and whistles, which is why it offers up its best-quality camera—along with a coupon that gives her a slight discount on an equally high-end leather carrying bag (though the camera itself is for full price, of course). The upshot is essentially what economists call price discrimination: you and your friend end up buying the same item, but at radically different prices.

An even newer software program known as
Baynote (in use by companies including AT&T and apparel maker Anthropologie) not only tracks your online purchases, where you scroll on a page, what you click, and what search terms you use on any given site, but also refines its search results to recommend to you products based on what products have appealed to users who have browsed and searched similar products.
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In one example, when AT&T noticed that people were plugging in a lot of searches for a new phone model known as Insight, Baynote was able to bump Insight up higher on the search results on the AT&T Web site in a matter of minutes. And AT&T is not alone.
EBay has a team that buys Internet search terms in order to drive search traffic back to its site.

Predicta and Baynote are just two of the many variations on a new and increasingly widespread marketing tool called “personalized retargeting” or “remarketing” that is popular with retailers like
Diapers.com
,
eBags.com
, and the Discovery Channel, as well as companies that sell real estate, travel, and financial services online. These programs capture the “
cookies” that your computer automatically deposits into your Web browser, creating an indelible imprint of every site you visit and every page you view, then use that information to send you personalized offers relating to anything you have read, viewed, or bought online. This, in fact, was the mysterious force behind a bizarre tale of
a pair of stalkerish shoes. As the
New York Times
reported last year, one morning a Canadian mother of two saw and admired the pair of shoes on Zappos, the huge online shoe retailer. From then on, the shoes just wouldn’t leave her alone. “For days and weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” the woman recalled.