Brandwashed (40 page)

O
ver these past pages, we’ve learned that few, if any, accidents take place in the marketing and advertising world. We’ve looked at many of the tricks, machinations, untruths, and manipulations that marketers and advertisers use to pressure, cajole, and entice us. We’ve seen how they use fear, sex, celebrity, New Age promises, insecurity, nostalgia, data mining, and more to prey on our most deeply rooted fears, dreams, and desires in the service of selling us their products. We’ve witnessed up close the alarmingly young age—often before we’ve even left our mothers’ wombs—at which they begin to target us and the sometimes surreal lengths they’ll go to in order to secure us as lifelong customers. We’ve even looked at the role
peer pressure can play in shaping our buying habits. But this chapter goes well beyond that.

In a world where roughly 60 percent of all Americans are members of Facebook (and some 175 million people worldwide log in to Facebook
each day
) and
Twitter has around 190 million users (who tweet approximately 65 million times during a twenty-four-hour period), I believe I’ve only just scratched the surface in exploring how vulnerable and susceptible we are to the advice, recommendations, and subconscious influence of our friends, neighbors, and peers.

The seed of the idea for the reality TV show we dubbed
The Morgensons
occurred to me almost eighteen months before I started writing this book, when I’d been unknowingly lured into a covert marketing ploy that prompted me to doubt my own ability to separate reality from advertising spin. As I pulled up to a gas station in Sydney, Australia, the guy across from me, who’d just finished filling up his own tank, approached me. “Hey, mate, love your car,” he said. “Oh, thanks,” I said politely. “But mate,” he went on (yes, Australian men
do
love to use this endearing term), “you really should consider using superoctane ninety-eight gas.” He proceeded to tell me he had the same model of car as mine at home in his garage, adding, “You can’t believe the difference in your car’s performance—it’s amazing.”

I thanked him, then promptly forgot his advice. Yet over the next few weeks, every time I needed to gas up my car, I couldn’t get his words out of my mind. Whenever I drove into a gas station, the same internal dialogue—
Should I buy the octane or the superoctane 98?—
rolled around in my brain.
What the hell?
I’d begun thinking.
It couldn’t hurt, and it costs less than ten cents more.
And sure enough, from then on, each time I needed gas, I’d fill up with the superoctane 98.

Then, a few months later, with the needle of my gas gauge close to empty, I pulled into the very same gas station. I was filling up when I heard an extremely familiar voice.

It was
him
, the superoctane 98 man! This time, though, he wasn’t addressing me but another car owner who was filling his tank with the cheapest brand of gas. “Hey, mate,” he called over, “love your car.” “Thanks,” the guy replied in the same polite tone as I had. “But mate,” the man went on, “you really should consider using superoctane ninety-eight. Thing is, I have the same model of car at home, and once you’ve tried it, you won’t believe the difference—it’s
amazing
.”

I’d been completely punked. Either this guy owned every brand of car ever manufactured and knew only two sentences in the English language, or the gas station had planted him to ramp up sales of its higher-priced gas. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering,
Martin, how could you fall for it? You—who work day in and day out in the marketing industry—have been duped into changing your whole buying behavior thanks to five seconds of covert marketing?

But it wasn’t until a year later, when the film
The Joneses
hit the big screen, that I was inspired to hatch my own marketing experiment—to test the effects, over an eight-week period, of that same tactic I had succumbed to in the suburbs of Sydney.

A month later, after screening literally hundreds of hours of videotape, the results from
The Morgensons
came in. But anecdotal evidence like this, no matter how many hours of it, isn’t always the most scientific, which is why I decided to conduct an additional fMRI study to confirm our findings. The results proved beyond any doubt whatsoever that marketers, advertisers, and big businesses have nothing at all compared to the influence we consumers have on one another.

P
icture this. Gina and a gaggle of friends are going shoe shopping at
DSW, the giant retail chain. (DSW, for the uninducted, stands for Designer Shoe Warehouse.) En route to the giant shoe mecca, Gina ingenuously asks a carful of her friends, “Has anyone been to DSW before? I just love the whole concept. You’re just
bound
to find the shoe you want there.” Two hours later, she’s managed to “convince” (subtly, of course) five of her friends to buy multiple pairs; some, in fact, have walked out of the store armed with as many as five new pairs of boots, heels, and flats. Not only that, but I discovered later that following their trip, three of Gina’s friends visited DSW’s Web site, “liked” the store on
Facebook, and, as of writing, had bought several more pairs of its shoes online.

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.

S
o 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.”

E
arlier 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.