Brandwashed (7 page)

Counterintuitive though it sounds, there’s a real biological basis behind our attraction to fear. Fear raises our adrenaline, creating that primal, instinctual fight-or-flight response. This in turn releases epinephrine, a hormone and neurotransmitter that produces, as many “adrenaline junkies” will attest, a deeply satisfying sensation. There’s a substantial overlap between those brain areas involved in processing fear and pleasure,” said Allan Kalueff, a neuroscientist at the University of Tampere in Finland. Adds Yerkes National Primate Research Center neuroscientist Kerry Ressler, the amygdala, our brain’s “fear center,” “gets just as activated by fear as it would in the real world, but because your cortex knows you’re not in danger, that spillover is rewarding and not frightening.”
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By uniting us against a common enemy, fear also brings humans together. It has a perverse yet delicious binding quality. It’s for this reason that we love to spread fearful rumors, sometimes blowing them out of all proportion just to heighten the sense of danger. Nothing travels as quickly as a frightening rumor—think of those ubiquitous urban legends about highway murder gangs and escaped convicts. Says Michael Lewis, director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, “Fear has a certain contagious feature to it, so the fear in others can elicit fear in ourselves. It’s conditioning, like Pavlov and the salivating dog.”
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According to Harjot Singh, the senior vice president and director of planning at the marketing communications firm Grey Canada, our brains are hardwired to fear potential threats.
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Professor Joseph LeDoux of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety at New York University concurs, explaining that “we come into the world knowing how to be afraid, because our brains have evolved to deal with nature.”
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What’s more, as anyone can attest who’s ever had the bejesus scared out of them by the sound of a branch scratching on a windowpane on a windy night, fear is far more potent than our facility for reason. Explains
Newsweek
, “The amygdala sprouts a profusion of connections to higher brain regions—neurons that carry one-way traffic from
amygdala to neocortex. Few connections run from the cortex to the amygdala, however. That allows the amygdala to override the products of the logical, thoughtful cortex, but not vice versa.”
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Adds UCLA neurobiologist Michael Fanselow, fear is “far, far more powerful than reason. . . . It evolved as a mechanism to protect us from life-threatening situations, and from an evolutionary standpoint there’s nothing more important than that.”
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Says an article on political fearmongering that appeared on the left-leaning political Web site Daily Kos, “When a threat is perceived, the body goes into automatic mode, redirecting blood to certain parts of the body and away from the brain. The respiratory response also decreases the blood supply to the brain, literally making a person unable to think clearly. In other words, the loss of blood to a person’s brain can make him or her stupid, literally.”
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What’s more, an academic study entitled “The Extended Parallel Process Model” explains that people who are exposed to fear appeals think carefully about the responses proposed in these messages, then follow the advice of the persuasive message in an attempt to neutralize the danger.”
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Clearly, fear is a powerful persuader, and you’d better believe that marketers and advertisers know it and aren’t afraid to exploit it to the fullest.

Which is why the marketing world uses scare tactics to sell us everything from antidepressants to condoms, dental floss to laundry detergent, burglar alarms to cell phones, bottled water to pizza dough, as well as countless other brands and products you’ll read about in this chapter. I recall once seeing a vintage 1950s ad for lunchbox thermoses that bore the unforgettable tagline “A Fly in the Milk May Mean a Baby in the Grave.” As you’re about to read, advertisers have since gotten a lot more subtle and creative in the ways they use fear to persuade us.

But really, I don’t mean to scare you.

P
erhaps you recall a 1994 TV advertisement for an Aquafresh toothbrush. In one hand a woman is holding up a toothbrush, in the other, a
ripe tomato. “With this tomato, I’m going to make an important point about your toothbrush,” she says, pressing the bristles into the poor tomato, creating a gash that resembles a bleeding gum. “Only Aquafresh Flex Brush has a unique, pressure-sensitive neck that bends and flexes if you press too hard,” the woman continues, “so you can prevent damaging your gums, while still giving your teeth a thorough cleaning.”
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On the face of it, Aquafresh was just using a simple prop to show how great its product was. But in fact something a little bit more subtle and sneaky was going on. After all, a prop resembling a bleeding gum calls to mind only one thing: a trip to the dentist. What else could be more universally terrifying?

So besides dentists and germs, what other kinds of fears do companies play on in marketing us their products? For one, the fear of failure. In a surprising 2008 study, researchers at the University of Bath, UK, found that the fear of failure drives consumers far more than the promise of success; the latter oddly tends to paralyze us, while the former spurs us on (and pries open our wallets). In fact, as the study found, the most powerful persuader of all was giving consumers a glimpse of some future “feared self.”
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We all have some version of a future self we’d take great pains to avoid. Do most of us go to the gym because we want to be healthy, or because we’re scared of getting flabby or out of shape? Do we bathe, shampoo, and brush and floss our teeth out of reverence for the rules of hygiene, or are we imagining the “feared self” we might resemble if we smelled bad, our hair were scraggly and unwashed, and our teeth were rotted and yellow? I can’t help but think back to a classic L’Oréal ad in which an older man is walking down the street. To our eyes, he looks great—dapper and distinguished. The camera then cuts to a beautiful younger woman passing him by. And through her eyes we see him as old, decrepit, and repulsive—his worst-feared self realized.

Sometimes, advertisers prey on our fears of our worst selves by activating insecurities that we didn’t even know we had—like about the appearance of our armpits. This is exactly what Dove’s recent “Go Sleeveless” ad campaign was doing; by claiming that their new special moisturizing formula will make our underarms “not only odor free but prettier,” Dove was subconsciously planting the fear that our armpits
might be not only smelly but also hideous. As
Slate
aptly pointed out, “Dove’s empowerment-via-shame marketing approach for Go Sleeveless has its roots in advertising techniques that gained popularity in the 1920s: a) pinpoint a problem, perhaps one consumers didn’t even know they had; b) exacerbate anxiety around the problem; c) sell the cure.” Among the many “feared selves” that have been historically planted by marketers, the article cites such concerns as “bad breath,” “smelly underarms,” and “the many troubles down there.”
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What else frightens us nowadays? A lot. Most of us are scared about the economy, of losing our jobs, and of defaulting on our mortgages. We’re scared that our spouse or partner might leave us. We’re scared of loneliness and having no friends. We’re afraid of sexual inadequacy. Of getting cancer. Of getting old and breaking a hip. Of death. We’re scared of driving and we’re scared of flying. We’re scared of terrorists and of global warming. We’re scared of the bright sun and the dark night. We’re afraid of
E. coli
bacteria in our beef, hormones in our milk, and mercury in our fish. We’re scared of viruses infecting our computers and our water supplies. We’re scared of earthquakes quite literally shifting the ground beneath our feet and of our children being abducted by strangers in cars. We’re scared that we talk too much or too little, that we dress badly, that our nails are unclean and our hair wayward. Or that no one will tell us about the piece of kale in our teeth, or that while we strive to be charming and amusing, we’re actually fatally unfunny . . . and everyone knows it but us. According to Gavin Johnston, a behavioral science–based branding consultant, many brands prey on what anthropologists dub “panoramic fear”—namely, “an overwhelming sense that control has been lost, prompting consumers to scramble to find any kind of comfort they can.”
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It’s these seemingly infinite fears—some planted in our minds by marketers and advertisers, others merely amplified by them—that drive us to buy triple-moisturizing creams and heat-safe leave-in conditioners, teeth-whitening strips and multivitamins. Not to mention gym memberships and organic food and bottled water and humidifiers (and dehumidifiers) and designer clothing and Viagra and earthquake insurance and water-filtration systems and plastic surgery and bike locks and . . . 
burglar alarms.

P
icture this: You’re a single, twentysomething female in a skimpy T-shirt and sweats, ready to work out at home to a yoga DVD when you hear suspicious noises coming from outside. Or you’re a teenage girl home alone at night, convinced you hear the sound of keys jiggling in the downstairs lock. Or you’re a mother preparing dinner while your kids play in the yard, and you’ve failed to notice the suspicious-looking fellow lurking near the garage. Or perhaps you’re a recent divorcée who’s just been flirting with a charming hunk at your house party and are startled, once the house has emptied out, to see this same hunk punching in your back door.

These are all scenes from widely viewed commercials for Brink’s Home Security, now known as Broadview Security. When they aired in 2008, many media observers and consumer advocates decried them as sensationalistic, salacious, and sexist. Not to mention transparently obvious in their intent to terrify. Airing a few months into the global recession—for many Americans, one of the scariest times in recent memory—the ads worked like a charm, especially among their target audience:
women. Thanks to this unabashed fearmongering, alarm sales rose by an unprecedented 10 percent in a single year—a year during which crime rates actually
decreased.
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“Are you a single woman who lives alone in a large, five-person house? Studies show that if you’re a lady, most men want to kill you,” went the hilarious parody of these ads that ran on
Saturday Night Live
.
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But what’s not funny is the fact that Broadview and burglar alarm companies are hardly alone in identifying our most deeply held fears and then playing them back to us in the most nightmarish scenarios possible. In one ad sponsored by the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (it was billed as a drunk-driving ad, although I’m willing to bet it sold more insurance policies than it saved lives), an adolescent boy is pictured flying through a car windshield because he’s forgotten to secure his seat belt. In a TV commercial for American Express traveler’s checks, a vacationing couple suddenly victimized by theft is shown huddled, helpless, and broke—before the credit card company, like a white knight, comes obligingly to the rescue. Prudential life insurance’s
“Don’t wait until it’s too late” ad campaign featured a pitiful-looking family barely managing to carry on because a deceased patriarch had failed to sign up for life insurance.

And of course there’s GM’s OnStar, a subscription-based “vehicle security, safety and communication service,” whose manipulative but riveting radio commercials are recordings of actual distress calls from customers—from a panicked woman reporting she’s just been involved in a collision to a terrified child calling for help because his mother is having trouble breathing.

I’m not proud of it, but I once helped create an ad like this. It was a TV commercial featuring a father and his young daughter. The father was about to leave on a business trip, and the daughter was dejected. The camera cut to the father in a black limousine as it pulled away from his visibly unhappy daughter. Next, the screen showed Dad on an airplane. Then the daughter again, looking up longingly into the sky. Next we see Dad striding into a meeting overseas, his daughter back at home. At last the phone rings. The daughter picks it up, almost tearily. It’s Dad. He told her he would call her, didn’t he?

The commercial was for Allianz, a well-known life insurance company. Yes, we were using fear to remind fathers to look out for the families they love. Without saying so, the ad asked,
If something were to happen to you, would your family be financially protected?
Later, we scanned people’s brains as they viewed it to see which shot was the most affecting (and persuasive). The hands-down winner was the shot of the little girl gazing up at the sky.

Yet this was nothing compared to another ad I saw once. “I Want More Time,” which is available on YouTube, is dubbed the “saddest commercial ever,” but I think a more proper description is the “most emotionally manipulative commercial ever.” In it, a middle-aged man driving a car along a highway speaks in voice-over about his teenage son. “I want time to understand him,” we hear, as we see flashbacks of the father berating the young man. “I want to listen to his songs,” the father’s voice-over resumes, and “tell him I’m sorry,” and “I want time to do what I’ve never done: take better care of him. Love him more.”

At which point a highly realistic-looking commuter bus rams his car head-on. He’s dead.

Cue the words “Thai Life Insurance.”
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The reason ads like these work so well is because they hit us in two powerful places. Fear and its close cousin, guilt. I consider guilt to be a global virus. And no one is better at spreading that virus than marketers and advertisers. As an article that appeared in the
Journal of Consumer Research
in 2006 explained, fear mixed with a high level of blame, regret, guilt, or even a dare tends to translate emotion into action.
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This instinctively makes sense; after all, isn’t it the combination of fear and guilt that makes you reach for the nicotine gum instead of the cigarettes or baked Cheetos over the fried ones? (I might add that the packaging of these baked snacks is designed with the “feared self” of today’s health-conscious woman in mind. Note the matte, unshiny bags they come in, compared to the slippery, gleaming bags enclosing regular Cheetos, which subconsciously remind us of oily, greasy skin.) In short, fear and guilt are marketers’ one-two punch.