Brandwashed (2 page)

So last year I decided I would go on a brand detox—a consumer fast of sorts. More specifically I decided that I would not buy any new brands for one solid year. I would allow myself to continue to use the possessions I already owned—my clothes, my cell phone, and so on. But I wouldn’t buy a single new brand. How do I define “brand”? Well, in my line of work I look at life through a particular lens: one that sees virtually everything on earth—from the cell phones and computers we use to the watches and clothes we wear to the movies we watch and books we read to the foods we eat to the celebrities and sports teams we worship—as a brand. A form of ID. A statement to the world about who we are or who we wish to be. In short, in today’s marketing- and advertising-saturated world, we cannot escape brands.

Nevertheless, I was determined to try to prove that it
was
possible to resist all the temptations our consumer culture throws at us.

Yes, I knew this would be a challenge, especially for a guy who is on the road over three hundred nights a year. It would mean no more Pepsi. No more Fiji water. No more glasses of good French wine. That new album I was hearing such good things about? Forget about it. The brand of American chewing gum I’m partial to? No dice.

How else did my lifestyle have to change? In the morning, since I couldn’t eat any branded foods, like Cheerios or English muffins, I started eating an apple for breakfast. To shave, I use a battery-powered Gillette Power razor known as the Fusion; luckily I already owned that, but since I couldn’t buy shaving cream, I had to start shaving in the shower. I traded my electric toothbrush and Colgate toothpaste for tiny travel ones the airlines offer for free, and I started using the other freebies that airlines and hotels provided.

Some habits I had to give up completely. Sometimes, in countries where eating the local cuisine can be dodgy, I bring along packs of ramen noodles. Well, sorry, but no ramen. I’d just have to take my
chances. As any traveler knows, the air gets dry on long plane flights and in hotel rooms, so I typically use a face moisturizer by Clarins. Not anymore. I often pop a vitamin C if I feel a head cold in the wings. Now I’d have to make do with a glass of orange juice (the generic kind). Sometimes before TV appearances, if my hair looks crazy, I’ll use a hair gel called Dax. For a year I’d have to run a comb through it and hope for the best.

If I didn’t live the kind of life that I do, I might have been able to survive without brands for an eternity. But given my insane travel schedule, I knew I had to allow myself some exceptions, so before I kicked off my detox, I first set a few ground rules. As I said, I could still use the things I already owned. I was also permitted to buy plane tickets, lodging, transportation, and nonbranded food, of course (so I wouldn’t starve). I just couldn’t buy any new brands—or ask for any. Thus, in midflight, when the drinks cart came rolling around, I couldn’t ask for Pepsi or Diet Coke. Instead, I asked for “some soda.” I continued going to restaurants, but I made sure to order the “house wine,” and if a dish claimed it came with “Provençal” potatoes or “Adirondack tomatoes,” well, I’d just have to order something else.

For the first few months I did quite well, if I may say so myself. In some respects, not buying anything new came as a relief. But at the same time it wasn’t easy. Have you ever tried shopping at the grocery store and not buying a single brand? In airports, for example, while I’m killing time between flights, I like to wander through duty-free shops. I enjoy buying gifts for friends or stocking up on chocolate. Then I’d remember—
Martin, you’re in brand rehab—
and I’d turn around and leave. At the time of my detox, the world was struggling through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—one precipitated in part by out-of-control consumer spending. So like most people, I wasn’t immune to the feeling that unless my purchases were essential and practical, I shouldn’t buy anything. Yet knowing that so many people felt this way, companies and advertisers were doing everything in their power to get us to open our wallets. From London to Singapore to Dubai to New York, fantastic sales and bargains and special offers were
everywhere
; it seemed every store window was a sea of signs for 50 percent off this or two for the price of one of that screaming my name. Each time I walked
down the street, I seemed to be assaulted by posters and billboards for some sexy new fragrance or shiny new brand of wristwatch—on sale, of course. Every time I turned on the TV, all that seemed to be on were commercials: svelte twentysomethings gathered poolside drinking a particular brand of beer; rosy-cheeked children gathered at the breakfast table on a sunny morning, happily scarfing down a bowl of a certain brand of cereal; Olympic gold medalists performing feats of impossible athleticism in a certain brand of sports gear and sneakers. Somehow, even the packages of mouthwash and fruit juice and potato chips and candy bars I’d never noticed before were calling to me from the aisles of the supermarket and drugstore and seemed oddly alluring.

But I took the high ground.

Under the terms of my detox, I wasn’t even allowed to buy a book, a magazine, or a newspaper (yes, I think of all of these as brands that tell the world who you are or, in some cases, would like to be perceived as being), and let me tell you, those fourteen-hour transatlantic flights got pretty boring with nothing to read. Then there were the frustrating times a friend would tell me about a fascinating article or novel that had just come out. Under normal circumstances, I would have hunted down the thing. Now I couldn’t. Instead I’d stand balefully at the magazine kiosk or inside a bookstore, scanning the newspaper or magazine or book in question until a clerk shot me the universal look for “Get out if you’re not going to buy something.”

Harder still was being around my friends. I couldn’t buy a round of beers at a bar or a gift for someone’s birthday—and I happen to
love
buying people presents. Instead, I made up one lame excuse after another. I feared my friends secretly thought I was being a tightwad, that my brand detox was just an excuse to be cheap. But I stuck with it anyway. I was determined to prove that with a little discipline and willpower, I could inure myself to all the persuasive marketeering, advertising, and branding that surrounded me.

Then, six months into it, it all came tumbling down. The fact that my brand fast lasted only six months, and the fact that a person who should have known better got punked by his own profession, says a whole lot about just how shrewd companies are at engineering desire. So does what happened to me immediately after I toppled off the wagon.

M
y relapse took place in Cyprus. The night it happened, I was scheduled to give a keynote presentation. But when my plane touched down at the airport, I discovered the airline had misplaced my suitcase. It was gone. Which meant I didn’t have anything to wear for my speech. I had the pants I was wearing, but no shirt other than a sweaty, unfragrant black T-shirt that I had no time to wash. Here’s something they don’t teach you in Harvard Business School:
Never give a keynote presentation naked from the waist up.
This wasn’t some drive-by, meet-and-greet appearance, either. It was an important presentation, and they were paying me well and expecting a good crowd. I admit it, I freaked out.

Half an hour after checking into my hotel, I found myself standing at the cash register of a local tourist trap, holding a white T-shirt in my hands. It was the only color the store had. The letters on the front spelled out “
I
CYPRUS
.”

I’d officially relapsed. And all for a crappy T-shirt, too. Not only did I break my detox, but for the first time in recent memory, I broke my all-in-black rule and gave my presentation wearing black pants and my ridiculous white T-shirt. Despite my questionable attire, the evening went well, but that wasn’t the point. As they say in certain twelve-step programs, one drink is too much, and a thousand is too few. In other words, now that I’d given myself permission to end my brand fast, the dam had burst. I went a little nuts.

Twenty-four hours later, I was debarking in Milan, Italy, the fashion capital of the world. Let me tell you: this is not a place you want to be if you’re trying to give up brands. Wouldn’t you know it, but there happened to be a huge furniture sale in a store not far from my hotel! Fantastic handcrafted stuff, too!
Sold
to the little blond guy in the
I
CYPRUS
T-shirt! From then on, I was buying San Pellegrino water, Wrigley’s gum, and minibar M&Ms by the caseload. Then there was the black Cole Haan winter jacket I bought in New York, and . . . the list goes on. Over the next few weeks and months, I couldn’t stop. You could have sold me roadkill so long as it had a label and a logo on it. All because of one lost suitcase and one cheap replacement T-shirt.

Yes, I make my living helping companies build and strengthen brands, and in the end, even I couldn’t resist my own medicine.

That’s when I realized I had been
brandwashed
.

W
hen I was first approached to write this book as a follow-up to my previous book,
Buyology
, the world was still digging out from economic free fall. Did anyone really want to read a book about brands and products, I wondered, at a time when the vast majority of our wallets and handbags were either empty or zippered shut? Then it struck me: could there actually be a
better
time to write a book exposing how companies trick, seduce, and persuade us into buying more unnecessary stuff?

In 1957 a journalist named
Vance Packard wrote
The Hidden Persuaders
, a book that pulled back the curtain on all the psychological tricks and tactics companies and their marketers and advertisers were using to manipulate people’s minds and persuade them to buy. It was shocking. It was groundbreaking. It was controversial. And it’s nothing compared to what’s going on in the marketing and advertising worlds today.

Nearly six decades later, businesses, marketers, advertisers, and retailers have gotten far craftier, savvier, and more sinister. Today, thanks to all the sophisticated new tools and technologies they have at their disposal and all the new research in the fields of consumer behavior, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, companies know more about what makes us tick than Vance Packard ever could have imagined. They scan our brains and uncover our deepest subconscious fears, dreams, vulnerabilities, and desires. They mine the digital footprints we leave behind each time we swipe a loyalty card at the drugstore, charge something with a credit card, or view a product online, and then they use that information to target us with offers tailored to our unique psychological profiles. They hijack information from our own computers, cell phones, and even Facebook profiles and run it through sophisticated algorithms to predict who we are and what we might buy.

They know more than they ever have before about what inspires us, scares us, soothes us, seduces us. What alleviates our guilt or makes
us feel less alone, more connected to the scattered human tribe. What makes us feel more confident, more beloved, more secure, more nostalgic, more spiritually fulfilled. And they know far more about how to use all this information to obscure the truth, manipulate our minds, and persuade us to buy.

In the pages ahead, we’ll learn all about what they know, how they know it, and how they turn around and use that knowledge to seduce us and take our dollars. We’ll pull back the curtain on how specific companies have crafted the most successful ad campaigns, viral marketing plans, and product launches in recent memory, including how Axe probed the sexual fantasies of thousands of male consumers in preparation for rolling out its infamous body spray campaign, how Calvin Klein rolled out its best-selling fragrance, Euphoria, how a marketing campaign for a popular brand of vodka transformed an entire country’s drinking habits, and more.