Brandwashed (3 page)

We’ll look at the subtle yet powerful ways companies use peer pressure to persuade us. We’ll see how they stealthily play on our fear, guilt, nostalgia, and celebrity worship, often in ways that hit us beneath our conscious awareness. We’ll see examples of how some particularly devious companies have figured out how to physically and psychologically addict us to their products and how certain popular Web sites are actually rewiring our brains to hook us on the act of shopping and buying. We’ll look at the new ways sex is being used to sell to us, including the results of an fMRI study that reveals something shocking about how heterosexual men
really
respond to sexually provocative images of attractive men and surprising findings about who marketers are
really
selling to when they “brand” the newest sixteen-year-old teen heartthrob.

We’ll see all the underhanded ways companies are collecting information without our knowledge, not just about our buying habits but about everything about us—our race and sexual orientation; our address, phone number, and real-time location; our education level, approximate income, and family size; our favorite movies and books; our friends’ favorite books and movies; and much more—then turning around and using this information to sell us even more stuff. We’ll explore the techniques advertisers and marketers are using to reach and influence children at a younger and younger age and read about
alarming research revealing that not only do these techniques work, but children’s lifelong preferences for brands can be shaped and set and at a
much
younger age than ever imagined.

I’ll also be revealing the results of a revolutionary guerrilla marketing experiment I carried out in service of this book. The inspiration for it was the 2009 David Duchovny and Demi Moore movie
The Joneses
, about a picture-perfect family that moves into a suburban neighborhood. As the movie unfolds, it turns out they’re not a real family at all but a group of covert marketers who are attempting to persuade their neighbors to adapt new products. Intrigued by this premise, I decided to stage my own reality television show,
The Morgensons
. I picked a family, armed them with a bunch of brands and products, and let them loose on their neighbors in an upscale Southern California gated community. The questions going in were: How powerfully can word of mouth influence our buying habits? Can simply seeing another person drink a certain type of beer, apply a certain line of mascara, spray a certain brand of perfume, type on a certain make of computer, or use the latest environmentally conscious product persuade us to do the same?

You’ll find out in the last chapter of this book. And should you pick up the enhanced e-book version of this book (and have a video-enabled reading device), you’ll get to see the Morgensons in action; throughout the book you’ll encounter countless video clips of actual footage from the experiment.

My goal is that by understanding just how today’s
newest
hidden persuaders are conspiring to brandwash us, we as consumers can battle back. The purpose of this book is not to get you to stop buying—I’ve proved that is frankly impossible. The purpose is to educate and empower you to make smarter, sounder, more informed decisions about what we’re buying and why. After all, enough is enough.

Martin Lindstrom
New York

L
ocated in Paris,
CEW France, short for Cosmetic Executive Women, is a group of 270 female beauty-business professionals whose avowed mission is to show the world that beauty products not only are more than a trivial indulgence but can actually be used to improve people’s lives. To that end, in 1996, CEW set up its first-ever Center of Beauty at one of Europe’s most prestigious hospitals, with the goal of providing emotional and psychological support to patients afflicted by trauma or disease.

Many of the patients at the center suffer from dementia or from amnesia caused by brain traumas resulting from car, motorcycle, skiing, and other accidents. Some are comatose. Many are alert but can no longer speak. Most can’t remember any details of their accidents, how they ended up in the hospital, or in many cases even their names.

Which is why the professionals at the Center of Beauty, led by former psychotherapist Marie-France Archambault, decided to enter their patients’ pasts through their noses. Teaming up with the international fragrance company International Flavors and Fragrances, Archambault’s team has bottled more than 150 distinct aromas, including the forest, grass, rain, the ocean, chocolate, and many others, and then run
what they call olfactive workshops, in which they use these fragrances to help patients regain memories they’ve lost.

CEW works closely with hospital medical teams and language therapists and also brings in family members and close friends to create a portrait of the life a patient was leading before his or her accident took place. Where did he grow up? In the country? In the city? What were the smells of his childhood? What were his youthful passions, his hobbies? His favorite foods and drinks? What smells might be most familiar? Then they design fragrances to trigger those memories.

CEW worked with one former cosmetics company executive who had suffered a serious stroke. When probed by doctors, he remembered almost nothing about his past. Yet once the CEW team placed the smell of strawberry under his nose, the patient began speaking haltingly about his youth. For another severely impaired patient who had no recollection of his motorcycle accident, the mere smell of street pavement was enough to “unfreeze” his brain. Just murmuring the words “tar, motorcycle” after sniffing the scent helped him take his first cognitive steps toward recovery.

The team has also worked with geriatric and Alzheimer’s patients who, after being exposed to fragrances from their childhoods, have shown radical improvements in recalling who they were and are.

What this goes to show is that certain associations and memories from our childhoods are resilient enough to survive even the most debilitating of brain traumas. When I first heard about this amazing CEW program, it confirmed a suspicion I’d had for a long time, namely, that most of our adult tastes and preferences—whether for food, drink, clothes, shoes, cosmetics, shampoos, or anything else—are actually rooted in our early childhoods. After all, if a childhood love for the smell of strawberry can survive a serious stroke, the preference must be pretty deeply ingrained, right?

Studies have indeed shown that a majority of our brand and product preferences (and in some cases the values that they represent) are pretty firmly embedded in us by the age of seven. But based on what I’ve seen in my line of work, I’d posit that, thanks in no small part to the tricks and manipulations of probing marketers, stealth advertisers, and profit-driven companies that you’ll be reading about throughout this
book, our brand preferences are set in stone even before that—by the age of four or five. In fact, based on some new research I’ve uncovered, I’d even go so far to suggest that some of the cleverest manufacturers in the world are at work trying to manipulate our taste preferences even earlier. Much earlier. Like before we’re even born.

W
hen I was very young, my parents loved the sound of bossa nova. Stan Getz. Astrud Gilberto. “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Corcovado,” “So Danco Samba,” and all the others. There was one long, dreary winter when they played bossa nova practically nonstop. So I suppose it’s little wonder I grew up to be completely in love with its sound (as I still am today).

Only thing is, my mother was seven months pregnant with me that winter.

Scientists have known for years that maternal speech is audible in utero; in other words, a fetus can actually hear the mother’s voice from inside the womb. But more recent research has found that a developing fetus can hear a far broader range of tones that come from
outside
the mother’s body as well. It used to be assumed that the mother’s internal bodily
sounds (the beat of the heart, the swooshing of the amniotic fluid) drowned out all external noises—like
music. But studies reveal this isn’t quite true; in fact, not only can soon-to-be babies hear music from inside the womb, but the music they hear leaves a powerful and lasting impression that can actually shape their adult tastes. Says
Minna Huotilainen, a research fellow at the Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, “Music is very powerful in producing fetal memories. When the mother frequently listens to music, the fetus will learn to recognize and prefer that same music compared to other music.” What’s more, she adds, “The fetus will build the same musical taste with his/her mother automatically, since all the hormones of the mother are shared by the fetus.”
¹
I guess that may explain why I still have so many bossa nova CDs in my collection. And on my iPod.

In and of itself, this seems pretty harmless, even kind of sweet.
After all, who wouldn’t feel a little warm and fuzzy inside knowing that their adult love of the Beatles or Norah Jones may be rooted in the fact that Mom listened to
Abbey Road
and “Don’t Know Why” over and over while she was pregnant? But when you think about how many tunes, sounds, and jingles are linked to brands and products, this all starts to seem a whole lot more sinister. And there is indeed evidence to indicate that hearing tunes and jingles in the womb favorably disposes us to those jingles—and possibly the brands with which they are associated—later on.

In one study, Professor
Peter Hepper of the Queen’s University, Belfast, found that newborn babies will actually show a preference for a TV theme song (the more basic and repetitive the better) that was heard frequently by their mothers during their pregnancies. When newborns—just two to four days old—whose mothers had watched the long-running Australian TV soap opera
Neighbours
during pregnancy were played that show’s theme song, they became more alert and less agitated, stopped squirming, and had a decreased heart rate—signs that they were orienting well to their environment. And it wasn’t just because music in general has soothing qualities; as Hepper reported, those same infants “showed no such reaction to other, unfamiliar tunes.”
²

How can we explain this striking finding? Says another globally recognized fetal researcher, who chooses to remain anonymous, “While it is very difficult to test newborn babies, and the studies to date have been done on small numbers of children, it is possible that fetuses could develop a response to sounds heard repeatedly while they were in the womb, especially if those sounds were associated with a change in the mother’s emotional state. So if, for example, the mother heard a catchy jingle every day while pregnant and the mother had a pleasant or relaxing response to the jingle, the fetus, and later the newborn, could have a conditioned response to that sound pattern and attend to it differently than other unfamiliar sounds.” In other words, the minute we’re born, we may already be
biologically programmed
to like the sounds and music we were exposed to in utero.

Shrewd marketers have begun to cook up all kinds of ways to
capitalize on this. For one, a few years ago, a major Asian shopping mall chain realized that since pregnant mothers spent a great deal of time shopping, the potential for “priming” these women was significant. Pregnancy, after all, is among the most primal, emotional periods in women’s lives. Between the hormonal changes and the nervous anticipation of bringing another life into the world, it’s also one of the times when women are most vulnerable to suggestion. So the shopping mall chain began experimenting with the unconscious power of
smells and sounds. First, it began spraying Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder in every area of the mall where clothing was sold. Then it infused the fragrance of cherry across areas of the mall where one could buy food and beverages. Then it started playing soothing music from the era when these women were born (in order to evoke positive memories from their own childhoods, a popular tactic you’ll read more about later on).

The mall executives were hoping this would boost sales among pregnant mothers (which it did). But to everyone’s surprise, it also had another far more unexpected result. A year or so into the sensory experiment, the chain began to be inundated by letters from mothers attesting to the spellbinding effect the shopping center had on their now newborns. Turns out the moment they entered the mall, their babies calmed down. If they were fussing and crying, they simmered down at once, an effect that 60 percent of these women claimed they’d experienced nowhere else, not even places where they were exposed to equally pleasant smells and sounds. After analyzing these perplexing findings, the mall management finally concluded that the baby powder and cherry scents and the comforting, soothing sounds (including these mothers’ own heartbeats, the sound of children giggling, and a carefully choreographed selection of instruments and repetitive rhythms) had infiltrated the womb. As a result, a whole new generation of Asian consumers were drawn—subconsciously, of course—to that shopping mall. And though management hasn’t been able to measure the long-term effects of these “primed” baby shoppers, some evidence indicates that these shopping mall experiments may have a potent effect on the shopping habits of the next generation for years to come.