Brandwashed (30 page)

Isn’t this the exact phenomenon that explains not only why we run out to buy the books recommended on the
Today
show book club but also why there are so many celebrity doctors hawking their beauty products in Sephora? I call it “turning our brains off.”

In a 2009 study, Emory University School of Medicine scientists led by
Gregory Berns, MD, a professor of neuroeconomics and psychiatry at Emory, found that people will actually stop thinking for themselves when a person they perceive as an expert offers them advice or direction. In the study, experimenters asked volunteers to make a decision about their finances. In one trial, volunteers were asked to make decisions on their own. In another, they received conservative advice guaranteed to minimize their gains from a financial “expert.” Then the researchers scanned their brains.

Fascinatingly, the fMRI showed that in the face of “expert” advice (even though it actually wasn’t particularly good advice), the parts of the volunteers’ brains involved in considering alternatives became almost completely inactive.
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It seems that receiving “expert” advice shuts down the areas of our brains that are responsible for decision-making processes, especially when the situation involves risk (interestingly, the areas of the brain responsible for skepticism and vigilance also become less active when a person is engaged in prayer).
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“The brain activation results suggest that the offloading of decision-making was driven by trust in the expert,” according to C. Monica Capra, PhD, a coauthor of the study. Added Berns, “This study indicates that the brain relinquishes responsibility when a trusted authority provides expertise. “The
problem with this tendency is that it can work to a person’s detriment if the trusted source turns out to be incompetent or corrupt.”
³⁹

Because we are so in awe of
fame and fortune, the line between expert and celebrity can be surprisingly thin. Remember the old joke, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV?” Turns out there’s a lot of truth behind it. Take
Bill Cosby, for example. As one study notes, at the height of the popularity of
The Cosby Show
, in which he played a physician (and loving father to a large brood of children) named Dr. Huxtable, Cosby also appeared in a series of extremely successful TV ads for Jell-O gelatin and pudding. Why did these ads work? Because people confused him with the discerning doctor and doting father he played on television—someone you’d expect to endorse only the very healthiest and most wholesome food items. What was going on in their brains as they watched those ads? A summary of the experiment in
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
“found that a single exposure to a combination of an expert and an object leads to a long-lasting positive effect on memory for attitude toward the object.”
⁴⁰

Is it any wonder celebrity experts like Dr. Gross, Dr. Perricone,
Martha Stewart, or anyone who offers advice or counsel on television (many of whom, paradoxically, are experts only because they are famous and famous only because they are experts) have the rapturous and devoted followings they do? When we hear their “expert” advice, we unwittingly shut down the critical decision-making regions of our brains. As a result, we blindly heed that advice, often to the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars.

A
andy Warhol’s legendary quote about fame—“In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes”—was repeated back to him so many times over the years, it eventually made even his own eyes glaze over. “I’m bored with that line,” he announced in the late 1970s. “I never use it anymore.”
⁴¹

Today, it’s more like fifteen seconds. “The price of fame has hit rock bottom,” writer Bruce Horovitz remarked in
USA Today
, when, last year, apparel maker
American Eagle announced that for the mere price of a
shirt, jeans, or a pair of socks, customers could get their face flashed to the world on the store’s twenty-five-story-tall Times Square billboard. But what American Eagle’s savvy marketers have actually figured out is how to make a few fleeting seconds of stardom last forever—and get an everlasting supply of free advertising in the process. They knew that in today’s digital world, these young, wired consumers would whip out their digital cameras or smart phones, take a photo of their face on the billboard, post it on their Facebook pages, blast it to their Twitter followers, and so on, giving American Eagle countless millions of dollars of free publicity—and more celebrity of its own.
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Fact is, it’s unbelievably easy nowadays to become a celebrity. So easy that last year I made a bet with a
Today
producer that I could manufacture a celebrity from scratch.

I got to know
Krista Brunson, who works behind the scenes (not on camera) at the popular morning show over the course of appearances to promote my last book. I’d been explaining my thesis on celebrity—that if a person surrounds herself with the right accoutrements (and the right people), the public will be seduced into believing that she’s famous—and was challenged to prove it. So I decided we would transform Krista into a “celebrity” and see if people bought it.

At 6:00 a.m., Krista showed up in the NBC makeup room looking like her usual fantastic self: young, attractive, and pulled together, though admittedly nervous. Ten minutes later, at the request of a specially hired cosmetician, Krista had removed her usual makeup and a personal stylist got to work on her head-to-toe transformation. Before long, Krista’s hair had gotten big, her lips glossy, her cheeks bronzed, and her eyes smoky. Next, we outfitted her in a tight leather dress, textured tights, patent leather boots, an expensive Chanel handbag, oversized sunglasses, and—the pièce de résistance—a yappy, microscopic dog named Zak. But wait, we weren’t done. Everyone knows that
celebrities seldom travel solo, so we set her up with a phony entourage, including a personal photographer, a security guard (to keep adoring fans at bay, of course), and an NBC cameraman.

Krista Brunson was ready to be the star of her own life—an overnight sensation, a national treasure in the making.

With a camera team trailing us, we made our way out of the
Today
studios in Rockefeller Center and up toward Fifth Avenue. The photographer began snapping away as Krista, per my instructions, began window-shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue. I’d also instructed her to move slowly and languidly, as celebrities are wont to do, and to remain stubbornly in character, no matter what happened. At first, not a single person approached us. Then—and I’d never seen anything like this before—people appeared from out of nowhere and began swarming around like she was Julia Roberts or Keira Knightley.
From out of nowhere!
Many were convinced they’d seen her before and began snapping her photograph, and those who were simply convinced she was important kept sidling up to Krista’s entourage to ask who she was.

At one point, a member of Krista’s entourage filled her in about her schedule for the rest of the day. In response Krista, keeping in character, loudly announced that she wanted a champagne mimosa for lunch and later that afternoon a deep-tissue massage. As she continued along Fifth Avenue, the crowds multiplied. “Krista, what are you wearing to the Oscars?” one of our fake paparazzi called out. “Are you sleeping with Peyton Manning?” another asked. When people came forward to ask for Krista’s autograph, she repeatedly scribbled her real name. No one noticed.

And as we headed back to the studio, one man mentioned to me that he’d seen Krista in concert and even briefly exchanged words with her after a show. He wasn’t confusing her with someone else, either; he was thoroughly and completely convinced it had been her.

As I’d predicted, creating a celebrity was just that easy. Expensive accoutrements. Dark glasses. Great clothes. Designer shoes. A purebred dog the size of a rat. Which suggests that if we can simulate celebrity so easily, maybe it’s less about who we actually are and more about the brand we project to those around us.

But then again, most companies and their marketers already knew that.

W
ay, way high up in the hills of the Himalayas, in northern Nepal, beyond the moon, beyond the stars, its stems grazing the heavens, there grows a small, magical berry known as the goji.

Best of luck trying to track down the meaning of this word in any language, though one unconfirmed source once told me “goji” means, simply, “happy.” Whether or not that’s the real meaning, today the goji berry, or wolfberry, which resembles a shriveled red raisin, has been squashed, pulverized, crushed, and strained into a juice that resembles sewer water and is sold in health-food and organic markets for anywhere from $30 to $50 for a thirty-two-ounce bottle.

Chinese medicine has used
Lycium barbarum
and
L. chinense—
the scientific if slightly less marketable names for the goji berry—for centuries to help protect the liver, improve eyesight, and boost immune function and circulation. Today many makers of these juices—which include
PepsiCo (makers of SoBe Lifewater Goji Melon),
Coca-Cola (Honest Tea’s Honest Ade Super
fruit Punch with Yumberry and Goji Berry), Schweppes (Snapple Goji Punch), Anheuser-Busch (180 Red with Goji), Dr Pepper (Goji Fruit Punch Skinny Water), Campbell’s (whose V8 V-Fusions include Goji Raspberry as well as Passionfruit
Tangerine), and FreeLife International (which today carries the tagline “The Himalayan Goji Company” and which makes up 90 percent of the global goji business across twenty-six countries, with annual sales estimated to be in the range of $250 million to $500 million
¹
)—assert that daily consumption of goji juice may help cure almost every human ailment in existence, from depression to anxiety to sexual impotence to lower-back pain to circulatory problems to blood sugar imbalance to autoimmune deficiencies to liver failure to macular degeneration to some forms of cancer (some suppliers distributing goji juice go so far as to claim that a man named Li Qing Yuen ate goji berries every day and lived to be 252 years old).
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Yet as the back of one bottle admits somewhat sheepishly, “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

So
does
this pricey little fruit actually have any real proven health benefits, or is it all just one big sham? One published study suggests cautiously that the goji berry “certainly deserves further investigation.”
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Another study found that hairless mice who’d been given goji juice and then zapped with SSUV irradiation showed fewer incidents of sunburns, suggesting that “consumption of this juice could provide additional photoprotection for susceptible humans.”
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In another strange-sounding 2004 study carried out by the College of Public Health at China’s Wuhan University, diabetic bunnies were found to have “an increase in HDL, or ‘good,’ cholesterol and a reduction in their blood glucose level”
⁵
after consuming goji.

Well, that’s fantastic for diabetic rabbits and sunbathing rodents, but what about the rest of us?

Though there may be a great deal of quixotic charm surrounding the folklore, legend, and provenance of the exotic goji berry, there’s just not much concrete scientific proof it actually
does
anything—except perhaps cost a lot of money. Yet we keep buying it by the caseload; in 2009, goji products were a $145 million industry, reaching well beyond the juice market to include nine product categories, including tea (Celestial Seasonings’ Goji Berry Pomegranate Green Tea), cereal (Me & Goji Custom Artisanal Cereal), and candy (Vosges’s dark chocolate goji bar).
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But if goji berries haven’t been proven to have any real medicinal
properties, that raises an obvious question: how exactly are we being brandwashed to buy the stuff in such quantities?

Turns out the real magic of the goji berry has less to do with our hearts or our circulatory systems or our blood glucose and more to do with our brains.

As I wrote about in my last book,
Buyology
, our brains are prone to forming mental shortcuts, or bookmarks, known as
somatic markers, that link cues from our physical world to specific emotional states or properties. Well, I’ve seen over and over in my work that shrewd companies are able to actually plant these somatic markers in our minds by creating associations between some positive emotion and their product. It seems that’s exactly what’s going on when it comes to the goji berry. Now, bear with me for a minute. The goji berry is found in China and Malaysia but is most often linked with the Himalayas, former home to the Dalai Lama. And when we think of that part of the world, what comes to mind? Could it be Buddhism and everything Buddhism symbolizes: purity, simplicity, compassion, wisdom, selflessness, and, ultimately, enlightenment? Marketers of these products know this, which is why they have very cleverly prodded our brains to associate their products with these spiritual properties. How? For one thing, by taking great care to emphasize the berry’s Far Eastern provenance in their
packaging and advertising.