Brandwashed (31 page)

Look, for example, at a bottle of FreeLife’s Dr. Earl Mindell’s Authentic Himalayan Goji Juice (available in Amazon’s health and beauty section, among other places). Its stylish, expensive-looking bottle pictures snow-dusted Mount Everest ascending majestically into the clouds, seemingly uncontaminated by humanity. In the foreground, like a small miracle, there dangles a cluster of bloodred goji berries, affixed to a gently bent, leafy stalk. The price of four one-liter bottles? $186.11. Or take Goji Gold 100% Pure Organic Juice, created by Dynamic Health Laboratories, which comes wrapped in similar packaging picturing distant, vaguely Himalayan mountains, seemingly reaching into the heavens and therefore unsullied by man. The company Steaz, maker of organic green teas and energy drinks, too, markets its products using images meant to imply a Far Eastern origin. If you go to its Web site, you’ll be greeted by yet another Himalayan scene—dark mountains covered
with snow; clear, babbling brooks; untraveled pathways; a far-off red pagoda; and even computer-generated hummingbirds swooping in to feed on the nectar of virgin flowers—not to mention the words “Wisdom Can Be Obtained Within.”

While these brands would have you believe that the contents of their bottles are grown, hand harvested, and shipped from the pristine mountaintops of Tibet or Nepal, that couldn’t be further from the truth; FreeLife products are mass-produced and bottled in a giant factory in Phoenix, Arizona, Dynamic Health Laboratories is based in Georgia, and Steaz’s operations are headquartered in Newtown, Pennsylvania.

I’ve long considered the strongest brands on earth—from Apple to Harley-Davidson—to be intriguingly akin to the world’s religions, in that they tend to inspire in us a strong, ritualistic, almost evangelistic faith. In this chapter, though, we’ll be talking about a different way faith works as a hidden persuader. We’ll be talking about how marketers, advertisers, and purveyors of everything from food and beverages to clothing to cosmetics and more have embarked on an almost religious—and highly profitable—quest of their own: to ignite desire for their brands and products by imbuing them with such intangible yet emotionally powerful “spiritual” qualities such as health, hope, happiness, faith, clarity, good luck, and even the betterment of the human soul.

Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at Duke University and author of the best-selling book
Predictably Irrational
, notes that what we buy is often not only some thing but also an idea embodied by that thing.
⁷
Whether that embodied idea is health, happiness, enlightenment, or social responsibility, it’s this very universal psychological tendency that makes the hidden persuaders we’ll read about throughout this chapter so incredibly powerful.

A
s anyone who has visited a health-food store in the past few years is well aware, goji isn’t the only “miracle” berry in town.

Take acai, the fastest-growing product in the herbal subcategory, with 2009 sales just under $300 million dollars (it’s the biggest-selling
botanical product today).
⁸
The acai berry is a miniature, grapelike fruit that grows profusely in the rain forest of Brazil and is available today in the form of various tablets, juices, smoothies, yogurts, and instant drink powders (there’s even a goji-acai drink I saw once in a health-food store, which is like the marketing version of a double-bill concert featuring the Rolling Stones and U2). Again, the ads and the packages deliberately play up the berry’s “exotic” provenance; the box of Good Earth’s Rainforest Red Tea (with acai and tropical fruits, of course) pictures a savanna on which a mother lion sits nursing her cub, whereas Rainforest Therapy’s Acai Powder (fresh from the Brazilian Amazon) shows simple wooden vats overflowing with the life-giving fruit.

At first glance this seems perfectly harmless; we can’t imagine we’d be so gullible as to be duped into thinking a berry has magical properties just because there’s a picture of a rain forest on the box. But that’s exactly the point. The reason these subtle, seemingly innocuous images are so insidiously persuasive is because they operate deep within our subconscious. What’s happening here, though we’re barely aware of it, is that when we read the words “rain forest,” or “Brazilian Amazon,” the
somatic markers in our brains perk up and begin connecting various dots. Peacefulness. Serenity. Nature. Purity. And soon our brains begin to ascribe all sorts of spiritual and medicinal qualities to the product—which, of course, is exactly what the marketers want.

If this sounds a bit far-fetched, remember that our brains are
hardwired
to connect these dots and to make associations that sometimes aren’t even there. Countless studies have shown that thanks to this pattern-recognition skill humans are born with, we often “see” connections that don’t exist. Remember the
Today
show experiment I described earlier? The one where I fooled crowds of New Yorkers into assuming that Krista, one of the show’s off-air producers, was a celebrity? It was because their brains had simply put together various dots: The dark glasses. The hair. The entourage. The paparazzi. The tiny dog. From these assorted cues, many concluded they’d not only seen Krista before but had attended her concerts, loved her music, and so on. In a sense, this is exactly what is going on with acai and all the other products marketers would have us believe possess miraculous, restorative, even spiritual properties. External cues trigger associations so powerful that
the thought of questioning or second-guessing them doesn’t even occur to us.

However, companies and retailers that sell acai products don’t stop there. Not by a long shot. They aren’t content just sitting back and hoping that we’ll associate good health and spiritual well-being with their products; instead, they come out and make all kinds of highfalutin, preposterously unsubstantiated claims that acai juice increases energy, helps you lose weight, improves digestion and sexual performance, detoxifies the body, relieves insomnia, reduces cholesterol, rejuvenates your complexion, and helps with heart disease and diabetes and more. Yet profoundly little evidence that acai berry juice improves human health actually exists. Like most berries, acai has good nutritional qualities, but “there is not a drop of research” that supports marketing claims that it prevents weight gain and facial wrinkles, says Jonny Bowden, a certified nutrition specialist and author of several health books.
⁹
“The expensive Acai berry is the triumph of marketing over science, that’s the bottom line,” Bowden says. “[The berry] isn’t useless, but it’s not anything that people are claiming it is.”
¹⁰

I really have to tip my hat to whoever’s out there marketing acai and all these other “superfruits.” Sure, there are vitamins and omega-3s in the acai berry—just as there are in all the other (markedly less expensive) fruits, like bananas, grapes, and cranberries. And yes, one study by the University of Florida did suggest that an acai berry extract may indeed retard the growth of leukemia cells—in a petri dish, not in actual humans, that is.
¹¹
According to acai drink manufacturers, if you drink four ounces of acai berry juice daily, it’s the equivalent of scarfing down more than two dozen fruits a day—well, that may be true (only because it’s highly concentrated), but according to the FDA we actually need only about two cups of fruit a day.

As you may have surmised by now, acai juice isn’t cheap. A week’s supply will cost you roughly $40, which, if you do the math, comes to nearly $2,000 a year. And acai has even migrated over to the skin-care category; for approximately $40, we can now buy acai hydrating facial cream and antiwrinkle hydration cream infused with acai and mulateiro, rosewood, or copaiba (it would seem that the harder it is to pronounce, the more it costs).

Some online sellers of acai berry go even further over the line in their sneaky efforts to sell us the stuff. Some use a tactic called
network marketing, a clever technique that also incorporates a healthy dose of
peer pressure. What this means is that one day your friendly neighbor Maureen will knock on the door, claiming that the acai juice she is holding (and by holding, I mean selling) has cured her of all that ailed her—from hangovers to varicose veins. A number have gone so far as to offer consumers a free trial, which seems fairly harmless—that is, until the trial ends and the consumer discovers that the company has covertly signed her up to automatically keep receiving shipments, to the tune of $80 a month; “some [have] had to cancel their credit cards just to break free from the scheme,” according to
Arlene Weintraub in her book
Selling the Fountain of Youth: How the Anti-Aging Industry Made a Disease Out of Getting Old—and Made Billions
. The practice was so widespread, Weintraub writes, that “the consumers’ site Complaints Board (
www.complaintsboard.com
) collected more than 17,000 posts from furious buyers of Acai.”
¹²
Sneakier still, according to CNN, many online acai vendors, like FWM Laboratories of Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood, Florida, Advanced Wellness Research of Miami Beach, Florida, and others stand accused of using fake diet blogs to steer consumers to sites plugging these free trials.

While we’re on the topic of “magical” fruits, what about pomegranate? That one really
does
have actual health benefits, doesn’t it?

Well, like the goji, the pomegranate has been used for centuries in traditional medicine across the world to treat everything from mouth ulcers to dry coughs to diarrhea to conjunctivitis to tuberculosis. (I might add that artwork from the earliest days of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity shows pomegranates symbolizing both unity and eternal life.) More recently, pomegranates have been shown to reduce UVB-induced skin damage
¹³
and “exert favorable effects on lipid profiles” (whatever that means).
¹⁴
What you have to keep in mind about these claims, though, is who is funding these studies: companies like POM Wonderful, maker of those wonderfully weird-shaped bottles of pomegranate juice. (Incidentally, in case you were wondering why those bottles are shaped that way, they were deliberately designed not only to resemble one pomegranate on top of another but also to evoke associations of the
“ideal” female form—a little fuller on the top and bottom with a cinched waist. Similarly, the heart in place of the
O
in the brand logo is meant to evoke associations of cardiovascular health.) In any case, it turns out that if you fund enough scientific studies—and the owners of POM have not only funded over fifty-five of them, but they’ve also donated over $34 million in research support to scientists and universities all over the world—you can find
something
redeeming in just about any product under the sun. Sure, pomegranates have a handful of health benefits, but again, so do fruits, vegetables, fish, oatmeal, olive oil, a healthy lifestyle, exercise, and weight control.

Did I forget to mention that pomegranate juice also contains “valuable
antioxidants”? If you’re not sure exactly what antioxidants are or what they do—other than bellow at us from the shelves of the supermarket and health-food store—you aren’t alone. For the record, antioxidants neutralize and stamp out the errant, unstable molecules known as free radicals that damage our body’s cells (our bodies produce free radicals naturally, as do pollution, the environment, too much sunlight, and an unhealthy lifestyle). But just so you know, you don’t need to pay two dollars an ounce for some weird purple juice to stamp out these free radicals (nor do you have to travel to Nepal or the rain forest); antioxidants occur naturally in fresh fruits and vegetables. According to Dr. David Gems of University College London, “It is not the antioxidant content of your food that is critical, it is that you don’t eat too much [food]. . . . Get plenty of exercise. Get a dog and take it for a walk.”
¹⁵

But that doesn’t stop POM Wonderful from claiming (on its Web site) to be the “antioxidant superpower” and “far and away the top performer in terms of antioxidant potency, defined as the in-vitro ability to scavenge free radical molecules.” Nor does it stop the company from marketing a line of teas, bars, pills, and supplements containing the “super antioxidant extract” it calls POMx—the
x
, of course, meant to imply a medical prescription, despite the fact that the products have never been medically or clinically tested. So specious are the brand’s
health claims, in fact, that in 2010, POM Wonderful received a warning letter from the
FDA, stating that “the therapeutic claims on your website establish that the product is a drug because it is intended for use in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or
prevention of disease”
¹⁶
and that the marketing of POM Wonderful using these claims was in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
¹⁷
Similarly, in 2009, regulators accused
Kellogg’s of deceiving consumers with claims that their Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved children’s cognitive health and attentiveness.

While Kellogg’s quickly agreed to a settlement, POM, at time of writing, has repeatedly claimed innocence and, according to the company Web site, was “currently reviewing FDA concerns.”
¹⁸

I
t should come as no surprise that selling health (or the illusion of health) is hugely profitable. In fact, it is so profitable that it has spawned an entire exploding industry of products marketed as “functional foods”—one that pulled $37.3 billion in 2009 in the United States alone. Naturally, companies have a lot of tricks up their sleeves for snagging a share of this hugely profitable (and rather bogus) market; witness, for example, the cash cow known as “one-hundred-calorie packs,” which cleverly allow manufacturers to create smaller servings typically at twice the price. In industry parlance, this is a well-known strategy called selling “perceived health and wellness,” with the major word here being “perceived.”