Brandwashed (9 page)

What was going on here? After watching the tapes again, we noticed that generally, if Kelly liked a product enough to touch it, study it, and ponder it, she’d buy it,
but not the one she’d picked up
. Instead, just like those newspaper buyers, she’d put that “tainted” bottle of shampoo or can of coffee or bag of tortilla chips back on the shelf before selecting an identical one stashed one or two items behind it. And on one occasion, when the product Kelly wanted was the lone one remaining on the shelf, the fear response in her brain was so pronounced she ended up choosing another brand altogether—though if you had asked her, she would have had no idea why she had done so.

It makes sense that our fear of germs or contamination would be particularly pronounced when it comes to food products. But how do
we explain the fact that Kelly’s fear response was just as strong for, say, paper towels as it was for a carton of milk? I chalk it up to clever marketing that plants seeds in our brains—subconsciously, of course—that maybe a product is or isn’t as “clean” as we believe. To see what I mean, picture, say, a marmalade display. Marmalade, as most people know, is a fruit preserve with a thick, peely texture and a syrupy taste. From the beginning of time, marmalade, which originated in Scotland, has been marketed and sold in jars with tartan-plaid screw tops, to cultivate that exotic suggestion of its being “imported” (even though most is manufactured in the United States). Still, because most Americans believe jars of this “exotic” product have traveled thousands of miles in who knows what conditions and been manhandled by who knows how many grimy mitts, the average consumer, before buying a jar of marmalade, will carefully inspect it, hoping to confirm that what he or she is buying is safe, fresh, and uncontaminated.

Yet there is no way on earth a marmalade manufacturer can guarantee freshness. Marmalade is simply
not
a fresh product. It’s not meant to be. Those glass jars have been sitting on this supermarket shelf for upwards of eight months. But marketers don’t want us to know that! So what do they do? They try to create the
illusion
of freshness by attaching the top of the marmalade lid to the glass jar with a narrow white strip of adhesive paper. When the strip is unbroken, it means that no one has twisted the top of the can open (and done who knows what to it). It signals to consumers,
Hey, don’t worry, you’ve got a fresh jar!

Hotels, incidentally, employ a similar tactic by placing a paper seal on the seats of their toilets and a paper lid on glasses you’ll find in the bathroom or near the minibar. I’ve always been astonished by the fact that a single, flimsy sheet of paper is enough to create the illusion that no other person has ever used that toilet or drank out of that glass, but somehow it does (And in fact one hotel employee once admitted to me that the glasses are not actually washed—merely dried with a towel—before being used again and again. Yet that paper lid gives us the illusion of cleanliness.)

Marketers call this the “fresh strip.” Along with its close relative, the plastic seal, the fresh strip is today standard in many food and product categories including, among others, yogurt, peanut butter, coffee,
ketchup, iced tea, mustard, juice, vitamins, and over-the-counter medicines. It conveys the (in many cases false) impression that what’s inside this jar, bag, or container is unsullied by germs, untouched by another human being. Moreover, many of these jars and containers are deliberately engineered so that when we unscrew that marmalade at home, we’ll hear that comforting
smack
sound, further reassurance that what we’ve bought is fresh, clean, and safe—never mind that the smacking sound was created and patented in a sound lab to manipulate us into believing that the marmalade was flown in from Edinburgh just this morning.

Don’t be fooled. The reality is that this jar of marmalade has likely been sitting on this shelf unbothered for months. Occasionally, a clerk will come by and dust it.

T
o truly see all the tricks marketers have for creating the illusion of freshness, there’s no place better to go than Whole Foods, the world’s largest purveyor of natural and organic edibles. What passes through your mind when I say the word “fresh”? Free-roaming cows and chickens? Handpicked
fruit and flowers? Homegrown tomatoes, still on the vine?

As we enter Whole Foods, symbols, or what advertisers call “symbolics,” of freshness just like these overwhelm us. No matter what Whole Foods you visit in any city in America, the first thing you see is flowers. Geraniums. Daffodils. Jonquils. Behind the display of flowers cascades a stream of clear water against a coppery backdrop (another “symbolic,” suggestive of calm and serenity). Flowers, as everyone knows, are among the freshest, most perishable objects on earth. Which is why fresh flowers are placed right up front: to “prime” us to think of freshness the moment we enter the store. (Consider the opposite: what if we entered the store and were greeted with stacks of canned tuna and plastic flowers?) Now that we’re primed, we proceed to carry that association, albeit subconsciously, with us as we shop.

The prices for the flowers, as for all the fresh fruits and vegetables,
are scrawled in chalk on fragments of black slate, which is a tradition of outdoor European marketplaces. It’s as if, or so we are meant to believe, the farmer or grower pulled up in front of Whole Foods just this morning, unloaded his produce (chalk and primitive slate boards in hand), then hopped back in his flatbed truck and motored back upstate to his country farm. The dashed-off scrawl also suggests the price changes daily or even throughout the day, just as it might at a roadside farm stand or local market. But in fact, most of the produce was shipped in by plane days ago, its price set and fixed at the Whole Foods corporate headquarters. Not only does the price not change daily, but what may
look
like chalk on the board is actually indelible; the signs have been mass-produced in a factory. In industry parlance, marketers use the term “Farmgate” to refer to this strategy of planting a (false) image of a real, all-natural working farm in our minds, and “Factorygate” to refer to the fact that most everything we see before us is actually manufactured by a large corporation.

These same “Farmgate” tactics are behind the coolers of chipped ice planted everywhere you look. Ever notice that there’s ice everywhere in this store? Why? Does hummus really need to be kept ice-cold? What about cucumber-and-yogurt dip? No and no. This ice is another “symbolic”—an unconscious suggestion that what’s before us is bursting with freshness. To our irrational, germ-fearing minds, tortillas, hot dogs, pickles, and other nonperishables must be fresher—and thus safer to eat—when they’re sitting on a bed of ice, especially when the soda or juice perspires a little, a phenomenon the industry dubs “sweat” (the refrigerators in most juice and milk aisles are deliberately kept at the exact temperature needed for this “sweating” to occur). Similarly, for years now supermarkets have been sprinkling select vegetables with regular dew drops of water—a trend that came out of Denmark. Why? Like ice displays, those sprinklerlike drops serve as a symbolic, albeit a bogus one, of freshness and purity. (Ironically, that same dewy mist makes the vegetables rot more quickly than they would otherwise. So much for perception versus reality.)

When carrying out experiments on consumer behavior across the world, I often ask people a truly obnoxious question: would they mind emptying the contents of their fridge and freezer onto the kitchen table,
then, one by one, ranking and replacing the items depending on how “fresh” they perceive the products as being?

You would be surprised at how the extraordinarily persuasive effects of advertising play into people’s perceptions of freshness. The one product consistently at the top of people’s lists? Heinz ketchup. That’s right, consumers rank bottled ketchup as being fresher than lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and so on. “Why Heinz?” I always ask, noting that the expiration date on the bottle isn’t for another six months. “You’re right,” the majority reply after a moment. “I have no idea why I put that there.”

So what’s behind this bizarre impression that ketchup is fresh? It’s all in the way it’s marketed. Heinz subtly plays up the “tomato-ness” of ketchup, with its deep red color—the shade of a picked-right-off-the-vine beefsteak tomato—even though it’s actually made from tomato concentrate. Moreover, Heinz does not, in fact, have to be refrigerated once the seal is broken, as we are led to believe. That’s yet another illusion meant to trick us into thinking the product is fresh.

My extensive work for McDonald’s shows that symbolics like these can alter our perception of everything from freshness to value or even quality. I once helped McDonald’s incorporate symbolics of freshness in its restaurants throughout Europe. We painted green leaves on the insides of the lamps and even went so far as to display fresh tomatoes and vegetables behind glass displays. In France, McDonald’s went so far as to transform its fabled logo from yellow to a dark, leafy green. And trust me, it worked.

Another powerful “symbolic” of purity and freshness? Fruit. In the juice world, it’s a general rule of thumb that the more fruit a manufacturer displays on the side of the juice carton, the greater will be our perception of freshness. Note the spill of kiwis, oranges, mangoes, strawberries, and raspberries that blanket most juice cartons. Would it surprise you to find out that many of these blends contain only the tiniest trace amounts of the more expensive, exotic fruits like kiwi and mango, and are typically more water and sugar than actual fruit juice? (By the way, even though you might think of brands like Dole, Minute Maid, Just Juice, and Odwalla as “natural” brands, in fact they are owned by Coca-Cola, while Pepsi owns Tropicana. And guess who has a true monopoly on the entire category of fruit juices, not to mention
milk, buttermilk, and lemonade? A Swedish conglomerate called Tetra Pak, the global manufacturer of those rectangular plastic containers in which our juices and milks are packaged.)

This reminds me of the time a couple of decades ago when I was asked to develop a “cheese ball” snack—a round version of Cheetos. On my preliminary package design, I placed five cheese balls in a minimalist, Stonehenge-like pattern. The person who hired me had a fit. “Who would buy only five cheese balls?” he asked. “We need to see tons of cheese balls on that package!” Over the years I’ve realized how right he was, and across all categories, too. I redesigned the package to show seemingly hundreds of those cheese balls. Why? Because it seduces us into thinking we are getting that much more in the package. This may have nothing to do with freshness (after all, even the smartest marketers out there would be hard-pressed to fool any consumer into thinking that Cheetos are remotely fresh), but it goes to show why, despite the minimal amount of actual fruit inside most fruit juices, their containers picture a veritable cornucopia of kiwis, mangoes, and so on.

Speaking of fruit, you may think a banana is just a banana, but it’s not. Dole and other banana growers have made the creation of a banana into a mini science, in part to manipulate perceptions of freshness. In fact, they’ve issued a “banana guide” to greengrocers, illustrating the various color stages a banana can attain during its life cycle. Each color represents the sales potential for the banana in question. For example, sales records show that bananas with Pantone color 13-0858 (otherwise known as Vibrant Yellow) are less likely to sell than bananas with Pantone color 12-0752 (also called Buttercup), which is one grade warmer, visually, and seems to imply a riper, fresher fruit. Companies like Dole have analyzed the sales effects of all varieties of color and, as a result, plant their crops under conditions most ideal to creating the right “color.” And as for apples? Believe it or not, my research found that while it may
look
fresh, the average apple you see in the supermarket is actually fourteen months old.

Knowing that even just the suggestion of fruit evokes such powerful associations of health, freshness, and cleanliness, brands across all category lines have gone fruity on us, infusing everything from shampoos to hair conditioners to baby soaps to bottled waters to nicotine chewing
gum to lip balm to teas to vitamins to cosmetics and even to furniture polish with pineapple, oranges, peaches, passion fruit, and banana fragrances, engineered in a chemist’s laboratory, of course. Mango-papaya conditioner, anyone? Lemon lip gloss? Orange-scented Pine-Sol? Will these products get your hair or your floors any cleaner than the regular versions? Of course not. But the scent of fruit evokes strong associations of cleanliness for germophobic consumers, and that’s really all that matters. We’ve reached a point where our shampoos are so fruity we almost want to guzzle them down.

Shampoo companies also realize that the sheer volume of bubbles a shampoo generates can evoke associations of freshness and cleanliness—bubbles signal that the shampoo is strong and invigorating (just as the “sting” of an aftershave or the bubbles hitting our throat when we down sparkling water “inform” us that the product is fresh and uncontaminated). Some companies I know have even gone so far as to create a chemical that accelerates the appearance and quality of bubbles, to make unwitting bathers feel as though their hair is getting cleaner faster. I call this a “perceived justification symbol”—a moment designed to reassure us that we made the right purchase (and, of course, ensure that we’ll stay loyal to that product in the future).

Similarly, ever wonder why Aquafresh toothpaste looks the way it does? There’s a good reason each squirt is a rainbow of colors. The white is meant to be a symbolic for whiter teeth, the red a symbolic for protecting the gums, and the blue a symbolic for fresh breath. And it works. In one experiment, I asked two groups of consumers to try two different versions of the toothpaste—one the regular version and one that had been dyed just one color. Sure enough, the group using the paste with the three colors not only reported that the toothpaste worked 73 percent better, they even claimed they believed that their teeth looked whiter.