TRICK NO. 2Credit card companies know what kind of consumer you are before they ever make you an offer. If you buy smoke detectors, you never miss a payment. They love college students, because even though they often pay off debts, they take a long time to do it — which means more interest.
In so many ways, it would seem ever more difficult to separate the typical American consumer — battered by the Great Recession, bloated jobless numbers, relentless spikes in foreclosures and food stamps — from what little money they have. And yet at no time in history has it ever been simpler to do so, with companies employing the most sinister methods.
“That’s is why I did this book,” says Martin Lindstrom, author of “Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy.”
Lindstrom, a marketing genius who was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2009, says that his experience in the field and research into new strategies has led him to become something of an apostate.
“We have gone too far,” he says. “It’s time to draw a line in the sand — not just to inform the marketers, but to inform consumers so that they can push back.”
We spend nearly every conscious moment being pitched and prodded: at home, on our commute, at work, at sports arenas, the movies, bars, plays, restaurants, clubs, on our phones. Most of us likely consider ourselves sophisticated shoppers, familiar with tactics such as impulse buys and product placement, yet we’re manipulated into making nine out of every 10 purchases.
Despite such success rates, the industry has come to regard these effective techniques as rudimentary and antiquated. Today, the retailers that you patronize, whether brick-and-mortar or online, can predict what product you’re going to buy and when, before it even occurs to you that you’re out of Aquafresh, or will need two rolls of Bounty in about a week.
As described in the new book, “The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future — Just Enough,” the US government and multinational corporations are building super-computers that mimic the human brain, which is wired to swiftly synthesize information in order to predict what will happen within seconds.
“Predicting customer and competitive behavior,” write authors Vivek Ranadive and Kevin Maney, “will be a key differentiator in 21st century business.”
Dystopian and Orwellian as this all may sound, no one is safe — not even the unborn. That, after all, is a future consumer.
Lindstrom first became aware of what’s called “priming” while conducting research in Asia — Korea, specifically. He focused on one of that nation’s biggest shopping mall chains, which was particularly popular with pregnant women and young mothers. Why? A few years ago, this mall, while trying to keep their shoppers in stores longer, began pumping in smells and sounds that pregnant women might find soothing — everything from Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder to the aroma of cherries to music that these women themselves would have heard in utero. (Science has since determined that fetuses as young as six months are sensitive and receptive to outside stimuli.)
At that point, it was really just an experiment: “Marketers don’t know” everything about human behavior, he says. “They have hunches.”
To Lindstrom’s shock and distress, not only did these tactics work on expectant mothers; once the women returned to the mall with their newborns, the babies would stop fussing.
“I interviewed the moms,” Lindstrom says. “And they all said, ‘I feel so relaxed here, and my baby is so calmed.’ ”
Diaper companies and formula manufacturers dispensing their products to new moms in maternity wards seems a transparent, almost noble marketing technique in comparison. What’s happening in Korea is so stealth it’s verging on Huxley-esque science fiction: the careful cultivation of an in-utero consumer, primed to have product preferences before even speech develops.
“It’s very difficult to prove,” Lindstrom says. “These techniques are only around three years old, and no one has really been aware of them before.”
Similar experiments with priming babies in utero have been conducted in the UK, he says, and he believes its emergence in the US is inevitable.
On the whole, however, the US remains the most accomplished and advanced when marketing to babies and toddlers.
A few examples: Maclaren strollers branded with colors and logos from Dylan’s Candy Bar. The Shell oil logo appears on LEGO toys. Maybe you or your brother had a little Hess oil truck growing up. Audi manufactures branded teddy bears. The iPhone, which can confound adults over 60 and yet is mastered by the pre-verbal, has age-targeted apps such as Peek-a-Boo, Baby Fun! and Infant Arcade. If a child recognizes a brand by 18 months, chances are that’s a customer for life. By the time they hit the age of 3, toddlers can recognize 100 brands and are a $20 billion-a-year market, half of that generated in the US alone.
It’s equally important that marketers successfully target these mothers, since the brands they buy — dish detergent, garbage bags, orange juice, soda, water, etc. — will most likely be “handed down” to their children, who develop brand loyalty to the stuff they grew up consuming.
(By the way, just about everything you buy — from bottled water to lipstick — is produced by about five major companies. Pepsi owns Tropicana, Mountain Dew, 7Up, SoBe Lifewater and Aquafina, and in 2007 was forced to truthfully brand the latter as tap water. Coke owns Minute Maid, Hi-C, Dasani and Vitamin Water, among hundreds of other brands. L’Oreal owns over 20 brands, including Lancome and Maybelline. Estee Lauder owns 25, Prescriptives, M.A.C., Origins and $135-per-ounce Creme de la Mer among them. The denim used by high-end brands for $200 jeans is often the same stock used by the Gap.)
And, in a feedback loop of consumption, children largely determine what their mothers buy; 75% of all unplanned food purchases by moms, for example, are made to placate a nagging child.
As for food shopping: In the main, it’s a two-tiered scam. First, there’s the making and marketing of processed foods; manufacturers are allowed to legally claim they’re “natural” when the opposite is true. Much processed food contains additives that trigger dopamine receptors in the brain, causing cravings for even more helpings while not ever allowing you to feel full, spurring you to buy again and again. (Similarly, Lindstrom reports that the urban legend about some lip balms is true: They contain salicylic acid, which actually exacerbates chapped lips. These companies are literally your drug dealer.)
Organic foods and their purveyors are nearly as criminal. As progressive and gratifying as it may feel walking into one of the major big-box shops — making your ethically responsible purchases and sacrificing lower price points to do so — all those organic fruits, cage-free eggs and steroid-free beef slabs aren’t much better than what you’d find at the bodega.
That riot of allegedly fresh, organic, super-healthy food, nesting so beautifully on ice, isn’t coming from small family-run farms, which have pretty much been decimated by agribusiness anyway. It’s been flown in days if not weeks ago. And that richly-colored produce isn’t the result of super-pure soil — those bananas have been cultivated to grow skin that matches Pantone color 12-0752, or “Vibrant Yellow,” which is warmest and sells best. The average age of a supermarket apple, according to Lindstrom’s research, is 14 months.
The second tier of the food shopping scam: the design and engineering of grocery stores themselves. You, the sorry consumer, are operating maybe one level above Jack Nicholson in the topiary maze at the end of “The Shining.”
“The average woman spends eight years of her life in the supermarket,” Lindstrom says. “It’s depressing.”
All the more so since much of that time she’s held there subliminally: by tiny tiles and mini-bumps in the floor that slow down carts, by items that are constantly stocked elsewhere, in order to “kill” her shopping list and prompt impulse buys; by installing shelves with rounded corners, which actually trigger the shopper to walk around and around.
“If the supermarket industry can extend the stay of each female shopper by 15 seconds,” Lindstrom says, “that’s $300 million more annually.”
Other tricks that Lindstrom uncovered while researching his book: Those paper strips wrapped around the drinking glasses in your hotel room? Meant to make you feel confident that they’ve been freshly washed; they haven’t. Retail and furniture shops lay thick carpeting in strategically placed areas, because studies show that once you step on a rug, you stop moving. Also, their rugs are made with longer and thicker threads, which successfully slow you down.
Retailers usually stock expensive items next to mid-priced items next to cheap ones, and they’ll place the one they want you to buy on the left, because most people will grab that item first, with their right hand — this is just what we do, no one knows why. But sooner or later, no doubt, big business will figure that out.
The most overwhelming threat to our autonomy, of course, is what’s known in the industry as “data mining.” Every time you make a purchase with a credit card, or visit the ATM, or log on to your computer, you’re providing a global network of industries with your highly specific tastes, spending patterns, and debt load. Your multinational bank and the people at Crate & Barrel know whether you’re single, married or divorced; have children, and if so, how many and how old they are; if you’ve got a sick parent or a second job, how likely you are to pay your bills on time.
The biggest indicator for the last one, by the way, isn’t so much your credit rating as the kinds of things you buy, they’ve found: People who purchase carbon monoxide detectors, or soft-pads to prevent furniture from scuffing the floor, reliably pay their bills on time. People who buy chrome ornaments for the hoods of their cars? Chronically late.
The biggest aggregators of data about you are the very companies most Americans feel they can’t live without: Facebook, Google and Apple. Using Apple software — and even if you don’t own an Apple computer, chances are you use iTunes — allows them to mine your data. Google has become so surgically precise that they can tell which of their users mean “nice,” as in pleasant, or “Nice,” as in the French resort town, in an unpunctuated e-mail. Liking movies or music or art exhibits on Facebook? You’re giving away free advertising of the most valuable kind — studies show that, aside from fear, the greatest motivating factor in purchasing is the endorsement of someone you know and trust.
And data mining, say the authors of both books, presents the greatest danger. The regulations are very thin, and, for the bulk of us, we cannot help what we divulge of ourselves. It’s just taken, without our consent.
“There’s a whole generation that’s OK with data mining, because they’ve never known a world without it,” Lindstrom says. “Germany has the hardest data mining laws in the world, and it’s no coincidence — they know the consequences of too much information in the wrong hands.”
The American consumer, on the other hand, “is about to give up,” he says. “And that’s really a problem.”