Brandwashed (10 page)

Back at Whole Foods, as I round the corner, a decidedly nonfruity smell hits me. Seafood! There are whole fish, eyes, scales, and all, laid out on yet another cold bed of “symbolic” ice, again suggesting that the fish in this store were reeled in just this morning. But the fish you actually buy sit behind a glass counter in individual plastic containers and have already been beheaded, deboned, and pared down to a more
manageable size—you’ll never actually take home one of those four whole fish lying balefully across their ice coffin. In fact, these are probably the only four intact fish in the entire store, and they probably aren’t even fresh at all, as they’ve been lying out there in the open all day, if not longer. Yet again, our brains have been tricked into believing that everything in the store was fished, trucked in, and hand-delivered just this morning.

I was once called in to advise the owner of a Dubai fish market who had attempted to sell frozen fish. At first, very few customers showed any interest. Then the manager decided to place the store’s supply of frozen fish atop coolers of ice cubes. Suddenly (and irrationally), sales of the fish—the
frozen
fish, remember—rose by 74 percent. Why? It was perceived as fresher simply because it was displayed on blocks of ice. Interestingly, in France consumers actually believe frozen foods are “fresher” than fresh fruits and vegetables. I credit an ingenious frozen-food industry for stressing in its marketing and advertising how long it takes fresh produce to make its way from the farm to the production facility to the supermarket to a consumer’s refrigerator. Why, that fresh bunch of spinach could easily be weeks old! Whereas, they inform consumers, frozen food is conserved and preserved on the spot!

A final fish story. A friend of mine once worked on the small island of Tenerife, largest of the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain. He was a fisherman, and his very best customer was a popular local restaurant known as Los Abrigos. But the restaurant owners had specific instructions. Once my friend and the other fishermen had caught their day’s supply of seafood, Los Abrigos’s management asked them to deliver the fish to a small nearby port, where it was then transferred onto a traditional-looking fisherman’s boat (the kind no one, including my friend, uses anymore). When customers would arrive for lunch between noon and 3:00 p.m., the fisherman’s boat would putter into the harbor, and everyone would look on as a grizzled old Spanish fisherman would step out and hand over the fish, ostensibly reeled in just moments earlier, to the waiting restaurant staff. It was all completely staged, but people fell for it, and soon the restaurant had to turn away a daily overflow of customers.

So whether it’s germs or disease or some feared version of a future
self, marketers are amazingly adept at identifying a fear out of the zeitgeist, activating it, amplifying it, and preying on it in ways that hit us at the deepest subconscious level.

As you read on, you’ll learn that fear is far from the only psychological tool companies and marketers are surreptitiously using to persuade us.

Which may be the scariest thing of all.

Y
our cell phone’s ringing! Is it a colleague checking in? News of a canceled meeting? A sick child? A death, a birth, an emergency? Without this lifeline in your hand, where would you be? Lost. Distracted. Cut off. Alone.

I know a man whose iPhone sits in a bedside dock beside him at night. Most nights, he wakes up involuntarily at 1:00 a.m. to check his e-mail. Then again at three. Then again at five. In the morning, his phone awakens him with a soft but audible rendition of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Can’t We Be Friends.” By the time he’s kissed his wife good morning or roused his kids, he’s already sent three text messages, checked his three e-mail accounts, scanned the headlines of the
New York Times
, and watched a highlight reel from last night’s Knicks game on
ESPN.com
. As he gets ready for the day, his phone goes with him everywhere. To the bathroom while he takes his morning shower. Outside when he takes the dog out for a quick walk. While driving to work, he recharges it in the passenger seat, lest the battery run out before he makes it to his office (where he has a backup). As he drives, his GPS app tells him which route has the least traffic. He checks the day’s weather on it, not to mention the temperatures in Paris, New York, and five other cities. At work, he plugs it into his computer. In idle moments, he plays Angry Birds, Tetris, and Super Mario Kart on it. Sometimes he squints to read a book on the Kindle app. He uses his smart phone as a stopwatch, a flashlight, a calculator, a calendar, a camera, a stock checker, a note taker, and more.

More than once he’s misplaced it. At those times he felt as though his very identity had been stripped from him. The feeling, he tells me, was similar to that of a smoker who knows there’s got to be one more cigarette around here somewhere, or a junkie who knows there’s one more fix stashed in a drawer, if only he could find it. And in this behavior he is far from alone. A recent study of two hundred students at Stanford University revealed that 34 percent rated themselves as addicted to their phones, while 32 percent worried they someday would be addicted. The way things are trending, I suspect this number is only going to grow. Think about how many times
you
check your phone throughout the course of the day. Twenty-five? Fifty? Two hundred? Now think about that sick, uneasy feeling you get when you discover that not a soul has called, texted, e-mailed, or written on your Facebook wall (at least not since you last checked five minutes ago). Let me ask you another question: Where do you keep your cell phone when you go to sleep at night? On your nightstand, within arm’s reach? In bed with you, tucked away soundly, inches from your snoring spouse’s pillow? You wouldn’t be alone; as a recent
New York Times
article put it, “After six to eight hours of network deprivation—also known as sleep—people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cell phones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.”
¹

I was once dining at an elegant restaurant in Paris. Two tables away sat an American couple. It was lunchtime. I glanced over as the familiar digital choreography—what I call the “cell phone dance”—got under way. Lowering his head, the man drew his hand to his pants pocket, surreptitiously slid out his phone, and cocked his eyes down at the small, glowing screen. A moment passed. Then the man excused himself and went to the bathroom. I followed him in, simply because I wanted to prove he was there for no other reason than to check his e-mails and texts. I was right. The moment he returned to the table, the woman,
who had undoubtedly taken his absence as an opportunity to check her own phone, rose to use the bathroom herself. I imagine the same routine took place in the ladies’ room (a female executive once told me about a time when she was having lunch with her boss and excused herself to use the bathroom—where she found herself trading text messages with her seated boss).

These days, we’re tapping away at our phones and handhelds while eating breakfast with our families, during our kids’ soccer games, and apparently from the bathrooms of fancy Parisian bistros. Tucking our recharged cell phones into our purses or pockets before leaving the house in the morning has become a ritualized step of arming ourselves against the day. A poll conducted by
USA Today
asked WiFi users how long they could last before they started getting “antsy” about checking their e-mail in-box, instant messages, or social-networking sites. Forty-seven percent replied, “One hour or less.”

I recently conducted an experiment in conjunction with global audio identity experts Elias Arts to identify the fifty most powerful and addictive sounds in the world. The third-place winner? The sound of a vibrating phone. Be it an
iPhone, a BlackBerry, or an Android, there’s no question that the vast majority of us are extremely attached to our phones. But addicted? Really? Isn’t that a bit much?
²

Not really. While it’s true that most of us wouldn’t meet the American Psychological Association’s definition of an addict, some psychologists have argued that smart phones may tap into the same associative learning pathways in the brain that make other compulsive behaviors—like gambling—so addictive.”
³
In other words, when we use our phones, our brains create a powerfully positive associative memory—in effect conditioning us to crave that activity again. Just as with
addiction to drugs or cigarettes or food, the chemical driver of this process is dopamine, that feel-good neurotransmitter. Some psychologists have asserted that when we receive a new e-mail or text, our brains release a shot of dopamine, and thus we learn to associate that pleasurable feeling with the act of checking our phones. So like an alcoholic who craves that euphoric feeling he gets from drinking, we’re left craving that rush we get from seeing that text message pop up.

Still, the theory that behavior like that of my iPhone-obsessed
friend is driven by the same neurological processes as drug or alcohol
addiction remains unproven and controversial. So I decided to conduct an fMRI study to find out whether smart phones—iPhones and BlackBerrys—are really, truly addictive.

With the help of MindSign, a neuromarketing firm based in San Diego, California, whose brain-activating methodology shows companies what consumers are thinking when they’re using products and viewing ads, we enlisted eight males and eight females between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. As the study got under way, researchers screened both audio and video of a ringing and a vibrating iPhone. Researchers then screened these audiovisual images to our volunteers three times in a row.

Were iPhones really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping, or video games?

Two weeks later, the MindSign research team rang me up with the results. First, a straightforward observation: The audio and the video of the iPhone both ringing and vibrating activated both the audio and visual cortices of our study subjects—in other words their brains had visual, not just auditory, associations with the sound of the ring tone. What was more surprising, though, was that there was also a flurry of activation in the brain’s insula—which is connected to feelings of love and compassion.

In short, these participants didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction to their iPhones. What the sights and sounds of a ringing or vibrating cell phone did reveal, however, was that our study subjects
loved
their iPhones; their brains responded to the sound of the phones the same way they would respond to their boyfriend, girlfriend, niece, nephew, or family pet. In short, it may not be addiction in the medical sense, but it is true love.

B
rand and shopping addictions may not be as life-threatening as addictions like alcoholism or drug dependency, but they are very real and, when taken to the extreme, can be very debilitating. Take the case of
Carolyn Longmead, a middle-aged shopaholic secretary from the UK who stole roughly $225,000 over a two-year period from the small electronics store where she worked. Did she use this money for a down payment on a house or to send her kid to college? Nope, she used it to fund her Louis Vuitton, Prada, and Gucci habits (when she was caught, the brand-name clothes, handbags, and shoes bought with the stolen money were enough to fill twenty-seven garbage bags).
⁴
Or the case of Amy Gagner, whose shopping compulsion, says CBS News, caused her to empty out IRAs, stock options, and 401(k)s, all to pay off a $200,000 shopping debt—and who, after spending thirty days at a residential addiction center, now lives for her own safety without a credit card, a checking account, or even a computer.
⁵

A true addiction can be defined as a persistent, uncontrolled reliance on either a behavior or a substance, whether it’s alcohol, a particular food, chocolate, prescription pills, smoking, gambling, shopping, or even sex. Most psychologists would agree that addictions result from a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental factors, though the relative influence of each varies and isn’t precisely known. Today most experts also agree that regardless of its cause or what shape it takes, addiction is, biologically speaking, a brain disease. In other words, it’s “caused by persistent changes in brain structure and function”
⁶
—which goes a long way toward explaining why many addicts are unable to give up their particular poison by sheer willpower alone.

The
Annals of General Psychiatry
defines shopping addiction, or “compulsive or pathological buying (or oniomania),” as “frequent preoccupation with buying or impulses to buy that are experienced as irresistible, intrusive, and/or senseless,” and goes on to say that in order to qualify as a true addiction, “the buying behavior causes marked distress, interferes with social functioning, and often results in financial problems.”
⁷
Based on this widely accepted definition, a Stanford University study estimates that roughly 6 percent of the population, or seventeen million Americans, suffers from a shopping addiction,
⁸
a condition that, according to the authors of the study, typically coincides with other disorders ranging from mood and anxiety to eating disorders to substance abuse.
⁹
A more recent study published in the
Journal of Consumer Research
put the prevalence of shopping addiction at a startlingly high 8.9 percent.
¹⁰