Brandwashed (18 page)

What exactly is this manly item? It’s an iron.

Sure, sex in advertising may be one of the oldest tricks in the book, but from what I’ve seen in my work, one thing couldn’t be more clear: whether it’s by probing our deepest and darkest sexual fantasies, by engineering nostalgia for the sexual heyday of our youth, or by covertly selling the promise to make us more sexually attractive, today’s marketers and advertisers have all kinds of new ways of tapping into our most basic and primal human desire—and making a whole lot of money in the process.

I
n 1931, a dedicated bird-watcher named
Edward Selous started pondering a curious phenomenon he’d been observing for years. How, Selous wondered, could so many species of birds—rooks, gulls, lapwings, geese, starlings, you name it—rise from a field in complete synchrony, as though doing a choreographed dance? Everyone knew birds aren’t that bright and have no way of communicating with one another, so how could they possibly coordinate their actions in such a seamless manner? It must be mind reading, he concluded. At the time, no one gave Selous’s ESP theory credence. After all, he had no proof, and the scientific community then, just as now, preferred facts over speculation. Still, back in the 1930s no one could come up with a better explanation.

As it later turned out, Selous wasn’t completely crazy. The birds’ behavior
was
the result of a mind meld of sorts. The birds weren’t reading one another’s minds, of course, but they were, in a sense, acting as if they shared one collective brain. This phenomenon isn’t unique to birds. The animal kingdom is rife with examples of it. Even
termites—yes, those nasty little creatures that were put on earth to gnaw down structures and cause the foundations of houses to buckle—are capable of a collective consciousness. To put it not so kindly, a single termite is
spectacularly dumb; its brain doesn’t contain enough neurons even to conceive of what it’s doing. Yet a
million
termites have enough collective brainpower to build giant, complex structures, some as high as thirty feet tall: the termite mound. The question is how.

It wasn’t until the late 1950s that science came up with an explanation. When biologist
Pierre-Paul Grasse observed many groups of termites during the early phase of building, he found that each little fellow appeared to be carrying out three simple steps.

First, the termite would chew a mouthful of earth and mold it into a pellet with its saliva.

Second, the termite would wander around directionlessly, and as soon as it stumbled upon an elevated area, it would dump the pellet, just as a golden retriever might drop a spit-covered tennis ball.

Third, the termite would repeat steps one and two over and over.

It’s hard to comprehend how these dim-witted insects can eventually construct a giant, well-designed structure through this achingly slow, seemingly random and uncoordinated process. But they can. The more earth pellets the termites drop into place, the higher the ground becomes. And the higher the ground becomes, the greater the chance that all the other aimlessly meandering termites will bash into it, allowing it to grow even more. When these few mounds, or pillars, reach a certain height, Grasse explains, “a new behavior kicks in and the termites start to build arches between them. The whole elaborate termite mound with its chambers and tunnels and sophisticated air circulation channels arises from the work of thousands of termites with no central coordination at all, just a few simple rules.”
¹
The name Grasse gave to this bizarre phenomenon was “cooperation without communication.”

In short, no big-cheese termite queen issued any orders. There was no strategic planning, no formal organizing intelligence telling the termites what to do. They simply created a world by operating as if they were tiny, singular cells in one enormous termite brain.
²

The process can be explained by a theory known as “complex adaptive systems,” which says that many systems in nature (like birds taking simultaneous flight or termites painstakingly constructing a colossal mound) are inherently “emergent” and “nondeterministic,” which means, in plain English, that the whole is mightier than the sum of its
parts and that you can’t predict the collective results simply by looking at the individual actions (like a single termite holding a saliva-drenched bit of sand or one bird about to take flight). According to this theory, although the process might be invisible to the human eye,
termites are actually able to intuit “when and where to add to the structure by maintaining a high degree of connectivity to others in the colony.”
³
In other words, only by observing and mimicking the behavior of its neighbors can a termite figure out what it should be doing.

We as consumers, I’ve observed time and again, act in much the same way. Just like those birds and those termites, we, too, are wired with a collective consciousness in that we size up what those around us are doing and modify our own actions and behaviors accordingly. In a 2008 experiment conducted by researchers at Leeds University, groups of people were instructed to walk aimlessly around a large hall, without conversing with one another. But first the researchers gave just a few of the people detailed instructions on where, precisely, they should walk. When they observed the resulting behavior, they found that no matter how large or small the group, everyone in it blindly followed that handful of people who appeared to have some idea where they were going. As the scientists put it, “(The) research suggests that humans flock like sheep and birds, subconsciously following a minority of individuals,”
⁴
and that it takes a mere 5 percent of “informed individuals” to influence the direction of a crowd of up to two hundred people. The other 95 percent of us trail along without even being aware of it.
⁵

According to Professor
Jens Krause, who engineered the study, “What’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision, despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another.” Just like those termites, “in most cases the participants didn’t realize they were being led by others.”
⁶

Want more evidence that it takes only a few people in a group to steer the direction of others around them? In a study conducted in Cologne, Germany, a crowd of two hundred people clustered in the center of a large circle that was numbered like a clock. Researchers then handed out slips of paper to ten “informed individuals” that read, “Go to nine o’clock, but do not leave the group.” The others were given no specific instructions, just notes that read, “Stay with the group.” For a
while, the group seemed to mix and mingle fairly randomly. But soon enough, the “informed individuals” had led all the others to the designated nine o’clock target.
⁷

In 2007, the
Washington Post
rolled out an intriguing and now-famous experiment. The newspaper hired one of the best musicians in the world to play a $3.5 million Stradivarius violin on a subway platform during morning rush hour in America’s capital city. Most if not all commuters walked right by and ignored him.
Just another downtrodden street musician after my loose change
, they undoubtedly thought. The violinist’s final take for the entire morning: $32.17—just a fraction of what a single ticket to one of his performances would cost. On the face of it, it might seem these commuters were just philistines who wouldn’t know musical talent if it hit them over the head. But I believe this was an example of our collective consciousness, our herd mentality, at work. Think about it. One harried commuter ignores the performer (maybe she was in a particular hurry that morning or is tone-deaf), and so the commuter behind her, assuming there must not be anything to see here, rushes past him as well. So does the person behind her, and the ten people behind him, and so on and so forth until the entire mass of morning commuters is brushing past a world-class performer whom, under other circumstances, they might have happily paid hundreds of dollars to see perform at the Kennedy Center or Carnegie Hall.
⁸

Standing out, or being different from everyone else, causes most of us great discomfort. Sometimes even literally. I’ll never forget a Unilever focus group I once observed, where consumers were discussing shampoos. As soon as the moderator brought up the topic of itching, everyone in the room began scratching their scalps. Did they all suddenly develop a head of lice? Of course not. They were simply, and utterly unconsciously, mimicking the behaviors of others in the room.

Over the years, I’ve noticed another interesting phenomenon. When you show people a stack of photos from a party or an album of pictures just uploaded onto Facebook, the first thing they do is pause and look at the picture of themselves. Not so surprising—we’re a vain species. But what’s the second thing they do? Pause and look at the pictures of
people surrounding them
. Why? Because once they’ve taken note of how they appear, they need to analyze how they appear compared
to others: Do they look as though they belong? Are they making the right impression? Are others looking on at them approvingly? This is telling. It shows that we as human beings never assess ourselves, our behaviors, or our decisions in a vacuum; we assess them
in relation to everyone else
.

The point is, we’re a social species, wired to display this kind of herd behavior. Even fourteen-month-old
babies show evidence of it. In a series of studies, researchers trained fourteen-month-olds to play with five distinctive toys. These same children later demonstrated their newly won toy-playing skills to other fourteen-month-old children at a day care, children who’d never seen these particular toys before. Two days later, one of the researchers brought the same toys to each of these second children’s homes. Without hesitation, the children began playing with the toys
in the exact same way
they’d witnessed at the day-care center. The conclusion? Fourteen-month-old babies automatically imitate behaviors carried out by peers and bring what they’ve learned home with them, even forty-eight hours later.
⁹

There is ample research to show that we instinctively look to the behavior of others to inform the decisions we make—everything from which way we should walk, to what music we should listen to, to which kind of car we should drive. It seems, in short, that we instinctively believe that others know more about what we want than we ourselves do.

Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon. It’s called
peer pressure.

When we hear those two words, we tend to sigh inwardly, as deeply and darkly as we did when we were adolescents. What a loaded and even faintly patronizing expression, conjuring up memories of teenage insecurity, acne, and trying to fit into a small universe where a phantom classmate hisses “C’mon, just one of these won’t hurt you” into your ear. While that kind of old-fashioned peer pressure certainly exists, that’s not exactly the kind I’m talking about here. I’m talking about a more implicit kind that taps into our primitive human desire to be accepted—those evolutionary instincts not to be left out or exiled from the human tribe. As you’re about to read, this implicit peer pressure is a far more insidious kind, and companies and marketers are taking advantage of its persuasive powers in ways you couldn’t even imagine.

A
uthor and social psychologist Robert Cialdini once demonstrated the persuasive power of our peers in a fascinating experiment. Several hundred volunteers took their seats in a room, purportedly to fill out a survey. But that was only a distraction from the real purpose of Cialdini’s experiment, which had to do with how our behavior is swayed by those around us. A large glass jar of cookies stood prominently on a nearby desk, filled to the brim with deliciousness.

“Would you like a cookie?” one of the researchers asked the survey takers. Approximately one fifth of the volunteers took him up on his offer. (How very self-disciplined of them.) In the second stage of the experiment, the research team surreptitiously removed most of the cookies from the jar, so that it looked as though others had already taken one. Still, only about one fifth of respondents reached for a cookie.

In the final stage of the experiment, however, a researcher sat behind a desk beside a large glass cookie jar. But this time, before the researcher could ask volunteers if they wanted a cookie or not, a stranger ambled into the room, removed the glass lid, took a cookie in front of everyone in the room, and walked out again. This time, when the survey takers were asked if anyone wanted a cookie, nearly every single person took one.

This experiment revealed something that advertisers and marketers have long been instinctively aware of: humans want what other humans want. And the more visible other people’s demand is, the more we want what they are having. In the cookie jar experiment, people didn’t want more cookies when they thought that others
might
have taken a cookie. But when they actually
saw
another person take a cookie, their brains said,
Gimme!