Brandwashed (20 page)

These kinds of stamps of approval can even influence our choice of alcoholic beverage. When the Beverage Testing Institute dubbed Grey Goose the “best-tasting
vodka in the world,”
Sidney Frank, the marketing genius behind the brand, not only promptly created giant ads boasting this new best-tasting-in-the-world status, he “indoctrinated” both hundreds of distributors and somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty
thousand bartenders with that very information so that anytime a customer came into a bar or liquor store and asked what the best-tasting vodka was, they would be told it was Grey Goose.
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The result? By 2004 the company had sold 1.5 million cases and Sidney Frank had sold the company to Bacardi for a cool $2 billion.

Whether it’s the world’s best-tasting vodka, the best-selling novel of the week, or the highest-grossing movie of the year, you better believe that companies are very deliberately using best-seller lists to persuade us to buy what “everyone else likes.”
Amazon, the online bookseller (and increasingly, the online seller of just about
everything
), takes this an ingenious step further by actually e-mailing customers to let them know that their fellow purchasers of a certain item have also purchased some new item—and thus that they might like that item, too. This is a case not only of baldly manufacturing
peer pressure but also of
data mining, a topic we’ll be looking at in a later chapter.

An intriguing study published in the journal
Science
shows just how well this can work. The researchers invited twenty-seven teenagers to visit a Web site where they could sample and download songs for free. Some of the teens were told what songs previous visitors had downloaded, whereas others weren’t. Indeed, those told what songs their peers had chosen tended to download those very songs. But part two of the study was even more telling. This time, the teens were divided into eight groups and told only what had been downloaded by people from their own group. The researchers found that not only did the teens tend to choose the songs that had been previously downloaded by members of their groups, but the songs that became “hits” varied across all the groups. The implications were clear: whether or not a song became a “hit” was determined
solely by whether it was perceived as already being popular
.
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This is what I mean about the two-tier system: whatever gains an early advantage in popularity will win. This may not seem so bad at first, but look at it this way: if we’re duped into buying something just because it’s popular (even if it isn’t), think about all the great books or songs or CDs we might be missing simply because they weren’t on that “top ten” list.

But this still doesn’t explain precisely
why
our buying decisions are
so unduly influenced by a brand’s supposed popularity. So the authors of the study decided to use an fMRI to see what was
really
going on in these impressionable teenagers’ brains when they succumbed to peer pressure. They had twelve- to seventeen-year-olds rate fifteen-second clips of songs downloaded from MySpace. Then they revealed to some the songs’ overall popularity. The results showed that when the participants’ own ratings of the music matched up with what they had been told about the song (e.g., if they liked a popular song), there tended to be activity in the caudate nucleus, an area of the brain connected to rewards. When there was a mismatch, however (e.g., the teen liked the song but discovered it was unpopular), areas associated with anxiety lit up. The researchers concluded that “this mismatch anxiety motivates people to switch their choices in the direction of the consensus, suggesting that this is a major force behind conformity observed in music tastes in teenagers.”
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Early popularity is so closely tied to a brand or product’s ultimate success that even Hollywood is leveraging the predictive power of the teeming hordes. According to
New Scientist
, one of the most widespread new techniques for predicting the box-office performance of a film is by using something called “artificial markets.” On one, dubbed “the
Hollywood Stock Exchange,” movie fans can buy and sell virtual shares in celebrities and in forthcoming or recently released films. This virtual market, which operates with a virtual currency called Hollywood Dollars, uses these predictions to create a stock rating reflecting the aggregate view of each film’s popularity or likely popularity (obviously, people only buy virtual shares in things they expect to be hits). “This is currently the gold standard in the industry for predicting likely box office receipts,” says Bernardo Huberman at HP Laboratories in Palo Alto,”
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and amazingly, the method has been so accurate that it’s now even being used to predict the outcomes of political campaigns.

Of course, we aren’t always consciously aware that it’s perceived popularity that’s driving our preferences. Recently, I asked a focus group of ten female
Louis Vuitton fans, “Why do you love the brand so much?” Each one spoke of the quality of the zipper, the leather, and finally, the brand’s timelessness. I was skeptical. So we took these same
ten women and scanned their brains using fMRI. In each case, when the women were shown pictures of Louis Vuitton products, the Brodmann area 10, the region of the brain that’s activated when respondents are observing something they perceive as “cool,” lit up. The women had rationalized their purchases by telling themselves that they liked the brand for its good quality, but their brains knew that they really chose it for its “
coolness.”

The fact that even our brains can’t seem to bear for us to be left out seems to suggest that whether it’s the “hit” song, the “it” gift, or the “in” designer handbag, in the end what we buy really has little to do with what we want and more to do with what we think we
should
want.
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Even marketers themselves fall for this. For instance, every advertising agency “planner” (a term used in most European ad agencies for the person who conducts consumer research) of my acquaintance owns a fancy Moleskine leather notebook. They don’t give these out in orientation; it’s simply become an unspoken rule that every ad agency planner has to own and use one. If you don’t, it implies you’re on the outside, not a member of the “in crowd.”

These marketers make their living dreaming up ways to prey on consumers’ fear of being left out, but subconsciously they (or may I say
we
) are just as vulnerable to
peer pressure as the rest of us.

I
n an earlier chapter, I wrote about how, in our society, cell phones and smart phones have fed a fear of being alone or of being perceived as alone; how, paradoxically, our ability to be constantly connected with others has ignited the fear we have of being unpopular and even unloved.

The Internet, and in particular social-networking sites, have also revealed the extent to which many of us fear that our opinion, and very existence, might not matter. Just as the ability to be connected all the time gives rise to the fear that we are actually alone, the ability to comment, pontificate, and broadcast ourselves all the time gives rise to the fear that no one actually cares what we have to say. I believe it’s this
insecurity, this feeling of being left out, that’s contributed to one of the most contagious social phenomena of our times:
Facebook.

First, a few facts and figures about Facebook. As of 2011, Facebook has close to seven hundred million active users, which translates into 22 percent of everyone on the Internet, and it’s still growing by 5 percent a month.
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According to
Time
, “If the website were granted terra firma, it would be the world’s third largest country by population, two-thirds bigger than the U.S.”
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Fifty percent of those users log on to Facebook at least once a day, while more than thirty-five million users update their statuses daily, creating a total of over sixty million daily status updates.
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But the question is, how did Facebook become the global phenomenon it is today? How did it rise above all other social-networking sites out there (and believe me, there are plenty) to become the one online universe we simply “had” to be a part of? Quite simply because it’s where everyone is. It’s where invitations are sent, party pictures posted, messages exchanged. Increasingly, it’s also where we conduct our social lives. Who wouldn’t feel left out of a world where more than twenty-five billion pieces of information are shared a month and where photos are added at a speed of nearly one billion unique images a week?
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To
not
be on Facebook would guarantee complete social isolation; it would be like moving to a hut in the Shetland Islands.

Most people are more or less aware of this. But what is less known is the extent to which companies are leveraging the persuasive power of connections on Facebook to cleverly advertise and market their products. Take, for example, the feature on Facebook known as the “like” button, formerly known as the “become a fan” button. Originally, people used this to “like” their friends’ status updates; it was a way to indicate our approval of the fact that, say, Jenny had just eaten a ham-and-cheese sandwich or Billy had had a great time in Aruba. But increasingly, the site has been encouraging users to “like” their favorite bands, books, movies, brands, and products—so successfully that the site processes a staggering one hundred million clicks of the “like” button daily.
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Do you happen to enjoy the TV show
Friday Night Lights
? If you go to that show’s Facebook page, it will tell you how many friends of yours also “like” the show. Wait, Erica likes
Friday Night Lights
, too? You think Erica is pretty cool and have now received what marketers
call “social proof” that it’s okay to like the show, giving you a mandate to recommend the show to
your
best friends, so before you know it, you click the “like” button—which has conveniently popped right up on the bottom of the page—too. This will then show up in the newsfeed for all your friends to see, and they in turn may well reach for the “like” button, and so on and so forth until any Facebook user who comes across a mention of the show will spy a little message popping up saying, “Bob and Fred and Martin and 712,563 Facebook users like
Friday Night Lights
.” This is peer-pressure advertising at its best, and it works. According to
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, marketers have known this for a really long time. “I’m much more likely to do [or buy] something that’s recommended by a friend,” she’s been quoted as saying.
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Facebook isn’t the only social-media site out there that’s making guerrilla marketers and advertisers out of us, either. Take
Foursquare, the popular location-based social-networking game we talked about earlier. Thanks to portable GPS apps, it knows where you are at any given time, so all you have to do is tap the Foursquare app on your iPhone or BlackBerry and it will automatically show you a list of nearby restaurants, bars, stores, and shops. But this is more than just a real-time, location-tracking version of Zagat. The point of the game is to “check in” to as many of these establishments as you can, whereupon Foursquare will automatically broadcast your whereabouts to other Foursquare users, and you can also elect to have your
Twitter or Facebook feeds immediately updated when you check in to a restaurant, bar, café, or store (which most users do). You earn points for each place you check in, and the user who visits an establishment most is dubbed its “mayor.” Not only is this game surprisingly addictive (as we discussed in
chapter 3
), and not only does it get you to regularly spend money at establishments you might not have otherwise frequented, but because it broadcasts your location to all your fellow Foursquare players, Facebook friends, and Twitter followers, it provides a boatload of free advertising for every establishment you set foot in. As Twitter founder
Evan Williams has said, “Many of the great businesses of the next decade will be about making information about our [consumer] behaviors more visible.”
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I
t’s well known that our culture glorifies the teenage years—just look at how many contemporary movies and TV shows revolve around high school. But rosy retrospection aside, who over the age of thirty would want to relive that torment of uncertainty, self-consciousness . . . and
peer pressure? While it’s clear by now that peer pressure exists well beyond the high school cafeteria, it’s also true that there is no demographic more susceptible to peer pressure than teens and
tweens (and it’s worth noting here that adolescents today spend five times more money than their parents did at the same age). Why? Largely because teenagers don’t know who they truly are yet, so they sport the brands they do as a backup form of ID. In 2010 a longitudinal study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that our brains don’t become fully mature until age twenty-five (and sometimes not until later), indicating that in our teen years, our cognitive abilities, and thus our sense of self, are still miles from their final development.

Studies have shown that when tweens ask for a pair of Hollister jeans or the latest hot Wii game for Christmas, they’re asking for more than the latest, hippest product; what they’re really asking for is a dose of self-esteem. Deborah Roedder John at the University of Minnesota recruited 250 kids ages eight through eighteen and asked them to select among one hundred words and images and create a collage answering the question “What makes me happy?” When she looked at the results, she found that the children with higher self-esteem chose words that represented nonmaterial activities and achievements, like getting good grades or skateboarding with friends, whereas the children with lower levels of self-esteem chose possessions, like new clothes or an iPod.
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