Brandwashed (21 page)

Thanks to the deliberate marketing strategies by purveyors of everything from cigarettes (look at those smiling, laughing, white-toothed smokers surrounded by friends and having a grand old time!) to razors (if you shave with the Venus razor, the ads suggest, you, too, can end up with a hot, hunky boyfriend) these days, many children are socialized to believe they can buy themselves into popularity and acceptance. Approximately 60 percent of the 2,035 teenagers we polled in our national SIS study for this book believed that wearing or owning the right brand
of clothes, gadgets, or cars could help them “buy” happiness. Moreover, compared to adults, teens were more likely to buy famous brands, more likely to believe that having the right clothes, gadgets, and cars could help them become more popular, and more likely to display expensive items such as makeup and perfume conspicuously in their bedrooms and bathrooms. While teens believed that their favorite brands made them feel cool, confident, friendly, self-expressive, creative, and passionate—they couldn’t have cared less about whether a brand actually
did
!—the adults said their favorite brands made them feel more reliable, practical, effective, and—yes—nostalgic. According to a study in the
Journal of Consumer Research
, “Starting at 11 or 12, children begin to understand so much about the complex meanings of products and brands, and that is the exact time when their self-esteem drops. They’re thinking, ‘I don’t think I’m so popular. I don’t think kids like me. How do I solve that? Well, I know that popular kids wear Gap clothes and Nike shoes. So if I wear those, then I’ll be popular.’ ”
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In short, the less confidence or self-esteem they had, the more they seemed to be dependent on brands. (One might even conclude from this that the larger the logo we wear, the less self-esteem we have.) In a way, it makes sense; it’s easier, after all, to fit in with your peer group by buying the same brand of sneakers than it is to transform your personality. According to
Amanda Grum, a psychologist who specializes in play and parenting, peer pressure “is most effective in children aged five to 12, as they are starting to develop their own identity. . . . Belonging is a powerful urge for young children, especially before their sense of self is fully developed. By aligning themselves with an external force, they are able to use the attributes of that object or group to help define themselves.”
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According to a poll of 112,000 teenagers in thirty countries, just under half of all teenagers factor in the brand when making purchase decisions, with Nike, Lacoste, Adidas, Sony, and Apple being the most popular among the boys, and Zara, H&M, and Roxy among the girls. What’s more, just under half of all the teens said if there was no visible branding, they wouldn’t buy an item of clothing at all.
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In a focus group I recently conducted (in conjunction with the Murray Hill Center) with female teens and tweens, I found that the more popular a brand, the more aware these young women are
of its high cost.
Hollister and Abercrombie weren’t just “cool girl” brands by virtue of how they looked; they were “cool girl” brands because they
cost more
than other brands. Clearly, companies know that teens (and often adults) are willing to pay more for brands they deem cool or popular—which is why Apple can get away with charging $229 for the
iPhone 4 and Abercrombie can charge forty dollars for a tank top.

The widespread belief that expensive, high-end brands will bring popularity, acceptance, or status goes a long way toward explaining the universe of knockoff
clothing sold on the streets of many cities. Ironically, while we may often buy those fake Coaches, Versaces, Pradas, and Ray-Bans to feel better about ourselves, recent research shows they may in fact have the opposite effect. Three psychologists—Francesca Gino of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely of Duke University—gave a large sampling of women what appeared to be Chloé sunglasses, then told half the women they were fake and the other half they were real. Then they had the women carry out complex math puzzles, grade themselves on the honor system, and take money for each correct answer. Well, it turns out the women wearing the “fake” Chloé glasses (in reality, of course, they were all fake) cheated a whole lot more; a whopping “70 percent inflated their performance . . . and in effect stole cash from the coffer.”
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The authors concluded that “wearing counterfeit glasses not only fails to bolster our ego and self-image the way we hope, it actually undermines our internal sense of authenticity. ‘Faking it’ makes us feel like phonies and cheaters on the inside.”
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I guess it’s true what adman
David Ogilvy once said: “A fake Rolex will fool everyone but you.”

Lacoste is another high-end brand that has been extremely successful in using peer pressure to draw teenagers and college-aged kids to its products. Three decades ago, that little crocodile was one of the hottest logos in Europe and the United States.
Everyone
wanted to wear it. Then Bangkok-manufactured “fakes” began swamping the market, and the brand’s reputation went down the drain (Lacoste came close to filing for bankruptcy). So to resurrect its image, it gave out free shirts to cool-looking people at colleges and universities (as well as famous
tennis players) and paid for product placements on MTV . . . and suddenly the brand was back in action. Today—go figure—Lacoste is as popular as it was thirty years ago.

As many people know, few brands have shrewdly amassed a more cultlike, almost religious following than
Apple (and in fact, in an experiment I conducted for my last book, when I studied the brains of Apple fanatics using an fMRI, I found that their brain activity was similar to that of those devoted to Christianity), and peer pressure has been central to many of its strategies. One such strategy is early recruitment, or in other words, very deliberately marketing to kids aged thirteen to seventeen. This campaign has been so effective that today a staggering 46 percent of Americans in that age range own an
iPod, the product teens talk to one another about most is the iPod, and one survey found that 82 percent of high school students who own a portable music player own an iPod.
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Once these kids get to college, Apple even starts “recruiting” officially, going so far as to hire kids to become “Apple campus reps” and turning entire sections of college bookstores into mini Apple emporiums. “This is a great opportunity to represent Apple and to have some fun,” says the online recruiting ad. The job description includes hosting workshops, throwing events, and building relationships with students, faculty, and parents, and to top it off, “You’ll collaborate with the Apple team to run marketing programs on campus, from sales promotions to increasing awareness of Apple products. . . . It takes a leader, someone who can inspire peers and work with campus organizations.”
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This is a clever touch: who doesn’t want to think of him- or herself as a leader, a trendsetter, a person who inspires peers? (I might add here that if you are a frequent moviegoer, you would probably assume everyone on earth uses an Apple—a triumph of product placement and peer pressure all in one. In 2009 nearly one in two popular Hollywood
movies—roughly 46 percent—featured Apple or its products. Though it’s generally agreed that no money changed hands, Apple couldn’t have bought better advertising or brand exposure.)

Kids and teens want what the popular kids have, plain and simple. A colleague once told me an intriguing story about a computer game that was released in California not too long ago. Instead of advertising the
product in a traditional way, the game’s savvy developer simply identified the hundred most popular kids in a high school in Southern California, gave them free versions of the game, then sat back to watch it catch on like wildfire.

There’s an actual biological reason for why kids are so drawn to the classmates they deem more popular. Years ago, the BBC carried out a fascinating study. It showed kids a stack of photos of other kids who were either laughing or smiling and asked them to pick out the kids they would most like to be around. Every single person picked the laughing kids. On the face of it this seems obvious. Who wouldn’t want to be around someone who’s laughing and appears to be having a good time? But there’s another reason behind it; laughing actually makes us feel good on a physiological level. When we laugh, we’re flooding our brains, organs, and tissues with oxygen, which is one of the “primary catalysts for biological energy in the human body.”
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So the popular kids at school didn’t just get that way because of their personalities; they got that way because it physically
feels good
to be around them.

That said, as powerful as peer pressure is in persuading teens to buy, when a brand becomes
too
popular, too widespread, it can backfire. From studies I’ve conducted over the years, it’s become clear that young people will always deny being “a part of” any new trend. What’s more, I’ve found that once an older generation catches on to a new brand or trend, it becomes unhip, and fast. It’s what I call the “
generation lap” problem, because it’s what happens when the younger kids jump ship in an attempt to create the “generation lap”—meaning a psychological distance between them and older generations.

The generation lap, though, is in itself a form of peer pressure; a reverse peer pressure, if you will. Take what happened with the
Levi’s brand. In the eighties, Levi’s were
the
jeans to have. Anyone who was anyone wore Levi’s. But by 2001 the brand had taken a major hit. Its revenue was slashed in half and market share had dropped to 12.1 percent, from 18.7 percent in 1986.
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Levi’s was suddenly the brand that no one cool would be caught dead in. Why?

It’s a rite of passage for every child to pass through a rebellious phase. (That said, a study has shown that men and women both recognize that they are similar to their parents, or accept the strength of their
parents’ influence, by the time they turn thirty-five.) Many companies, knowing this, often market their brands and products to seem “bad” or “subversive.” Which is what Levi’s did . . . only a little too well.

Levi’s was the brand of rebellion for the baby boomer generation. That rebel without a cause, James Dean, wore them. In the sixties they were practically the uniform of hippies and protesters. In the seventies they were among the first brands to introduce bell-bottoms. But once the boomers grew up and started having kids of their own, the
generation lap set in. No rebellious youth wants to be seen wearing the same jeans as his
dad.
How can you distance yourself from your parents’ generation if your parents are into the same trend? So the kids started wearing other jeans, ones different enough to distinguish them from their parents. (Now you know what skinny jeans are all about—this style is adult-proof. Let’s face it, the trendiest adult on earth knows he can’t fit his fortysomething legs into those pipe-cleaner holes.)

This is exactly why I recommend that companies create more and more “brand
dis
approved” concepts—ideas or products or gadgets deliberately built to court parental disapproval. A concept so outrageous, so provocative, so different, so . . . 
anything! . . . 
that adults will react against it. This is harder to do than you might imagine, yet my research has shown that once such a concept has been identified, there’s almost a 90 percent chance that it will turn out to be a success among the younger set.

Peer pressure may sometimes work in backward ways, but the psychology behind it—the desire for acceptance—remains the same. I’ve seen again and again that there’s a certain type of consumer who will run
away
from what’s popular, even among the people in their own generation. If their peers start to like “indie bands,” they’ll turn up their noses. If their friends are decked out in Abercrombie & Fitch, they’ll head for the local Goodwill or Salvation Army. If they go to a school that champions the football team, they’ll spend their Saturdays playing the xylophone, or maybe just sit in their rooms scowling and smoking. They presume that anything that’s popular, that’s universally adored, or that involves long lines snaking around a block is probably substandard, populist swill. To them, it’s cool to be
un
cool.

But this isn’t really as counterintuitive as it seems. Because these
people tend to flock together with people who feel exactly the same way. So when one of them bashes the band Arcade Fire for being “sellouts” or declares that Converse sneakers are for “posers,” it’s likely because he’s observed those around him doing the same. In the end, nonconformity is a form of conformity as well.

I
n all my years in the marketing world, I’ve consistently found one fact to be true: nowhere in the world are people more easily brandwashed than in Asia. In Asian countries, it’s perfectly normal for a man to own half a dozen expensive Swiss watches or for a woman to carefully put aside a month’s salary for a pair of Prada shoes. In Asia, more so than even in the United States, a person is what he or she wears. But the really interesting thing about this is how socially contagious brand preference is over there. Most Asian women who carry a
Louis Vuitton bag don’t do so because they’re enamored of the brand. As one expert explained, “The ability or need to fit in is a strong driver. Asians are a collectivist society, and group identity is important. So in
Japan, if one office lady carries a Louis Vuitton bag, then it means that to fit in, the rest would do the same.”
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Louis Vuitton has very cleverly capitalized on the herd mentality of Asian culture by playing on a dream that is common to 78 percent of Japanese women: getting married in Paris. How? By playing up its “Frenchness” in its marketing, advertising, and stores. First off, in Japan, even more than elsewhere, the store design is made to look French-inspired—with its glamorous, old-fashioned Parisian street scenes and paintings of iconic French landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe. Store managers in Japan are often French-born (with accents that typically manage to outdo even Maurice Chevalier’s), and the brand’s suitcases, or “trunks,” are embossed with French name tags and placed conspicuously in the foyers of the company’s flagship stores (the stores even serve French-made Moët & Chandon champagne to their best customers). The photos in the Louis Vuitton catalogs are also set against Parisian backdrops, and even in Japan the models are
never, ever
Japanese. They’re either ambiguously ethnic or stylishly “French looking.” And no matter what country you’re surfing the Web in, when you go to the Louis Vuitton Web site, you’ll immediately be asked if you want to read the site in French—even though globally, French consumers are responsible for only a minuscule percentage of Vuitton sales (fact is, the French elite largely eschew the brand). And finally, even though Louis Vuitton in fact manufactures a number of its products in India, it continues to manufacture the luggage it sends to the Japanese market in France, just to keep up that “French” image.