Brandwashed (22 page)

Based on what I’ve seen in my travels, it’s also fair to say that in places where money is relatively new—like
China and
Russia—you’ll find the greatest obsession with brands. I believe that this, too, comes back to insecurity and the desire to fit in. For a long time, both China and the Soviet Union felt like the underdogs of the global economy—many of their residents have felt as though the rest of the world doesn’t yet accept or respect them. So they tend to overcompensate for this national lack of self-esteem by buying brands—the louder, bolder, and more in-your-face expensive the better.

I won’t ever forget a story a Russian man once told at a conference. He was recalling the first time he received special permission to travel from his home state to America. At the Dublin airport, where he was changing planes, he dashed into a small kiosk and, using the only money he had on him, bought a can of Coke. But the snap top broke off, and he couldn’t open the can. When he tried punching a hole in the top and the whole thing exploded, he didn’t care. He didn’t care about actually drinking the beverage. The point was, he’d bought an original can of Coca-Cola, and for him, that Coke symbolized nothing less than America.

T
o leave you with one final story of how marketers engineer viral trends, let’s take a trip to Russia, where last year Greg Tucker and Chris Lukehurst of the UK’s Marketing Clinic and I were summoned to develop a market-leading brand of (what else?)
vodka. I remember the first
time I set eyes on the vodka section of a Russian supermarket. There weren’t tens or even hundreds but thousands of varieties of vodka (and this wasn’t a monstrous superstore, either). Later I learned that Russia boasts roughly
three thousand
different vodka brands and
five thousand
different vodka flavors. Greg’s and my challenge was to create brand number 3,001 and somehow turn it into the market leader.

I had another mission, too—to transform the Russian population’s drinking habits. I’m sure you’re familiar with the place’s reputation. It’s mostly true. And the amount of drinking that goes on there has caused major societal damage, which the Russian government has been struggling to combat for many years. Now you might wonder (and rightly so) why a vodka company would want to figure out a way to get Russian citizens to drink
less
. Good question. The company’s reasons were twofold. The first was that cognacs are making significant inroads in Russia and becoming serious competitors to the long-standing Russian vodka industry. The second is a twist on the generation-lap problem—the rampant drinking among the older generation of Russians is turning off the younger generation, who look at their soused parents and think,
Dude, I don’t want to end up like that.

So I was tasked to travel around the country and find out why Russians drink as much as they did, and whether there was anything I could do about it. And paradoxically, at the same time could I help create a successful new vodka brand? To me these missions seemed incompatible, if not impossible. That is, until one night when I discovered something about
why
Russians drink as much as they do.

Not completely unlike the viral drinking game “icing” we talked about earlier in the chapter, it all comes down to a socially contagious ritual, only this one is a century old. The
scol
ritual begins with pouring vodka into a large—typically fifty-milliliter—glass. Then, all at once, everyone downs the stuff and cries out
“Nastrovia!”
No sipping here, either—you have to drink it down straight. This is one of Russia’s oldest and most widespread customs, and it’s a major part of every occasion or celebration, from birthdays to dinner parties to funerals. (Not doing it, in fact, is considered bad luck.) But once I began talking to hundreds of Russians in cities and villages across the country, I discovered something surprising. Most Russians
hate
the taste of vodka
and
hate the
accompanying ritual (they even have to scarf down food afterward to get rid of the burning taste in their throats). In other words, they don’t do it because they enjoy it—they do it because it’s simply
what everyone else does
—it generates a sense of belonging and camaraderie. Plus, there were no alternative rituals.

Which is when I thought,
Huh.

By introducing a
new
drinking ritual, one that people actually enjoyed, maybe I could not only gain awareness for a new brand but also show the Russians a new (and healthier) way to drink vodka.

Now, the thing about the
scol
ritual is that it requires that everyone drink at exactly the same speed: fast (which was actually bad for the vodka company, because a person who drinks too much too fast will also be on the floor that much more quickly, thus
reducing
overall vodka intake). This countrywide ritual was like a fraternity during hazing week; it was creating peer pressure to binge drink. By altering the ritual, my hope was that we could change at least the speed of drinking.

This turned out to be just what many Russians had been waiting for but no one had ever dared to say aloud. In the rough-and-tumble Russian culture, sipping a drink slowly is generally perceived as weak, overdelicate, and effete. No red-blooded Russian man would ever dare take the risk. The key, therefore, would be to introduce a whole new
masculine
way of drinking vodka, this time slowly and out of a small glass, that would still be perceived as “Russian.” So I borrowed from a country that many Russians respect and admire—Finland.

By setting up hundreds of testing groups and analyzing consumers’ taste palates across Russia, we crafted a vodka product that lacked the harsh burn everyone loathed—and by combining this new taste with a newfound ritual of drinking out of a smaller glass (and I’m afraid I’m contractually bound to secrecy, so I can’t divulge anything more), a new vodka brand hit the market. Time will tell whether the brand will take off, and whether we actually managed to create a healthier kind of peer pressure.

A
n American woman I know who spent her childhood years in Paris is obsessed with the taste of Mars bars. Not American Mars bars. Just French Mars bars. She will raise her right hand and swear that the U.S. version cannot compare with the taste of the Mars bars she snacked on growing up. She can’t explain why. When pressed, she’ll say only that the chocolate tastes sweeter and the caramel tastes creamier. When friends visit France, she begs them to bring her back supplies.

I have to admit, I feel as fondly about my memories of the holidays I spent growing up in Denmark, though I haven’t lived there for years. The snow coming down outside, the smells drifting out of the kitchen, the family members gathered around the tree. The simplicity of a time that, looking back, seems so far superior to the strident commercial machinery that defines the holidays today. Though I’ve had fantastic holidays in recent years, in my mind none compare to the ones I had when I was a child.

While we’re on the topic of the past, wasn’t the music you grew up listening to and the TV shows you liked to watch way back when all
frankly
better
than the newfangled bands and songs and shows that are on TV and the radio today? Or have you noticed that 99 percent of the time we derive the most pleasure from our first experience of something? That the original version of a song or movie is the best; that the house we grew up in is better and more attractive than any future home; that a story is more enjoyable
and
more believable the first time we hear it than the second or third time (in fact, I once conducted a study to investigate that last one and indeed found that 72 percent of people believed that the first source of a story was more authentic than subsequent retellings).

Sometimes the first experiences were objectively better, though not as a rule. But objectively better or not, they always
seem better in hindsight
. That’s because as humans (and consumers) we’ve been fooled into thinking the past was perfect, and by our own brains, too. The culprit? A simple and very powerful psychological persuader known as nostalgia—one that marketers know all too well.

Case in point: the 2009 Super Bowl, an event that’s almost become better known for its high-priced commercials than for the game itself (some of us can’t remember who played, others don’t care, but almost all of us can remember which commercial we liked best). During this particular Super Bowl, 151.6 million people,
¹
the largest TV audience ever, sat back and watched ads starring Don Rickles (for the flower company Teleflora), Abe Vigoda and Betty White (for Snickers chocolate bars), Stevie Wonder (for Volkswagen), and an antique sock monkey (for a new model of Kia).

What’s more, the soundtrack accompanying the commercials that spanned the roughly three-hour show featured songs by seventies funk stylists Kool & the Gang (for the Honda Accord Crossover); the classic rock band Cheap Trick (for Audi); the British symphonic rockers Electric Light Orchestra, whose global fame peaked in the midseventies (for Select 55 beer); and seventies singer-songwriter Bill Withers (for Electronic Arts’ Dante’s Inferno video game). During the halftime show, the eighties sensation Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band came out and performed “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Born to Run,” “Working on a Dream,” and “Glory Days.”

What decade were we in, anyway? What was going on here?

T
he word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek compounds
nostos—
meaning “to come home”—and
algos
, or pain. It was coined in 1688 by a Swiss physician,
Johannes Hofer, in reference to a bizarre malady affecting Swiss nationals stationed overseas (homesickness, basically) that Dr. Hofer believed could ultimately lead to widespread desertions and even death. In our modern parlance, however, it’s generally used to refer to, as
Webster’s
puts it, “a wistful or excessive sentimental yearning or return to some past period.”

In a 2006 study carried out at the University of Southampton in the UK, 79 percent of the 172 students polled claimed they experience nostalgic thoughts at least once a week, while 16 percent reported having such fond moments daily. Turns out there’s a reason we as humans are prone to these thoughts; nostalgia is good for us. According to
Scientific American
, “Rather than being a waste of time or an unhealthful indulgence, basking in memories elevates mood, increases self-esteem and strengthens relationships. In short, nostalgia is a source of psychological well-being.”
²
What’s more, when the same researchers asked those subjects to assess their social competence in three areas (their capacity to build relationships, their ability to be candid with others about their feelings, and whether or not they could offer their friends emotional support), they found that “the participants most likely to engage in nostalgic thinking did better in all three measures of social skills than those in the control group,”
³
concluding that “nostalgic thinking . . . breeds happier moods.”
⁴

Another reason we have a predilection for nostalgia is that our brains are wired to recall our past experiences as having been far better and more pleasurable than we experienced them to be in the moment, a phenomenon that goes by the names “rosy remembering” or “
rosy retrospection.” As Bryan Urbick, the CEO of the UK’s Consumer Knowledge Centre, theorizes, rosy retrospection may be an adaptive mechanism designed to erase and protect us from painful memories. Evidence suggests it may even have evolved to help ensure the continuation of the human race; after all, if women accurately remembered the pain of giving birth, chances are that few of them would voluntarily go through the experience again.

Though surprisingly little research has been done on
why
this nearly universal psychological phenomenon exists, countless studies have shown that we indeed have a strong tendency to assess past incidents or events more favorably after the fact than we did while those same events were taking place. (Interestingly, our brains are also prone to a phenomenon known as rosy
prospection
, whereby our anticipation of certain events is more positive than our actual experience of the event.) In one such study, psychologist Terence Mitchell and a team of colleagues had students who were about to embark on one of three vacations (a two-week tour of Europe, Thanksgiving weekend with their families, or a three-week bicycle tour across California) rate their anticipation of the trip, their level of enjoyment during the trip, and their memory of the trip after it took place. In all three cases, both the students’ anticipation and memories were more favorable than their feelings during the trip itself. As one study brief points out, “As memory takes over . . . the unpleasantness fades and the good parts remain, perhaps . . . even get amplified beyond reality.”
⁵