Brandwashed (23 page)

Other studies show that we’re so determined to remember the past favorably that on occasion we “remember” pleasant incidents that never took place. In one, individuals remembered seeing Bugs Bunny during a visit to Walt Disney World, an impossibility since Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. creation, not a Disney character. The experiment concluded that “even knowing a memory is not real does not make it any less meaningful or enjoyable” and that “the memory of an event is more important than the actual experience.”
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The point is, we tend to live in the past (and to some extent the future), and our brains like it that way. This is part of the reason why, in my experience, no one believes that on the inside they’re truly their chronological age. In fact, I have a theory that most people have a psychological age that remains fairly stable and consistent throughout their adult life, no matter how many candles burn on their birthday cake. I once asked a top banking CEO who was around fifty what his “inner age” was. “Nineteen,” he said at once. Ask the same question of a roomful of people, and I guarantee not one person will answer their actual age. It’s almost as if we’re two people: the one inside us and the (older) one others see. After all, who hasn’t felt incredulous at hitting
each milestone birthday, whether it’s twenty, forty, or sixty? Naturally, no one likes the thought of getting old, but I believe this phenomenon is rooted in something more than just a fear of aging. I believe it has to do with our rosy remembering of what our life was like when we actually were that “inner age.”

At this point, you might be thinking,
Okay, this rings true, but what does it have to do with how companies trick us into buying things?
Well, a lot, actually. Companies and marketers know full well that our “perceived” age is a huge factor in our shopping decisions and buying habits. Why does a fifty-year-old woman buy hair dye or wrinkle cream? Why does a forty-year-old man buy Ray-Bans or a Ferrari convertible (otherwise known as a midlife-crisis-mobile)? Not just to look or seem younger (though that’s part of it) but to bridge the gap between how old they are . . . and how old they
feel
inside. It’s the very same human tendency that drives grown men and women to buy all those things they loved (or
remember
loving) when they were younger, like tight jeans, fast cars, Converse All-Star sneakers, Pink Floyd CDs, and so on. All the kinds of stuff that will make us feel younger again or, rather, make us feel the age we actually believe we are on the inside.

Clever companies know that the older we get, the more intense our longings for the past become. They also know that our preferences for
music, movies, trends, and products we enjoyed in our carefree childhoods, adolescences, and early twenties remain with us our whole lives. In a 1998
New Yorker
article, neuroscientist and writer
Robert Sapolsky pondered his disintegrating interest in new things: food, experiences, and especially music. Why, Sapolsky wondered, did he keep playing
Bob Marley’s Greatest Hits
over and over while his twentysomething lab colleagues were bopping around listening to every hot new (or old but trendy) thing from Sigur Rós to Sonic Youth to the Black Eyed Peas?

In an attempt to understand why he was musically stuck in the seventies, Sapolsky set out to study “the windows in which we form our cultural tastes, and [in which we] are amenable to new experiences.” Was there, he wondered, an age at which these “windows of openness slammed shut?”
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Indeed, Sapolsky concluded, there was. He and his research assistants called radio stations that specialize in the music of various periods and asked the same two questions of each station manager:
When was most of the music that you play first introduced? And what is the average age of your listeners? Based on their responses, Sapolsky found that most of us end up playing and loving the music we’re exposed to when we’re around twenty years old (or younger) for the rest of our lives, and that if a person is over the age of thirty-five when a new pop music style makes its mark, there’s a greater than 95 percent chance he or she will never listen to it. After conducting similar inquiries about food and fashion, he concluded that our “window of openness” for new experiences, like getting our tongue pierced, slams shut at age twenty-three and our openness to trying out new foods (say, sweetbreads or calves’ livers) pretty much closes for good at thirty-nine.
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In my career, I’ve found time and again that there is often a specific moment or time in our lives when we form such powerful memories involving a brand that we decide (subconsciously) to consume the product for life. When I began working for Pepsi and
Coca-Cola, I remember speaking with a fifty-five-year-old woman who was a lifelong fan of Coke. Why? When she was six years old, her parents allowed her to walk alone to a local candy store where the owner served “real Cokes” by mixing together soda and syrup and pouring the concoction into an iced glass bottle. It was cold, frothy, and delicious, the highlight of her day. She would then traipse back to her neighborhood, where she would play on the street with the other kids until it got dark. It was what I call an “oasis” memory, when everything seems all right with the world—safe, contented, fun, protected, shimmering.

Today, this woman’s life is difficult. She works two demanding jobs and juggles several children, one severely handicapped. But when I stood before her and watched her take a sip of her Coke, I swear the look in her eyes changed. The taste had taken her back to that moment, that neighborhood, that oasis.

Such is the power of nostalgia.

N
ostalgia marketing is a perennial—and, I should add, wildly successful—strategy by which advertisers resurrect the sights, sounds,
and feel of a previous decade to sell us a brand or product of today. Sometimes it’s by reviving a commercial or a style of packaging or even an icon or spokesperson (like in those Super Bowl commercials) that those of us over thirty or forty are guaranteed to recall fondly from our own childhoods. Other times it’s done more subtly, by implicitly evoking the feel or texture of a simpler time. And sometimes it’s done by reviving an old brand itself.

Recent research from the University of Arkansas shows that the older a brand is, the more favorably it will be perceived, regardless of how well it works. One reason is that when we see a nostalgic product from the past, whether it’s a brand of breakfast cereal or a make of sneakers, we are reexperiencing the world as we first encountered it when we were young—that time when everything (thanks to our brains’ rosy remembering) was safer, simpler, better.

Few people know this, but one of the main goals of any brand or ad campaign is to own a “moment.” What do I mean by owning a moment? Well, if you’re in your late forties or early fifties, no doubt you remember
Kodak Instamatic cameras. Peaking in popularity between 1963 and 1970, Kodak Instamatic cameras were inexpensive, point-and-shoot apparatuses that created a phrase that became so ubiquitous as to secure a place in our cultural mythology: the “Kodak moment.” A Kodak moment, as many know, is an instant in time that captures a one-of-a-kind, emotional experience—that second before your son blows out the candles on his first birthday cake, the instant your daughter reaches out her hand to accept her high school diploma, and so forth. Though Kodak no longer manufactures Instamatics, the expression refuses to die. And for marketers, the “Kodak moment” is pure gold.

Owning an instant in time is a product’s equivalent of a landgrab, meaning that it keeps other brands out and in their place.
No trespassing; this moment is mine!
Nesquik, whose slogan is “They Only Grow Up Once,” has grabbed the moment you pack a milk box in your child’s lunch on his first day of kindergarten and realize he is morphing from toddler to boy before your eyes. The Jenny Craig weight-control program has co-opted the “seatbelt moment,” the instant when a woman secures her belt across her lap only to find it no longer reaches the clasp.

What these
slogans ingeniously do, of course, is subtly link their
products not just to those fleeting moments but to our
emotions
surrounding those moments. So that when little Billy’s middle-school graduation makes us feel wistful (where did the time go?), we reach for Nesquik, and when we feel insecure and embarrassed because our jeans feel tighter than usual, many of us automatically think,
Time to call Jenny Craig
. It’s all subconscious, of course, but that’s part of the reason it’s so powerful.

The
really
ambitious marketers and companies even try to lay claim to not just a moment but an entire era. Amazingly,
McDonald’s has successfully managed to lay claim to the last thirty years, with slogans like “It’s a good time for the great taste of McDonald’s” or “It’s MacTime,” because together we’ve shared “30 years of good times and great taste.”
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The result? Three entire decades’ worth of emotions and associations linked in our minds to their burgers and fries.

It’s worth noting that allusions to time persuade us to buy in other ways as well. Did you know that just
mentioning
time in an advertising campaign makes us more likely to buy a product? It’s because as soon as we’re reminded of how fleeting time is, we think,
I’d better have and enjoy this before it’s too late
. And did you also know that when we’re “primed” to think about time, the chances we’ll feel a personal connection to a product increases exponentially?
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For example, if a suitcase manufacturer or coffee company announces, “It’s time for a new set of rolling wheels,” or “It’s espresso time,” we’re more likely to respond positively to these ads than not. Why? Because time, quite simply, is one thing we all wish we had more of yet rarely give ourselves permission to savor.

Our tendency to romanticize bygone eras helps explain why nostalgia marketing is especially potent during uncertain economic times. When the stock market is down, personal debt is up, climate change is in the news, and job security is a thing of the past, anxious consumers seek nothing more than the retail equivalent of comfort food: the sounds, the smells, the appearance, and hence the memories and familiar fonts of the best-loved brands from our childhoods. In other words, an era before we were plagued with these grown-up worries.

In the face of insecurity or uncertainty about the future, we want nothing more than to revert to a stable time. And what time could seem more stable, simple, and quaint than the past (even though it was in reality crazy and turbulent, and we’re just not remembering it
accurately)? Plus, oddly enough, recalling the past not only provides us a source of comfort and security; it even makes us feel more hopeful and optimistic about the future, more equipped to deal with the challenges that lie ahead.

This is why during hard times we eat more “retro” foods, like macaroni and cheese and mashed potatoes, and flock toward classic, ever-iconic brands that have been around forever, like Hershey’s, Maytag, Heinz, Hellman’s, or Hunter Boot (a brand of shoe that’s been around for 150 years and is carried in high-end retailers like Bergdorf Goodman and Bloomingdale’s).
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This is also why
nostalgia marketing boomed during the turbulent years of World War II and has resurged at certain points throughout just about every decade since. It tends to conform to a particular pattern, too. Generally, marketers and advertisers home in on cultural trends that are most dissimilar (and therefore most romanticized) to the ones of the current age. For example, during the economic and political turbulence of the 1970s came a nostalgic fad for products that recalled the staid, conservative 1950s. During the buttoned-down Reagan-era 1980s, marketers paid tribute to the freewheeling 1960s, and in the tumultuous first decade of the twenty-first century, which saw 9/11, two wars in the Middle East, and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, marketers were harkening back to the trends and styles of the flush and relatively peaceful eighties.

Does anyone recall the 1986 commercial featuring Marvin Gaye crooning his 1967 tune “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” to a bunch of raisins? What about Wendy’s dusting off its 1984 “Where’s the beef?” TV commercial in 2010 or Coca-Cola reviving its famous 1971 “I’d like to teach the world to sing” ad for its thirty-fifth anniversary (the company even went so far as to hire a detective agency to hunt down the men and women who’d first sung the song decades earlier)?

Here one can’t help but note the popularity of “oldies”
television channels like TV Land, Nick at Nite, and American Movie Classics. And what about the recent cultural phenomenon, the AMC series
Mad Men
, which so impeccably captures the aura, essence, and glamour of Madison Avenue in the early 1960s? And it’s not just the show (which, by the way, has been deliberately advertised to play into this sepia-toned
nostalgic sentiment) we’re obsessed with. We’re also preoccupied with (and willing to spend money to enjoy) its trends and fashions in our own lives—all kinds of nostalgic items from tunic dresses and skinny ties to martinis and old-fashioneds.

Today countless companies and brands, from Coke to McDonald’s to General Mills to Target to Unilever, are turning huge profits by deliberately playing into our human fancy (and fantasy) that the past was better—simpler, quainter, more authentic, more secure—than our lives are now (there’s even a mall in Shanghai devoted exclusively to nostalgic products known as Zhonghua Laozihao Shangcheng, which translates to “Time-Honored Chinese Brand Shopping Mall”).
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However, the risk of this approach for marketers and advertises is that if they play up the past
too
much, we might begin to see the product or brand as dusty, outdated, or out of style. Which is why a lot of brands and companies, like the ones you’re about to read about, have developed some incredibly inventive—not to mention psychologically sophisticated—strategies for toeing this delicate line.