Brandwashed (24 page)

A
s I enter the Time Warner Center in New York’s Columbus Circle, a Midtown “mall” largely populated by high-end retailers, and descend the escalator to
Whole Foods, which we visited in
chapter 3
, it doesn’t escape my attention that the
music playing faintly overhead is a dance hit that weaves in a sample of Abba’s 1979 “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (a Man After Midnight),” providing quite a shot of nostalgia and familiarity for shoppers over thirty-five.

Talk about having it both ways. Here at Whole Foods, we see the latest agricultural and dietary fads of the twenty-first century—from grass-fed beef to gluten-free cookies to pesticide-free produce to cask-ale microbrews—united with the carefree tunes from an era before any of these things even existed. (Oh, and it’s no coincidence that this particular song is playing, either. In a later chapter we’ll be exploring the world of
data mining, at which time you’ll discover that there is no such thing as a melody playing “randomly” overhead while you shop.)

The connections between the gleaming, auditorium-sized, state-of-the-art Whole Foods and nostalgia marketing may not seem apparent at first. After all, isn’t Whole Foods about as modern as you can get? The past was a much quainter, far less complicated place than labyrinthine Whole Foods, right? For most of us, “the good old days” were a time before chain stores, anxieties about industrialized food, or even the term “organic” ever existed, an era when produce was fresh and no-frills and there weren’t ten different brands of everything from garbanzo beans to graham crackers.

Perhaps we “remember” a time when grocery shopping meant stopping with our parents at a roadside fruit and vegetable stand, where we sniffed and unpeeled ears of corn harvested just that morning, filled a basket with apples picked from a nearby orchard, or grabbed a bunch of flowers whose prices were hand-scribbled on a small slate board. Or was that in a movie we once saw? Doesn’t matter. I once screened photographs with consumers in five different countries, asking them to rank each photo in order of which most evoked a sense of freshness. The unanimous winner was a photograph of a twentysomething farm boy, wearing a cowboy hat and holding a wooden box laden with fresh vegetables. When I asked the respondents how many of them had seen this image in real life—not the farm boy in question but
any
farmer—only one person out of four hundred raised his or her hand.

The point is, whether or not we’ve actually set foot on an old-time farm stand in our lives, emotionally we associate things like old wooden boxes, flowers, and hand-scrawled signs with authenticity, history, and a better, simpler time (as well as with freshness, as we saw in
chapter 2
); in other words, everything that the modern-looking Whole Foods is not. Or is it? It might not be obvious at first, but the ingenious marketers who designed Whole Foods did so very carefully, to trigger these very associations of a simpler era.

For example, about a dozen feet into the store sit a dozen stacked cardboard boxes with anywhere from eight to ten fresh cantaloupes packed inside each one. These boxes could have been unpacked easily, of course, by any one of Whole Foods’ unionized employees, but they’re left that way on purpose. Why? For that rustic,
aw-shucks
touch. In other words, it’s a symbolic to reinforce the idea of old-time simplicity—as if
our mythical farmer ran out of cantaloupe crates and had to make do with used cartons.

But wait, something about these boxes looks off. Let’s move in and take a closer look. Funny, upon close inspection, this stack of crates looks like one giant cardboard box. It can’t be, can it? It
is
. In fact, it’s one humongous cardboard box with fissures cut carefully down the side that faces consumers (most likely by some industrial machinery at a factory in China) to make it
appear
as though this one giant cardboard box is made up of multiple stacked boxes. It’s ingenious in its ability to evoke the image of
Grapes of Wrath–
era laborers piling box after box of fresh fruit into the store. But like a lot of what goes on at Whole Foods, this image in false.

In the industry, these cardboard boxes are known as “dummies.” And for good reason! We’ve been punked by nostalgia again.

Whole Foods’ ongoing salute to the roadside stand of bygone days continues with a display of apples perched atop a wooden crate. The crate is deliberately distressed looking and grainy gray, suggesting that the apples on display were shipped to this store in a dirty flatbed, as they might have been in the 1940s.
The Apples of Wrath!
This crate is another symbolic, as are the two bottles of organic apple juice perched behind the apples, like Ma and Pa Apple overseeing a litter of baby Granny Smiths. Only a person with six-foot-long arms could ever hope to actually reach these bottles. But that’s not the point. Organic apple juice steers our brains to the old-fashioned notion of homemade cider—yet another marketing trick designed to recall a time when life was simpler and better and more delicious.

Yet there’s an interesting paradox at play here. The past is perfect, and so is its produce, right? Well, not exactly. Because what I’ve found in all my years of studying consumers and their responses to branding is that one essential component of the nostalgia factor is
authenticity, and nothing authentic is truly perfect, is it?

A bruise on the apple. A chip in the china. A scratch in the veneer on an old armoire. Just enough imperfection to create that authentic, slightly “used” feel can go a long way in evoking memories of that battered old toy we dug out from the attic or the scuffed bracelet we inherited from our grandmother. Have you noticed the market for
“prewashed” T-shirts? Rationally, we tell ourselves that we buy them because they don’t shrink in the washer or dryer, but emotionally, it has more to do with their “authentic,” tattered look. Goodwill and the Salvation Army are among the most popular destinations nowadays among teenage girls, for whom it’s become cool to doubt the “authenticity” of such manipulated clothing emporiums as Abercrombie & Fitch,
Hollister, and
American Apparel.

I recently visited a Trader Joe’s where they were having a sale on the luxury chocolate Ghirardelli. But the usual fancy wrappers and glitz boxes were nowhere in sight. Instead, they were selling “bulk” Ghirardelli chocolate chunks packed in large brown paper bags branded with old-fashioned handwriting. Inside were bits of chocolate cut into uneven pieces—as though a chocolate maker at a mom-and-pop candy shop had chopped them by hand. There was no doubt that this looked as authentic as could be—until I happened to buy two bags and coincidentally discovered that the pieces were identical. The broken chunks were not hand cut at all; they were molded by a machine to look like randomly broken pieces.

Most consumers are drawn to small imperfections, and companies know it. It’s an aesthetic the Japanese term
wabi-sabi
, which can be translated as the art of finding beauty in nature, whether it’s a brown spot on a banana or a knot in the bark of a tree. To illustrate, I have a friend whose father was the Australian ambassador to Japan. One day, she told me, her father was seated in his garden in the middle of Tokyo, sipping tea. Fifty feet away from him, a gardener was going around picking up fallen leaves. It took him two full hours to complete the job. Then, when there was not a single leaf remaining on the ground, the gardener disappeared for twenty minutes, came back, and started carefully and tenderly placing leaves randomly onto the lawn. One here, two over there, and so on. Why? Because the leafless lawn looked unnatural. It looked
too
perfect.

Perfection makes us as consumers leery. As everyone knows, nothing is truly perfect, ever, and so when it appears to be, we subconsciously seek out the flaw, the inauthenticity. We glimpse a perfectly shaped hamburger in the supermarket, and it suddenly reminds us that we’re eating mass-produced beef from an industrial slaughterhouse. We see a wall at Old Navy lined with impeccably stitched and identically dyed
pairs of jeans, and we can all but picture them rolling off the assembly line in a Chinese sweatshop. We’re sick and tired of picture-perfect babies and flawless models. Why do we love
YouTube videos so much? Because they’re imperfect, amateurish, and the people in them remind us of us. Recently there’s been a trend of using “real” people in mainstream movies and TV shows, and it’s one I predict will get bigger and bigger. According to a 2010 article in the
New York Times
, “
Television executives at Fox Broadcasting, for example, say they have begun recruiting more natural-looking actors from Australia and Britain because the amply endowed, freakishly young-looking crowd that shows up for auditions in Los Angeles suffers from too much sameness.”
¹³

But what is “authentic,” anyway?
Webster’s
defines it as “worthy of acceptance and belief,” but when it comes to the shady corners of the marketing and advertising world, that can mean a lot of different things. Is canned laughter authentic? Is the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas authentic? Is the sweater from H&M or the skirt from Zara that looks just like the one we saw on the runways during Fashion Week (but at quadruple the price) authentic? I would answer technically yes, as in all cases each one is true to what it intends to be. But at the same time, one could also argue these are mere imitations, clever ploys to trick our brains into thinking we’re getting “the real thing.”

These kinds of strategies are old hat for marketers and advertisers, but I’ve recently begun to notice an interesting shift. These days many marketers are introducing tiny, subtle imperfections into their products in an attempt to create the
impression
of authenticity, or what I call “inauthentic authenticity.” This is why, in places like Whole Foods, we’re seeing more and more Brussels sprouts and tomatoes still tethered to their stalks, many with dirt still clinging to the roots and leaves still hanging from the stalks. We’re seeing more handwritten signs that mimic the messy scrawl of a roadside fruit and vegetable stand; more dusty wooden crates; more rustic cardboard boxes; more packages that look as though they were wrapped casually, messily, by loving human hands (when in fact a machine packaged these containers, in some cases with the sticker deliberately attached crookedly, in an overseas factory). And all in the service of pushing our nostalgia buttons, evoking a rosy remembrance of a simpler time that may or may not have ever existed.

But the tricks Whole Foods plays aren’t the only ones companies have in their nostalgia playbooks. So let’s focus now on another variant of
nostalgia marketing: the old-fashioned kind.

O
ne of the classic (literally)—and most effective—ways companies create the nostalgia factor is by dusting off and rereleasing commercials,
slogans, or ad campaigns from the past. Few have pulled this off better than
Heinz did in 2009, when it revived its famous 1970s tagline, “Beanz meanz Heinz.”
¹⁴
Heinz’s new (or rather, old) advertisement features loving mothers feeding their kids plates heaped with Heinz Beans to the backdrop of catchy slogans, like “Sometimes when I’m feeling sad my mum will read the signs. She knows the thing to cheer me up and she knows that beanz meanz Heinz.” This ad was so memorable, it was voted the most popular slogan by the Advertising Hall of Fame nearly three decades after its original launch.

The British company Hovis has adapted an identical approach. In one advertisement, consumers see a retake of Ridley Scott’s original 1973 ad showing a “boy on a bike” riding through dodgy eras in British history, from the Blitz to the miners’ strikes. The implicit message: no matter what we’ve been through, Hovis has always been there for us.
¹⁵
It worked in 1973 and worked again in 2009—so well that it boosted sales 11 percent.
¹⁶

Even banks and tire makers have gotten into the slogan-repurposing act. Citigroup has recently brought back its original 1978 tagline, “The Citi never sleeps,” in an attempt to seem safer and more trustworthy by harkening back to a time before just about everybody hated and distrusted banks. And Michelin is bringing back its celebrated icon, the Michelin Man, created way back in 1898 (though in its latest incarnation, bowing to contemporary health concerns, he’s slimmed down).
¹⁷
Allstate insurance’s new TV ads feature a spokesperson strolling through a montage of Great Depression–era photographs while intoning, “Nineteen thirty-one was not exactly a great year to start a business, but that’s when Allstate opened its doors. And through the twelve recessions
since, they’ve noticed that after the fears subside, a funny thing happens. People start enjoying the small things in life. It’s back to basics, and the basics are good. Protect them. Put them in good hands.”
¹⁸

I began working for Pepsi around the time the company launched its retro-inspired “real sugar” versions of two of its most beloved drinks, which it decided to nostalgically dub “Mountain Dew Throwback” and “Pepsi Throwback.” Using all-natural sweeteners popular during the 1960s and ’70s, the “throwback” campaign even included a
Facebook app designed to make a Facebook user’s photo “retro” or pose him or her behind a retro-looking template. Well, the viral buzz was absolutely staggering, garnering “over 2 million website mentions, 24,000 blog posts, hundreds of
YouTube videos combined with a whirlwind of Facebook and Twitter activity.”
¹⁹

On the luxury side,
Louis Vuitton recently rolled out nostalgic ads featuring Sean Connery and Catherine Deneuve, symbols of the lacquered glamour of Old Hollywood. Another Vuitton ad recalls a bygone era by featuring astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride, and Jim Lovell, each representing a past generation of space explorers. They’re perched in a secondhand Western pickup truck, gazing up at the night sky, but they might as well be glancing back, awestruck, at history itself.