Brandwashed (41 page)

It seemed that the boys’ influence persisted even across ages and genders; when Jack told his college-age female cousin (who was not in on the experiment) about
Stinky Stink (the brand of body spray marketed to teen boys that I mentioned in
chapter 1
) and gave her a whiff, she commented that the young men in her dorm should use the stuff.

Interestingly, though, it turned out that as much brandwashing power as the Morgenson kids had on their friends and peers, the people they ended up having the most persuasive power over were their own parents. At one point during our filming, forgetting the cameras were running, Eric and Gina took their three sons shoe shopping. Over and over again, Eric approached his sons with one brand of sneaker after another. “Would you ever wear something like this?” he would ask. It should come as no surprise, given how brand-obsessed most teenagers are, that Jack, Sam, and Max made it clear that unless the sneaker was made by Nike, Vans, or etnie, they weren’t interested. In the end? In an obvious (and somewhat sweet) attempt to gain their children’s approval, Eric and Gina ended up buying exactly those brands.

A
fter watching the hundreds of hours of footage, I could come to only one conclusion: whether it’s shoes, jewelry, barbecue tools, or sports equipment, there’s nothing quite so persuasive as observing someone we respect or admire using a brand or product. Still, as convincing as the
Morgensons
footage was, I wasn’t completely satisfied with this anecdotal data. I wanted to empirically measure and validate our findings. So we had
ChatThreads analyze the data. This revealed a couple of interesting trends.

The first was that whether Gina was telling her friends about a great spa where she’d just spent a week or simply drinking a new brand of coffee in front of them, the Morgensons’ friends were by a long shot most likely to be susceptible to guerrilla advertising in the mornings, specifically between the hours of eight and ten. Why? Because in the wake of our dreams, mornings are when we tend to be most vulnerable to influence, persuasion, and suggestion. My guess is that mornings are also the time when we haven’t yet been exposed to marketing messages. Thus, our “filters” haven’t yet been activated.

At the same time, it’s worth noting that not a single person we spoke to in the show recalled even one TV commercial they’d seen over the past month. Not one! Yet when we asked the Morgensons’ friends to reel off a few random brand names, practically everyone came up with the brands that Eric and Gina had recommended. It was as though they’d stored these “Morgenson-approved” brands in an easily recallable “personal” place in their brains (as opposed to a “corporate” or “commercial” region that usually puts our brains on the defensive).

The brands the Morgensons advocated had another effect, as well: they went viral faster. Perhaps more important, they also carried a “halo effect” (meaning they became safe, preapproved, and inured to any possible criticism). Consequently, roughly one third of the Morgensons’ friends began promoting and even flaunting these same brands to
their
friends and acquaintances. (It even reached the point that when several of Gina’s friends came home raving at such length about the brands the Morgensons had recommended, the location producer suspected he was the victim of a setup. These women sounded like walking, talking TV commercials! Later, he discovered that the women were simply enthusiastically repeating what Gina had said to them, even using her exact same phrases and words.)

Might I take a moment here to add that during our four-week shoot, none—I mean,
not one
—of the Morgensons’ friends ever suspected
anything
, even when Gina drove an hour and a half out of her way to go shoe-shopping? (Gina later told me she’d never driven this far to
any
store.) At times, Eric and Gina both felt they were pushing the products too hard—that is, until they realized just how much many people’s natural, everyday conversations actually do revolve around brands.

Perhaps not surprisingly, ChatThreads also found that the brands the Morgensons’ peers were most likely to go out and buy at the Morgensons’ subtle suggestion were the bigger and better-known ones. Which confirmed my theory that conventional marketing and the more covert variety work best together, that the most persuasive of advertising strategies become that much more so when
amplified
by word-of-mouth advertising.

In the end, even I was genuinely flabbergasted by the power of word-of-mouth marketing. Going in, my paranoid fear had been that perhaps I’d overestimated the power of peer pressure. What if no matter how much the Morgensons promoted this or that brand, none of their friends actually went out and bought anything—or at best, just bought a single brand now and again? Turns out I needn’t have worried. The fact that
the Morgensons’ friends actually ended up buying an average per person of three brands recommended by the Morgensons
blew my mind. More amazing still? The impact the experiment had on the buying habits of the Morgenson family themselves.
Once our reality show wrapped, Eric, Gina, and their boys continued using and buying six out of the ten brands they’d spent the last month touting.

A few more things took me aback. I was surprised to learn that, according to ChatThreads’ analysis, even off-camera, more than 50 percent of people’s everyday conversations revolve around brands. I was surprised by the extent to which people “show off” brands in their homes (both consciously and unconsciously). As one woman told me, “I guess I wanted to display the brand because it gave me something to talk with all my friends about.” Finally, I was surprised that when we told Eric and Gina’s friends and acquaintances that the whole thing was a hoax, and a reality show, no one was angry or upset or cared even slightly that they had been duped.

Let me reiterate this last point. When I finally revealed the truth about the reality-show experiment, the Morgensons’ friends were at first disbelieving—come on, who wouldn’t be? But when I asked them if they minded that two of their closest friends had betrayed them in
order to convince them to buy brands, it was
my
turn to be shocked.
It was okay,
they said.
If the Morgensons told us a brand was good, it was totally okay.
“But what if the brands the Morgensons recommended
weren’t
ones they liked?” I asked. The answer?
Even if the Morgensons recommended brands they disliked, I’d still buy them.
And what’s more, not one person felt that our reality-show experiment had been unethical or wrong.

Strange, huh?

I kept asking questions. When asked if they could measure how influenced they were by the Morgensons’ recommendations on a scale of one to ten, Eric and Gina’s friends unanimously answered, “Ten out of ten.” What’s more, when I asked one man, a corporate speaker, whether he had ever mentioned the Morgenson-approved brands onstage, he told me he’d probably passed on the names of the brands to “thousands” of audience members. Assuming I’d misheard him, I asked him to repeat the figure. “Thousands,” he repeated, adding, “I just happen to love the shoes they recommended.”

In some instances, the persuasive effect was unconscious. In these cases it was only after multiple promptings that the Morgensons’ friends did admit that yes—come to think of it—they’d altered their purchase patterns by buying precisely the products the Morgensons had recommended. More than once, one of Gina’s friends volunteered that her favorite cosmetics brand was Kiss My Face, and that she’d heard about it, well, seems she couldn’t remember where. When asked to recall the date she first started using the brand, it turns out it was the day after she’d had dinner at the Morgensons.

At another point, that same woman mentioned how thrilled she was that her twelve-year-old had picked up his childhood LEGO obsession. “Why did he suddenly start playing with LEGO again?” I asked. The woman confessed she had no idea, but finally revealed that something had (literally) snapped into place “after we had dinner at the Morgensons.” Talk about unconscious! Eric and Gina had never even promoted the brand by name. But upstairs, while the adults were at dinner, this woman’s son had spent a half hour playing LEGO with the Morgenson boys.

Clearly, the Morgensons had exerted a very powerful influence—on both conscious and subconscious levels.

Still, I wanted to learn more. So now it was time to measure precisely
just how much guerrilla marketing can amplify the persuasive power of a marketing or advertising strategy by carrying out an fMRI research study.

My goal? To compare the power and effectiveness of personal, word-of-mouth recommendations to the blizzard of other media pushing and persuading us to buy stuff, whether it’s a TV commercial, an Internet campaign, or a fashion-magazine spread touting the latest miracle cosmetic.

Six weeks later, after analyzing millions of pieces of fMRI data, the research team sent me the results—allowing me to put into words finally why the Morgensons held in their hands the most irresistible tool of persuasion there is.

You see, in contrast to conventional TV or magazine advertising, a very surprising event takes place in our brains the moment other people recommend a car, a book, a band, a makeup, or a wine. The rational, executive regions of our brains close down while a fireball of activity occurs in the insula—a brain region that is responsible for “social emotions” such as lust, disgust, pride, humiliation, guilt, empathy, and even love. In addition, the brain scans showed, our friends’ recommendations stimulate the sensory regions of our brains, causing a sensation not dissimilar to the biological cravings I described in the chapter on addiction. In other words, it’s as though word-of-mouth endorsements are “recorded” on multiple brain tracks—and I know from my experiments in
Buyology
that the more “tracks” of the brain a brand or a product affects, the more engaged and attuned we are with it—and the more likely the recommendation is to stick.

Once again, the inner workings of the brain explain why word-of-mouth advertising lingers in our memory for weeks, whereas we can’t even recall the TV commercials we saw just this morning. More interesting still, it explains why we seem to have an innate tendency to spread these word-of-mouth endorsements to others. Recent research into the evolutionary roots of gossip (itself a form of word-of-mouth marketing, when you really think about it) has found that whenever someone tells us something good (like, “This is a delicious wine,” or “This makeup makes you look five years younger”), and we go on to repeat it, our brains reward us with a shot of
dopamine, that “feel-good” neurotransmitter
associated with everything from addiction to sensation-seeking. In short, whenever we hear about a brand from people we like and admire, then spread the secret along to others, not only are our brains emotionally engaged, they are also doused with a chemical reward that, as the expression goes, keeps on giving.

In short, if you can get word-of-mouth influence behind your brand, that influence multiplies the power of your brand exponentially.

Which is why I predict the premise behind the Morgensons will soon become a reality—that in the future, companies will hire and plant thousands of Morgenson-like families in communities everywhere, tasking them with the mission of promoting a brand or even an entire family of brands. We may even reach the point where certain households begin to accept salaried positions as stealth marketers. (Think of these thousands of households as “marketing sleeper cells” that will come to life once a company releases a new product or, conversely, when a brand endures a bout of bad publicity.) Sure, there may be resistance at first, but quite simply, companies have too much to gain. So consumers, when you receive product recommendations and advice from that affluent, attractive family who lives down the block from you, beware. Remember that to companies, their words are worth roughly $10,000 a month in marketing power.

And companies won’t have to look hard to find these covert marketers, either. According to our incredible casting director
Marcy Tishk and producer
Andy McEntee, when they began their search to find the perfect family to play the Morgensons, countless auditioning families were all but begging to be cast in the experiment. “So let’s say that a show like
The Morgensons
morphs from experiment to reality,” I said to Marcy, “and I tasked you to identify families who would be willing to carry out a similar job of secretly promoting brands to their friends and acquaintances—how difficult would that be?” “Oh, it would be pretty easy,” Marcy replied. “Could you recruit, say, tens of families like the Morgensons?” I pressed. “Martin,” Marcy said patiently, “yes. But not tens—
thousands
.”

Whenever I meet up with executives around the world, I remind them that today the most powerful force in marketing is not a corporation. It’s not a CEO. It’s not a big-budget marketing department. And
that with all apologies to Don Draper, the
Mad Men
days of sneaky, one-way-mirror marketing are over. Today and in the future, the people who hold the
real
power are hyperconnected, mouse-clicking consumers and their wide circles of virtual and real-life friends and acquaintances. In other words, the people who hold the real power are
us.

As consumers, we may think that brands own us—but in reality it’s the other way around. So the good news I want to leave you with is this: In our hyperconnected world of Twitter and YouTube and WikiLeaks—a world in which a single trick or deception or secret can be immediately broadcast to the world with the click of the mouse—the consumer is more empowered than ever. As a result, brands of the future simply
must
be transparent and live up to their promises. Trust me (and you marketers out there take note), any brand that doesn’t will be instantly and painfully exposed and reviled. That, in the end, is what this book is all about.