Brandwashed (5 page)

Some food marketers in particular are using an especially pernicious strategy (and one we’ll be talking about a lot more in
chapter 3
) to target young and impressionable children: ads disguised as entertainment. As a
New York Times
cover story recently reported, many food companies, “often selling sugar cereals and junk food, are using multimedia games, online quizzes, and cell phone apps to build deep ties with young consumers.” More specifically, as a 2009 report from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University found, three major food companies—General Mills, Kellogg’s and Post—were using games to “hawk cereals ranked among the least nutritious,” including Lucky Charms, Honey Nut Cheerios, Trix, Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, and Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles. As the article reports, a game on the Lucky Charms Web site invites kids on virtual adventures with Lucky the Leprechaun; Apple Jacks offers an iPhone app called Race to the Bowl Rally, a racing-car game in which kids collect Apple Jack Cereal Pieces for extra race points; and the Honey Nut Cheerios site lets kids create their own comic strip featuring BuzzBee, the cereal’s iconic mascot.
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In blurring the line between advertising and entertainment, these ads-as-games have several benefits for the companies in question. For one, they allow marketers to circumvent the regulations on advertising junk food on television. For another, they spread virally—as kids play or share these games with their friends, they unwittingly become guerrilla brand ambassadors. And third, as we’ll talk more about in
chapter 3
, these games are inherently addictive in nature. In short, they employ not just one but several powerful yet hidden persuaders.

As we’ll see throughout this book, food marketers are not alone in these tactics. Companies of all stripes know full well that advertisements also begin to shape children’s lasting preferences at an alarmingly
young age and that the younger we are when we begin using a product, the more likely we are to keep using it for the rest of our lives. Which is why makers of so many distinctly adult products are targeting their ads and marketing to inappropriately young customers. Let’s look at how.

S
tudies show that today, both boys and girls are reaching puberty on average a full year earlier than they did decades ago, a phenomenon known in marketing circles as “precocious puberty.” So what? Well, puberty means products—razors, shaving cream, face wash, acne gel, deodorant, makeup, and more. And you better believe companies are taking advantage of that fact. Seattle-based manufacturer Dot Girl, for example, sells a “first period kit,” a pink or robin’s-egg-blue pack decorated with cartoon characters and youthful logos. Inside, your eleven-year-old daughter will find an assortment of feminine hygiene products, including a heating pad to alleviate cramps. According to Dot Girl cofounder Terri Goodwin, “We wanted to keep it on the young side.” Says Toyna Chin, the San Francisco–based founder of Petite Amie, which carries the kits and sells them primarily to young teens, “Young girls are your first brand users. It’s important for any company to try and get that target audience as young as possible.”
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According to a report from the NPD Group, a consumer research company, “From 2007 to 2009, the percentage of girls ages 8 to 12 who regularly use mascara and eyeliner nearly doubled—to 18 percent from 10 percent for mascara, and to 15 percent from 9 percent for eyeliner.”
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As journalist Peggy Orenstein says in her recent book,
Cinderella Ate My Daughter
, close to half of six- to nine-year-old girls regularly use lipstick and lip gloss, and “tween girls now spend more than $40 million a month on beauty products.”
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That’s why Dylan’s Candy Bar, a high-end confectionery store on New York’s Upper East Side, offers a beauty line that includes “cupcake body lotion” and strawberry licorice “lip saver” (according to the Web site, “Lips should always be candy-luscious and sweet to kiss”).
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It’s also why there’s a Hannah Montana Makeover Set, Barbie makeup, and hair-straightening
products that feature seven-year-olds on the box. It’s also why Bonne Bell markets its cosmetics to girls as young as seven, the age at which it claims girls “become adept at using a lip gloss wand.” Even Nair, the hair-removal brand, has released “Nair Pretty,” a line aimed at ten- to fifteen-year-olds or, as it’s put in the industry, “first-time hair removers.”
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More appalling still, as the
Huffington Post
recently reported, Abercrombie and Fitch, the popular clothing retailer among the tween set, has begun marketing and selling padded bikini tops to girls as young as eight. As bloggers on
Babble.com
aptly pointed out, “The push-up bra is effectively a sex tool, designed to push the breasts up and out, putting them front and center where they’re more accessible to the eye (and everything else). How is that okay for second graders?”

In my book, it isn’t.

Still, nothing is as wildly age-inappropriate as a toy that Tesco, the UK retailer, released in 2006: the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, a pole-dancing play set marketed to females under ten—as something that will help them “unleash the sex kitten inside.” Not surprisingly, outraged parents lobbied to have the product removed from shelves, and I can’t say I blame them.

And how do you create a lifelong drinker? Start him or her off early by rolling out sweet, flavored, colored, sodalike beverages (laden with alcohol), known in the industry as “alcopops.” Though they are allegedly intended to be consumed by adults, an American Medical Association study found that alcopops are most popular among thirteen-year-old girls and that these kid-friendly, candylike cocktails make up 29 percent of the alcohol this group consumes.

So how do companies get their products talked about among the Miley Cyrus set? One technique is hiring the Girls Intelligence Agency, which recruits a stable of forty thousand girls from across the United States to act as guerrilla marketers. The agency gives these girls exclusive offers for products, events, and free online fashion consultations and then sends them into the world to talk up the products to their friends and classmates. The GIA even organizes events it calls “Slumber Parties in a Box,” “innocent” overnight parties these tween brand ambassadors host for eleven friends. Naturally, the point is for the GIA to
pass out assorted free items, including new DVDs and cosmetics. Moreover, “GIA instructs the girls to ‘be slick and find out some sly scoop on your friends,’ such as what they think is currently fashionable.”
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M
arketers aren’t just pulling these kinds of stunts on the girls, either. Though figures vary from company to company, my research shows larger and larger portions of marketing budgets are being devoted to brandwashing the next generation of male customers at as young an age as possible. You can hardly blame them; Gillette’s internal “war team” (an internal research team whose main purpose is to keep a close eye on the company’s key competitor, Wilkinson) found that once a boy has tried a Gillette shaver twice, there is a staggering 92 percent chance he will continue using the brand as an adult. Upon which Gillette began sending out special “Welcome to Adulthood” packs to young men on their birthday (the age varies according to state regulations) or high school graduation, according to one man I interviewed.

The upstart company Stinky Stink courts the tween boy set with a new body spray that mimics the distinctly adolescent scents of snowboard wax, rubber on skateboard wheels, the pine of skateboards themselves, and even the smell of a new PlayStation 3 or Wii gaming machine. “My happiest moment?” company founder Chris Sellers told me, “was when one thirteen-year-old boy told me, ‘This smells like my life.’ ” And when Gatorade (owned by PepsiCo) rolled out its new “G series” of drinks, its marketers established a “Mission Control” team, which tweets words of encouragement to high school athletes before big games and maintains a presence on Facebook, “where it answers queries from body-conscious teenagers about things like when it’s best to gulp down the new protein drink.”
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According to the
Wall Street Journal
, “Gatorade staffers monitor social-media posts 24 hours a day . . . hoping what they see and learn will help the company more effectively promote” its new line to Facebook- and Twitter-obsessed tweens and teens.
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Boy or girl, once your eighteenth birthday rolls around, you’re likely
to receive a present from a very unlikely sender: a tobacco company. Kool’s birthday gift, for example, contains an expensive-looking silver box full of coupons and even vouchers for this popular brand of menthol cigarettes, CDs of several up-and-coming rock bands, and an invitation to go online and create your own playlist (cigarette companies have found music to be a potent inroad for hooking smokers, which is why they so heavily promote at clubs and concerts). Since you’re not a smoker, you throw most of this stuff away. A month later, a second identical entreaty comes. Then another. If by the third or fourth attempt you don’t bite, the cigarette company knows you’re a lost cause—as studies have shown that by the third pack, a typical smoker is hooked—and moves on to the next victim.

Would you believe even gas companies and car manufacturers are starting to target kids? Shell gasoline’s marketing department has a long-standing partnership with LEGO to affix the Shell brand to LEGO toys, and in one animated BP commercial, children pull up to the pump in a BP station wagon while singing a catchy jingle in unison.
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In a TV advertisement for Porsche, a little boy sits in a classroom, daydreaming about adulthood, speed, and Porsches. In his daydream, he shows up at a Porsche dealership, asks to see Porsche’s 911 model, perches in it for a significant moment, then asks for the salesman’s business card. “I’ll see you in about twenty years,” the boy says. Cue the voice-over: “It’s a funny thing about a Porsche. There’s the moment you know you want one; there’s the moment you first own one; and for the truly afflicted, there’s the decade or two that passes in between.”
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Porsche is hardly the only automaker with its eye on these future consumers. Car manufacturer Audi makes a line of teddy bears, as well as “Rob the gecko,” a cartoon lizard featured in plush toys and baby items.
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Nissan sponsors the American Youth Soccer Organization, while Chrysler doles out hundreds of thousands of pop-up promotional books via snail mail to appeal to children.

Even Starbucks has acknowledged that the younger set is a big part of its demographic. According to the
New York Times
, “Starbucks is considering whether to add new drinks or drink sizes that better meet the needs of kids or tweens. ‘We need to be realistic about who comes into our stores, so if we have children who are coming into our stores on
their own, we want to make sure we have products that are appropriate to that age group,’ ” Starbucks spokesman Brandon Borrman said.
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The same article goes on to say that the baristas at one local Starbucks refer to steamed milk as a “babyccino.”

T
he younger we are when we start using a brand or product, the more likely we are to keep using it for years to come. But that’s not the only reason companies are aiming their marketing and advertising younger and younger. Another is that children can be a marketing tool in and of themselves, thanks to what I call their “pester power”—meaning their ability to influence their parents’ purchases. As James U. McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M University, puts it, “75 percent of spontaneous food purchases can be traced to a nagging child. And one out of two mothers will buy a food simply because her child requests it. To trigger desire in a child is to trigger desire in the whole family.”
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Kids “have power over spending in the household, they have power over the grandparents, they have power over the babysitter, and on and on and on,” Professor McNeal recently told the
New York Times.

I’ve found that children’s “persuasion” techniques are universal: negotiation (“If you buy me that chocolate, I’ll clean my room”); making a scene (which is self-explanatory); setting parents up against each other, which works especially well for children of divorce (“Dad got me Odwalla—why won’t you?”); and sneaking into the supermarket basket a product Mom doesn’t discover until she’s at the cash register, at which point she’ll let it go for fear of making a scene or appearing cheap or withholding.

At the same time, the persuasion also works in the other direction; parents are directly and indirectly responsible for influencing the lifelong tastes and preferences of their children. This increasingly common phenomenon is known in the industry as “hand-me-down influence,” and it tends to happen extremely early in the child’s life. Which raises the question: which comes first—the child’s influence or the parent’s? The short answer is both.

Here’s what I mean: Most families have strong cultures, attitudes, beliefs, values, and habits that a child grows up believing are the norm, and this includes everything from what they wear, to what they eat, to what brands and products they buy.
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To see how the cycle of influence works, take, for example, Tropicana orange juice, a staple of many children’s households. The child who observes his parents buying bottle after bottle of the stuff grows up believing Tropicana is the only orange juice in the universe. So when that kid goes with Mom to the grocery store, guess what brand of juice he or she will pester Mom to put in her cart? So Mom keeps buying Tropicana, and by the time that kid is older and doing her own grocery shopping, she just grabs that brand out of sheer habit. Thus a lifelong preference is born (by the way, since it’s usually the mother who takes the kid grocery shopping, mothers tend to influence adolescents’ purchases more strongly than fathers do, particularly for household products like soaps, condiments, cleaners, and laundry detergents).
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