Brandwashed (8 page)

Y
ou may have noticed that many of the tactics we’ve been talking about so far seem to be aimed at women. That’s because studies have shown that women are more prone to fear and guilt than men are. When psychologists in Spain recently questioned three hundred men and women between the ages of fifteen and fifty about the kinds of daily situations that engendered feelings of guilt—whether failing to make the time to visit a sick relative in the hospital, forgetting a friend’s birthday, or losing patience with a friend—in each and every case women felt significantly higher levels of guilt than their male counterparts (and were also more likely to feel angry with themselves if they felt they had hurt another person).
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No one is more vulnerable to fear and guilt than mothers, particularly new mothers. Now that you’re responsible for this fragile little person, the entire world has suddenly become one giant death trap. And you haven’t seen germophobia until you’ve seen a new mother. No matter where I am in the world, when I ask new mothers what they do when the baby finally arrives, 90 percent tell me that they begin
to clean as if there’s no tomorrow; they’re absolutely terrified of anything that could possibly harm or even contaminate their new arrivals. If Purell and other body and home sanitizers don’t yet play a major part in their lives, they will now. But those aren’t the only products out there marketed to paranoid mothers and fathers. Not even close. Among the many other health- and safety-related items there are: ointments, humidifiers, car seats that make Alcatraz look easy to escape, baby gates, cabinet locks, three-hundred-dollar digital color video baby monitors, “safety bath-time thermometers,” “safety bath-time faucet covers,” and more. This stuff doesn’t necessarily make the little ones any safer, either. For example, across Japan physicians are finding that Japanese babies’ immune systems are actually breaking down as an unfortunate consequence of their parents’ preoccupation with germs.

Still, marketers and advertisers are very skilled at playing to new mothers’ inherent fears, which I believe to be evolutionarily wired, that if they
don’t
buy all this stuff, they’re “not a good enough mother.” And in fact these are the first words that pop out of mothers’ mouths when their infant gets an infection or catches a cold—even though the chances of this happening at some point in the first few years of the child’s life are nearly 100 percent. Nonetheless, an insecure, hormonal, frequently isolated new mother believes it’s
her
fault. She messed up. She didn’t protect her child—a false impression she gleaned from one televised image after another of plump-cheeked, airbrushed babies who look as though they’ve never caught a cold, had an ear infection, or had a scrape on them.

I don’t know any new mother who doesn’t feel guilty about something. Maybe she’s worried she doesn’t buy her child enough educational toys. Or that she’s not preparing every meal from scratch, or that if she is, she isn’t using fresh or high-quality-enough ingredients. Is she a good mother compared to other mothers? There are so many ways for her to feel she isn’t living up to society’s standards. Naturally, there are an endless array of products out there—from LeapFrog computers for young children to organic baby food to postnatal exercise videos to LED lightbulbs to Priuses—to alleviate all that guilt.

In our time-starved society, how many mothers have time to drive to the supermarket, buy fresh ingredients, lug them home, then spend
hours peeling, chopping, simmering, sautéing, baking, and broiling them to perfection? Yet most moms (and dads) feel incredibly guilty about bringing home a prepackaged meal—or worse yet, getting takeout. No matter how convenient that frozen lasagna looks, if it comes in a cardboard box, most mothers feel guilty about serving it, as if doing so would be saying she doesn’t really care. That’s why food marketers came up with the ruse known as the finishing touch.

A few years ago, supermarkets began selling pizza. Not just in the frozen-food section; now a busy mom can buy raw pizza dough, a bag of mozzarella, and a jar of sauce, bring it home, roll out the crust herself, and voilà—feel as though she’s cooked homemade pizza (in the real world they may call it “cooking,” but behind the scenes, marketers dub creating a meal of any kind “assembling”). This was a brilliant marketing ploy, not just on the part of the supermarkets for shelving these existing products together but also on the part of brands like Pillsbury for rolling out a new “pizza dough” (not so different from its regular crescent roll dough) and Ragú for expanding its offerings to include “pizza sauce” (not very different from its regular tomato sauce). These canny companies learned that they could make a killing by selling us products that look “finished” but in fact require a little effort—the finishing touch—on our part.

Thus, a guilt-ridden mother can now provide a well-rounded, nutritious, home-cooked meal for her family. In the time it takes to mix in a packet of spices, gone is the fear that she’s served her family a premade, manufactured, subpar product.

Now you understand what Hamburger Helper or Duncan Hines brownie mix (add an egg and half a cup of water) are all about.

“Y
our dad wants you to have things he never had. Like hair,” reads the ad for Rogaine. Immediately the male viewer thinks about his hardworking, self-sacrificing father—before terror of losing more inches of his own rapidly retreating hairline sets in. Notice the sly combination of guilt and fear at work here?

An ad for the much maligned pain reliever Vioxx shows the famous figure skater Dorothy Hamill perched on a bench, lacing up her skates, with the voice-over “Along with all the great memories has come something I thought I’d never experience—the pain of osteoarthritis.” Our reaction?
Oh no! If an Olympic ice skater can come down with arthritis, so can I! But look—thanks to Vioxx, she’s skating again!
Fear, followed by hope and renewal. The classic one-two punch.

Do you suffer from allergies? The woman pictured in the ad for Flonase allergy spray sure does. In a series of photos, we see her unhappily rubbing and wiping her runny, red nose and finally clutching her nostrils in agony. She looks miserable, at the end of her rope. Then we see her after two squirts of Flonase spray. She’s now outdoors, laughing while her hunky husband rakes the lawn. Her teeth quite miraculously have suddenly become blindingly white. A beautiful blond child stands nearby, beaming. There’s a wheelbarrow and a watering can and probably more pollen and dander and grass than anyone can imagine, and guess what? It doesn’t bother her one bit. Flonase has transformed our sneezy, hacking worst nightmare into a sexy, feminine, outdoors-loving, allergy-free object of our envy and desire.

Sure, pharmaceutical ads play on our fear of death and disease and aging to get us to buy their products. But I believe that’s not the only fear tactic at work. Pharmaceutical companies also play on one of the most subtle yet powerful of psychological tricks: our fear of social isolation, of being outsiders. Countless studies show that humans have a universal need to belong (dating way back to our early ancestors, for whom survival depended on being a member of a band or tribe); for most of us, the thought of being left out or alone is terrifying.

How exactly do the drug companies play—and prey—on this fear? Believe it or not, they use a formula that, according to a research study carried out at Stanford University, is more or less standard for this kind of fear-based advertising. They begin with solitary shots of our worst “feared” self—a balding man, an overweight woman, or an unhappy or distracted child—whose gaze is conspicuously averted. Once the person in the ad has taken whatever it is that is designed to improve their appearance, steady their mood, or alleviate their symptoms, not only do they look brighter, happier, and sexier, but they face straight
ahead at the camera. This accomplishes two things. First, as any psychologist will tell you, averted gazes are generally associated with shame and social isolation, while a straight-ahead gaze is a sign of confidence and connectedness. So the straight-ahead gaze implies that taking the drug or medication has magically made the person in the advertisement not just healthier but more popular, loved, and accepted. Second, it invites you, the viewer, into the person’s life. In the advertising industry, this “after” picture is termed a “demand” photo, because the newly slimmed down/refocused/cured model “demands” a connection from the viewer.
Recognize me
, the photograph says.
Meet my gaze. You know me. This brand works. If you want to be as happy as I am, use it
.
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Big Pharma has plenty of critics. And while I’ll concede that pharmaceutical executives don’t actually sit around in boardrooms rubbing their hands together, concocting new ways to terrorize the public, given that the very nature of their products is to cure or treat things that most people find universally scary, like serious disease, it’s inevitable that fear finds a way into their marketing and advertising strategies.

Pharmaceutical companies don’t just remind us of all the horrible conditions we might one day come down with, like an embarrassing skin disease, sexual dysfunction, cancer, and so on. They also spend millions of dollars a year stirring up fear in our hearts over conditions we never even knew to be afraid of. Restless leg syndrome? Fibromyalgia? Premenstrual dysphoric disorder? Who knew such things even existed? Well, thanks to the psychologically manipulative and oft-aired commercials, we all do now.

Do you suffer from shyness? Apparently shyness isn’t just a personality trait but an actual pathology, and one that only Paxil can cure. What about acid reflux disease, formerly known as heartburn? Today there are over a dozen drugs, from Nexium to Prilosec to Zantac, available to treat it. Who knew that irritable bowels weren’t just the unfortunate repercussions of a spicy Mexican dinner and were actually a “syndrome”? PMDD, or “premenstrual dysphoric disorder,” is a relatively recent condition, though it bears much in common with the monthly hormonal changes fertile women have been experiencing for centuries. LBL, which stands for “light bladder leakage,” is an even newer one, pharmacologically speaking. Anyone who’s ever gone
swimming in a public pool has probably encountered a young child who suffers from this.

These days, we’re being persuaded to ask our doctors for medications to address what were once considered nothing more than everyday inconveniences. A recent study by two York University researchers found that Big Pharma spends nearly twice as much on promotion and advertising as it does on research and development. No wonder Americans are the most overmedicated people on earth, with overall domestic sales of prescription drugs totaling $235.4 billion.
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I
’ll bet that if you’re in the habit of buying the morning paper, you bypass the one directly on top of the stack. Instead, you lift up the top newspaper and pull out the one directly underneath it. Did you know that consciously or not, 72 percent of people do the same? Why? Because we imagine that the second one from the top hasn’t been manhandled by countless germy fingertips and is therefore somehow cleaner than the one above it. (Ironically, though, after scanning the headlines, many of that same 72 percent of consumers replace that paper right where they found it, under the top one, so they all end up thumbing through the same finger-smudged newspaper over and over.) It’s the same phenomenon that explains why when women visit the ladies’ rooms of hotels, stores, and restaurants, only 5 percent of them will enter the first stall. Why? Because they believe it’s less clean than the second or third one. Go figure!

The point is that the illusion of cleanliness or freshness is a subtle but powerful persuader—and marketers know it. I believe this is tied into our nearly universal fear of germs, which ties in to our innate fear of disease, illness, and even death. Think of all the lengths we go to in order to avoid “contaminants” in our lives. We slather on epic amounts of hand sanitizer. We pay exorbitant prices for fruit and produce grown without pesticides. We shell out extra for household cleaning products labeled “nontoxic” (so persuasive is this messaging that the company Method, which claims its products are “a cleaner clean,” is now the
seventh-fastest-growing private company in the United States).
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Does any of this actually make us any healthier? No, not really. But it does make us less afraid of getting sick.

Global contagions aside, our fear of germs pervades a whole host of buying decisions we make in our everyday lives, from which newspaper we pull off the stack to which groceries we buy. On a recent (NBC)
Today
segment, when my team and I scanned the brain of a female volunteer named Kelly as she made her way down the supermarket aisle so we could analyze her thought patterns as she made her selections, one of the most interesting things we found was that perceptions of cleanliness had a big impact on her decisions—without her even realizing it.

Over the length of the segment, store executives, the film crew, the producer, and even TV viewers failed to notice one thing that our brain scanners were able to pick up. Every time Kelly picked a product off the shelf, the scientists were able to detect a slight pause or increase in reaction time before she put the object either in her basket or back on the shelf. This in itself isn’t all that surprising; it takes most of us a second or two to decide whether or not to buy something. But what was really interesting was that every time Kelly held a product in her hand, the brain scans revealed strong activity in her brain’s amygdala region—the region responsible for fear, dread, danger, and discomfort (it also serves as a memory storage unit). Literally every product she touched during her shopping excursion sparked a fear response in Kelly’s brain.