Brandwashed (14 page)

When I spoke to Paul Hurley, the CEO of
ideeli, he admitted that his remarkably successful site has both a “social component” and a “game structure.” When you think about it, ideeli, Groupon, and these other social flash shopping sites really do have everything an addictive game could want. A prize. A ticking clock. A challenge. Other players. An “invitation only” exclusivity. Not to mention it’s, well,
fun
. One study, which looked at an online auction site known as
Swoopo, confirmed that although consumers aren’t pleased when they lose out on a deal, near misses “increased the desire to play the game.”
⁴³
Win or lose, our brains just want to keep on playing.

Jesse Schell predicts that in the future the convergence between gaming and buying, especially online, will only continue to intensify. And what’s more, games will increasingly migrate over from “dream stage” to the “routine stage” and become more and more integrated
in our daily lives. To some extent, this is happening already, from the bargain hunter who checks her daily Groupon and Gilt offers first thing every morning to the Foursquare user for whom checking in at Starbucks is as routine as drinking his morning coffee.

So where does it all end? Time will tell. One thing, though, is for sure. Whether by engineering cravings, imbuing products with chemically addictive properties, or turning shopping and spending into a game we can’t stop playing, companies and their marketers will only get better and better at manipulating our psyches and our desires to hook us on their brands and products.

G
uess how many times a day men across the world think about sex? Two? Five? Twenty? Try thirty-two times a day—which adds up to 224 times a week.

In my last book, I explored everyone’s favorite subject: sex. Specifically, the question “Does sex sell?”

My research found that men and
women reacted to sexually provocative advertising—suggestive commercials, ads featuring scantily clad models, that sort of thing—in much the same way they respond to sexual suggestion in real life. In general, women tend to be more easily persuaded by ads that are more romantic than sexual, ones that emphasize commitment, devotion, and partnership. Not surprisingly, men, on the other hand, responded to sexual innuendo and women in bikinis, especially when the ads or commercials were leavened with a heaping dose of adolescent humor.

That said, my research revealed that when it comes to persuading us to buy, sexy ads can sometimes backfire. In one study, I showed two separate groups of men identical ads. The first group watched sexually suggestive ads, while the other group saw the same ads, only without the sexual content. Turned out, the men who saw the sexually
suggestive commercials were no better at remembering the names of the brands and products they’d seen advertised than the men who’d seen the unerotic ads. In other words, while the male volunteers may have enjoyed the whiff of sexuality, ultimately it had no effect on their memory or impression of the actual product.

Yet sexually suggestive advertising isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, mostly because when we see attractive, scantily clad young people advertising an energy drink or a brand of underwear or a new line of cosmetics, the mirror neurons in our brain allow us to imagine ourselves as being equally attractive and sexually desirable. And after all, what is advertising about if not planting hopes and dreams inside our brains?

Sure enough, sex in advertising is still everywhere we look. Abercrombie & Fitch has recently reinstated its soft-porn in-store catalog,
American Apparel still showcases its pouty, scantily clad models in giant store windows, footballer David Beckham still sprawls across a Times Square billboard in his skivvies (at the time of writing, at least), and the 420 million Web sites spawned by the $4.9 billion global pornography industry still carry ads for everything from “sexual enhancement” products to escort services to, well, more pornography (by the way, in case you’re wondering, the average age a child stumbles across a porn site? I hate to say it, but it’s eleven).
¹
And though it may not work all the time, there is evidence to suggest that a sexed-up ad campaign can be persuasive, if it’s done in the right way; as Dr. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, found, people are more likely to expend money and effort on products and activities if they’re first primed with photographs of the opposite sex or stories about dating.
²

To give you one example of how sex can still sell, a few years ago one of the world’s biggest car manufacturers contacted me to help it turn around declining sales of one of its most iconic brands.

Throughout my years as a branding consultant, I’ve sought to explore the personality of the target customer so that I could help import that personality into the brand. This time around, though, I took a newfangled approach to connecting with consumers’ psyches. I created a rather unusual deck of cards—each of the two hundred cards picturing
a different animal. Then I asked a group of middle-aged men (the target customers) to identify five different animals they believed best represented the brand.

Next, I used fMRI neuroimaging to narrow the findings. When my team showed the men pictures of the first four animals they’d named, it was pretty much business as usual in their brains. But to everyone’s surprise, the final animal we showed them lit up those brain regions associated with sexual attraction and mating. When we then showed the same men photos and images of their dream cars (cars they either could ill afford or felt they were too old to drive), bingo: these same randy brain regions lit up.

Turns out that subconsciously, these nicely dressed businessmen, who had been married an average of twenty-three years and were the fathers of an average of 2.5 children, associated their dream cars—and that particular animal—with one thing, and one thing only. Sex. Bingo, we had our answer.

From that point forward, the animal—code-named “Asterix”—informed every single detail of the car’s design, engineering, and appearance. The animal in question was and is black, sleek, and rare, with smooth lines and long curves mixed with a “feminine” smoothness. The goal was to give the car smooth, shapely curves and motions: to make the male driver feel as if he were saddling up, riding, and conquering a fast, powerful, supple, beautiful animal. The engineers at the auto company imported these sensuous qualities to the car’s dashboard, gear stick, interior leather, and even door handles. In short, the car was sex on four wheels, and four years later, when it finally hit the road, the company enjoyed one of the greatest sales turnarounds in its history. (P.S. For the record, it was an Arabian horse, renowned, among other things, for, uh, the size of its penis.)

S
o how do I know that men think about sex thirty-two times a day? Because I talked to
David Cousino, a highly regarded
Unilever executive and an expert in consumer and market insight, who shared this,
as well as the many other surprising findings
Unilever’s internal research team uncovered when preparing to roll out what would become a multimillion-dollar brand:
Axe.

Axe is a line of men’s personal-care products that includes deodorant
body sprays, sticks, and roll-ons; shampoos; and body washes with names like Apollo, Kilo, Phoenix, Tsunami, and Voodoo. Introduced in the United States in 2002, Axe is renowned in marketing circles for how it craftily positioned is products as bottled pheromones—magical potions that could transform the greasiest, scrawniest, most acne-prone schlub into a confident, gorgeous, chiseled sex magnet. The behind-the-scenes story of how Unilever created this now-legendary Axe campaign isn’t just another demonstration of the power of sex in advertising; it’s also a fascinating example of just how deeply companies and marketers probe the depths of our inner psyches—our hopes, dreams, and daydreams—in the service of crafting the kinds of provocative, scandalously sexual, and smashingly successful campaigns that push the very limits of advertising as we know it.

First, the Unilever team conducted an extensive, in-depth online survey of twelve thousand boys and men aged fifteen to fifty around the world—from the United States to the UK to Mexico to South Africa to Turkey to Japan. But it wasn’t your average survey. This survey asked these twelve thousand males a series of highly personal, somewhat embarrassing questions, such as: “What is your strategy when you want to pick up a girl?” “When do you feel really insecure?” “When were you rejected by a girl?” “What is your ideal sexual fantasy?” and the aforementioned “How many times do you think about sex a day?” Why was Unilever asking these questions? “We wanted to identify male human truths,” recalls Cousino, whose team then analyzed the research country by country. “The things that make men tick, that are the same no matter where you go, no matter where you were born or who you are.”

The results were, to say the least, revealing (there’s nothing like online anonymity to get a guy to spill his guts). It may sound like a cliché or a scene from a bad porno flick, but as it turns out, the number one fantasy among men is this: A boy or a man is lounging in a hot tub or spa. He’s surrounded by three or four naked women. A corked bottle
of champagne stands nearby, with its foam bubbling over into the hot tub. Based on these responses and others, the Axe team realized something. The ultimate male fantasy isn’t just to be found irresistible by a sexy woman. It’s to be found irresistible by
several
sexy women! This was the groundbreaking revelation that was soon to become the crux of Axe’s campaign. Says Cousino, “We realized—or rather, had it confirmed . . . that if the campaign was to be successful, it would have to emphasize the pheromone aspects of the brand.” But wait, these marketers weren’t done probing yet.

Next, in a spirit of male camaraderie, Cousino and his Unilever colleagues accompanied roughly a hundred males (identical studies were later carried out across other European countries, North America, and Latin America) aged fifteen to fifty to the pubs until three or four in the morning and (soberly, while secretly taking copious notes) watched them in action. Their goal was to see how these men would pick women out of the crowd and ultimately approach them (to analyze their “game,” as it were). After poring over their pages and pages of notes, in the end, and via a process known in the industry as “segmentation,” the Unilever team isolated six psychological profiles of the male animal—and the potential Axe user.

The breakdown: