Free Brandwashed by Martin Lindstrom Page A

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. 33
Germophobia
    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 theseventh-fastest-growing private company in the United States). 34 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.
    What was going on here? After watching the tapes again, we noticed that generally, if Kelly liked a product enough to touch it, study it, and ponder it, she’d buy it,
but not the one she’d picked up
. Instead, just like those newspaper buyers, she’d put that “tainted” bottle of shampoo or can