Free Brandwashed by Martin Lindstrom Page B

of coffee or bag of tortilla chips back on the shelf before selecting an identical one stashed one or two items behind it. And on one occasion, when the product Kelly wanted was the lone one remaining on the shelf, the fear response in her brain was so pronounced she ended up choosing another brand altogether—though if you had asked her, she would have had no idea why she had done so.
    It makes sense that our fear of germs or contamination would be particularly pronounced when it comes to food products. But how dowe explain the fact that Kelly’s fear response was just as strong for, say, paper towels as it was for a carton of milk? I chalk it up to clever marketing that plants seeds in our brains—subconsciously, of course—that maybe a product is or isn’t as “clean” as we believe. To see what I mean, picture, say, a marmalade display. Marmalade, as most people know, is a fruit preserve with a thick, peely texture and a syrupy taste. From the beginning of time, marmalade, which originated in Scotland, has been marketed and sold in jars with tartan-plaid screw tops, to cultivate that exotic suggestion of its being “imported” (even though most is manufactured in the United States). Still, because most Americans believe jars of this “exotic” product have traveled thousands of miles in who knows what conditions and been manhandled by who knows how many grimy mitts, the average consumer, before buying a jar of marmalade, will carefully inspect it, hoping to confirm that what he or she is buying is safe, fresh, and uncontaminated.
    Yet there is no way on earth a marmalade manufacturer can guarantee freshness. Marmalade is simply
not
a fresh product. It’s not meant to be. Those glass jars have been sitting on this supermarket shelf for upwards of eight months. But marketers don’t want us to know that! So what do they do? They try to create the
illusion
of freshness by attaching the top of the marmalade lid to the glass jar with a narrow white strip of adhesive paper. When the strip is unbroken, it means that no one has twisted the top of the can open (and done who knows what to it). It signals to consumers,
Hey, don’t worry, you’ve got a fresh jar!
    Hotels, incidentally, employ a similar tactic by placing a paper seal on the seats of their toilets and a paper lid on glasses you’ll find in the bathroom or near the minibar. I’ve always been astonished by the fact that a single, flimsy sheet of paper is enough to create the illusion that no other person has ever used that toilet or drank out of that glass, but somehow it does (And in fact one hotel employee once admitted to me that the glasses are not actually washed—merely dried with a towel—before being used again and again. Yet that paper lid gives us the illusion of cleanliness.)
    Marketers call this the “fresh strip.” Along with its close relative, the plastic seal, the fresh strip is today standard in many food and product categories including, among others, yogurt, peanut butter, coffee,ketchup, iced tea, mustard, juice, vitamins, and over-the-counter medicines. It conveys the (in many cases false) impression that what’s inside this jar, bag, or container is unsullied by germs, untouched by another human being. Moreover, many of these jars and containers are deliberately engineered so that when we unscrew that marmalade at home, we’ll hear that comforting
smack
sound, further reassurance that what we’ve bought is fresh, clean, and safe—never mind that the smacking sound was created and patented in a sound lab to manipulate us into believing that the marmalade was flown in from Edinburgh just this morning.
    Don’t be fooled. The reality is that this jar of marmalade has likely been sitting on this shelf unbothered for months. Occasionally, a clerk will come by and dust it.
When a Banana Is Not Just a Banana
    T o truly see all the tricks marketers have for creating the illusion of freshness, there’s no place better to go than Whole