Brandwashed (25 page)

When you think about it, this strategy is really quite brilliant. By rereleasing ads and commercials from our youth (or in the case of Michelin, our grandparents’ youth), companies are not only triggering our nostalgia for that time; they’re creating an association in our brains between our rosy memories of the era and their product. It doesn’t matter if we never once ate Heinz beans or banked at Citibank in our lives. Those old ads still trigger memories of all the other things we lovingly remember from that time (while at the same time costing the company next to nothing).

In Boynton Beach, Florida, a town populated mostly by retirees, a new free publication entitled
Nostalgic America
attempts to hook senior citizens by pairing local ads with iconic images from yesteryear. For example, a photograph of the Beatles’ 1964
Ed Sullivan Show
appearance accompanies an ad for a long-term-care facility, and a photo of Gene Kelly crooning “Singin’ in the Rain” is pictured alongside a business selling “final-expense insurance.”
²⁰
What about the 1951 ad for the debut of the
TV classic
I Love Lucy
situated next to a reverse-mortgage pitch? Still, few crafty advertising campaigns aimed at seniors can compare with the Social Security Administration tapping musician Chubby Checker to promote its program in ads that feature a black-and-white video of Checker doing the twist with dancers dressed in 1960s attire. As Mr. Checker comes into color, he says, “A new twist in the law makes it easier than ever to save on your Medicare prescription drug plans.”
²¹

It might not surprise you to learn that your everyday supermarket, not just those high-end megastores like Whole Foods, is lousy with examples of nostalgia marketing. Let’s look at
cereals. Note that the iconic Tony the Tiger—who has been around since 1952—on the box of Frosted Flakes is appealing to the child buried inside the adult who dreamed of growing up to be strong and powerful. Similarly, the Australian brand Neutragrain, most commonly consumed by males between the ages of forty and fifty, is aggressively marketed to the little boy who wants to someday grow up to become an Iron Man hunk (the brand is the official sponsor of the 2011 Iron Man series, and if you go to the Web site, you’ll be assaulted by photos of youthful, ripped athletes). I would also argue that cereal in and of itself is a nostalgia product. Go to any college or university cafeteria and you’ll find a surprising number of homesick students shoveling the stuff into their mouths. Why? Sure, they might like the taste, but it’s also a lifeline to their parents, to comfort, and to the familiarity of childhood. Cheerios, Trix, and Cocoa Puffs have all undergone a 180-degree retro repackaging and are sold nowadays in vintage boxes. And if you really want to step into a time machine, watch one of those “new” black-and-white Rice Krispies commercials in which Mom, Dad, Grandma, and their precious band of little ones mix up some Rice Krispies treat memories.

The retro
food marketing trend doesn’t stop with cereal. In 2009 Nabisco brought out vintage renditions of Ritz crackers and Oreo cookies, while Hawaiian Punch has brought back its classic tagline, “How about a nice Hawaiian Punch?” and Jiffy Pop popcorn tells consumers, “Some things are even better than you remember.” And a few years ago, Anheuser-Busch rolled out a reproduction of its first-ever Budweiser can from 1936, complete with a three-step illustration showing
consumers how to drink the thing (back in those days, beer in a can was unheard of). Speaking of dated beverages, could that possibly be Tab on the soda shelf? Tab, the favorite soft drink of countless female dieters from the 1970s, is still around? You bet, and its original lettering in an oversize, jutting font has even been retained. It’s straight out of
That Girl
or
The Partridge Family
.

Past the soda aisle, we make our way toward a vast selection of chocolates. Whitman’s Samplers? Funny, the box looks like a patchwork quilt, just like the one Grandma used to have. Werther’s caramels? Anyone remember the TV ads where Robert Rockwell played the kindly grandfather lovingly offering a caramel to his sweet, innocent-looking grandson? Talk about nostalgia.

And in 2007, the frozen food brand Swanson, rebranding itself as “Swanson classics,” relaunched a line of “original TV dinners,” which included such 1950s staples as chicken pot pie, Salisbury steak with corn and mashed potatoes, and meatloaf—all served in that iconic, segmented Styrofoam tray of our youth, of course.

Marketers know that we as consumers are hungry for any relic of our past, and not just when it comes to food. When we buy a Monopoly or Parcheesi set or a Rubik’s cube, for example, we aren’t just buying a toy or a game; we’re purchasing a trip back to our childhood. This is why
Target has reintroduced what the chain calls “selected retro
toys,” including sock monkeys and gumball machines. We’re even more likely to buy a game that a brand rolled out last week but that
looks
like a relic of our youth. Take the popular Hasbro game Taboo. It was introduced in the late nineties but includes an old-school hourglass instead of a timer (which always makes me think of
The Wizard of Oz
, another childhood classic) and has a very simple, retro look.

Nostalgia is also one reason why Best Buy, the giant electronics retailer, has recently devoted shelf space in one hundred stores around the United States to LP records (yes, you read that right,
LPs, those bizarre black spinning things that make a crackling sound when the needle reaches the end). Despite the fact that most CD stores have closed to make way for the MP3 generation, vinyl is making a serious comeback. Go on eBay and you’ll find people auctioning off thousands of old records—sometimes for hundreds of dollars or more.
Facebook groups
and fan sites for lovers of vinyl abound, and Best Buy has deemed its vinyl experiment an unqualified success.

Some brands and products are even going so far as to make up a past they don’t have. How old do you think Baileys, the Irish whiskey-and-cream-based liqueur, is? A hundred? A hundred and fifty? After all, it terms itself “The Original” and comes in an “authentic-looking” bottle designed to denote the good old days. But in reality, Baileys Irish Cream will turn a mere thirty-seven this year. And those brands unwilling to invent a history can buy one; in an auction held last year in New York, defunct names like Lucky Whip, Handi-Wrap plastic wrap, and Snow Crop orange juice—and even such old-time media names as
Collier’s
magazine and
Saturday Review—
came up for sale.
²²
The winners not only bought a trusted, time-tested brand name; they purchased the memories of an entire generation.

Even
places
designed to recall the texture of a bygone era can be extraordinarily seductive. Think about your favorite restaurant or watering hole. Does it have the thick oak bar and wood paneling of a twenties saloon? The chrome booths, fluorescent lighting, and tabletop jukebox of a fifties diner? The dark mahogany and leather of an old eighteenth-century steakhouse? Does it actually date back to the era it’s meant to re-create? Probably not. More likely some smart marketer knew that making it look and feel “old-fashioned” would help lure in crowds—and dollars. As a recent
New York Times
article reported, this has become a trend in New York’s hip West Village neighborhood, where “a pride of reincarnated restaurants . . . each taking a different area of history for inspiration,” have turned the neighborhood into a “theme park of the past.” As the article goes on to note, “designers say it is important to give a room a detailed storyline that harks back to a more intimate way of life.”
²³

“H
appiness is not something you experience; it’s something you remember,”
²⁴
Oscar Levant was once quoted as saying. All these brands and companies I’ve talked about know that for most of us, the past is
always
better than the present; quite simply, it is how our brains are hardwired. When you think about it, it’s one of the nicer tricks our brains play on us, as it protects us from painful memories and instills in us an optimism that things will be good again. But the danger, of course, is that it also makes us unwitting suckers for anything—from bruised apples to sock monkeys to classic motorcycles—that reminds us of being young. And scarier still, sometimes all it takes is a subtle, subconscious cue like a few bars of a song or some old-fashioned lettering or a picture of a dead movie star to unleash that sly seductress,
nostalgia, in us.

As America’s roughly seventy-eight million baby boomers reach their sixties, there is no doubt in my mind that nostalgia will most likely play an even more integral role in marketing than it does today. At a time when technology is advancing at an ever-increasing pace, legendary brands and institutions from Woolworth’s to Tower Records are toppling left and right, and nothing feels durable or lasting, we as consumers are clinging even more protectively to those brands that not only have endured from our childhoods but reawaken us and allow us to relive the memories from that simpler, more stable time.

Speaking of which, remember the woman I spoke about earlier in this chapter, who swears that the Mars bars from France taste better than the same Mars bars manufactured in the United States?

I believe her. Bear with me for a moment and you’ll see why.

For the past few decades, I would say, nine out of ten new French parents have given their babies
Evian water. For French parents, it’s become a minor superstition of sorts: unless they give little François or Odile a bottle or cup of Evian, the child won’t turn out to be a successful adult. Many young French families keep two separate bottles of water at home: Evian for their babies and another brand of bottled water for themselves. In the introduction to this book, I spoke about the influence parents have over their children’s choice of brands and how, whether it’s the ketchup or mustard in the fridge or the scent of shaving cream or perfume our parents used, we carry throughout our adult lives a fondness for those products we grew up with.

As it turns out, it’s not just our personal past that can affect our brand preferences for years to come. We also have an abnormal attachment to past tastes and flavors of our history and culture. A few years back,
Danone, one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies and the manufacturer of Evian water, decided that since it was so successful in France, why not try to penetrate China, which, with its more than one billion potential Evian drinkers, was a potentially lucrative market?

Normally, Danone taps its Evian water in the French Alps before shipping it to retailers and customers across the globe. But given that water is quite heavy, the costs of shipping all the way to China proved to be so financially challenging that Danone made a fateful executive decision. The company executives summoned French water-quality experts to inspect hundreds of local Chinese wells in an attempt to find one that met the quality of the French Evian water. Millions of dollars in expenses later, they uncovered the perfect well (or so they thought) and began pumping and manufacturing the Chinese variant of Evian water.

It was a flop, an across-the-board disaster. When you think about it, it’s not hard to see why French consumers would turn their noses up at the stuff. After all, for many Westerners, China connotes pollution and industrial waste, not exactly qualities we’d want in our drinking water, especially if we were used to getting it from the verdant, picturesque, natural wonder in our backyard. But as it turned out, Chinese consumers wouldn’t touch it either. What was going on?

As everyone knows, the taste of water is frustratingly difficult to put into words. Water tastes like everything; it tastes like nothing. It tastes like air; it tastes like glass; it tastes like a cold night. So an Evian research group tasked with figuring out why the Chinese hated the water so much decided not to bother asking them what they thought of the taste of the water; instead they asked them questions about their childhoods. Among them were “Where did you play when you were young?” “What was the first drink you recall drinking as a child?” and “Which drink did your parents forbid you to drink—but you drank anyway?”

The results explained everything.

Just two decades earlier, metropolitan cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou had been farmland, complete with crops, cows, and farming traditions. Roughly 60 percent of the Chinese labor force worked in agriculture; by 1990 this number had fallen to 30 percent. In the mid-1990s, it dropped further once the Chinese Industrial Revolution reorganized certain cities into economic redevelopment zones
and the government bulldozed farmland in preparation for building factories.

Remember that most of the time we as consumers are seeking to activate and re-create taste memories from long ago, though we’re not always conscious of it. This was what was going on with Evian water in China. Chinese consumers weren’t used to the bustling, urban China of today. Most of them had grown up in agrarian surroundings that were more like the French Alps than modern-day Shenzhen—and had grown accustomed, like the French, to the faintest, subtlest taste of green vegetation in their drinking water, even the bottled stuff. Farmland can turn into factories, but memories are forever green, so when Evian rolled out the new China-sourced water, Chinese consumers felt deprived of the taste of their childhoods.

Which is where Evian’s experts had gone wrong. They thought they were marketing to the China of today, not the China of yesteryear. Based on the answers to the survey questions, Evian had no choice but to hunt down wells in China that, after filtration, still boasted a faint, grassy, moldy note. This wise shift in strategy not only altered how Danone and Evian decided to operate their future international businesses but today has made Danone the third-largest player in the Chinese water market.

Which is a long way of saying that I’ll bet my American friend is right about those French Mars bars. To her, at least, they
do
taste better than the American ones.