Brandwashed (33 page)

But is shelling out the extra money for these “responsible” products actually doing any social good? Or are they just making us
feel
more virtuous, in the same way that drinking acai juice makes us
feel
more healthy? Signs point to the latter, given that research shows that when we make these kinds of purchases we tend to give ourselves permission to make less responsible decisions in other areas of our lives—say, failing to recycle our Coke can after scarfing down an organic hamburger, or pressing the gas on our eco-friendly Priuses with an alligator-skin boot—thus undoing our efforts to “do good.” One study found that
the owners of hybrid cars drive more miles, are more ticket and accident prone, and even bash into pedestrians more.
³³

More ironic still is that today, buying “responsible” products, like hybrid cars, is actually an act of conspicuous consumption—a way of purchasing the respect and admiration of our peers (an old episode of
South Park
didn’t refer to it as the “Pious” for nothing). And in fact, Toyota engineered this quite deliberately. Not only were its designers the first to make an environmentally friendly car stylish, even
sexy
, with its sleek design, powerful engine, and cool-looking solar-powered moonroof, its marketers made the Prius nothing short of a status symbol by taking swift advantage of our devotion to celebrity. How? The company turned to Mike Sullivan, the owner of Toyota of Hollywood, and arranged for him to transport twenty-six Priuses to the 2003 Oscars, and “before long,”
BusinessWeek
notes, “such stars as Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio were being photographed (‘Look, we’re so green!’) with their Priuses, and ‘It became the cool thing to do,’ says Sullivan.”
³⁴
Toyota also loaned cars to an LA public relations agency, thus ensuring snapshots of such stars as Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart in Priuses, and also provided Priuses for use on such TV shows and movies as
CSI Miami
,
Weeds
,
Evan Almighty
, and
Superbad
, where the cars ended up being featured prominently (always driven by the lead characters, no less).
³⁵
With celebrities like Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, Will Ferrell, Miley Cyrus, Tim Robbins, Larry David (who owns three Priuses, including the one his character drives on his HBO series,
Curb Your Enthusiasm
),
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and others singing the praises of Toyota’s environmental marvel, and both the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation endorsing the Prius
³⁷
(remember the power of experts?), it’s no wonder that as of this writing, the hip brand is Toyota’s third-best-selling model, just behind the far more affordable Camry and the Corolla.
³⁸
In fact, several consumer studies today rank Toyota as one of the most environmentally friendly brands in the world. But hold on a moment—isn’t Toyota a
car
company?

The appeal of the Prius is a perfect example of what psychologists call “competitive altruism,” a widely accepted theory which asserts that people do socially responsible things (like buy hybrids and other environmentally friendly products) not so much to do good but rather to
show off their benevolence and enhance their social reputations. One study supporting this theory found that even the most (ostensibly) environmentally conscious consumers tend to actually
avoid
buying green products when no one else is around to witness their selfless, mindful behavior. When people buy lightbulbs over the Internet, for example, they tend to choose the nongreen, politically incorrect (and less expensive) option. But if they’re buying in the store, where other people can see them, they will typically go with the longer-lasting LED bulb in the recycled package. As the researchers explain, “Status motives led people to make a rather economically irrational decision, at least from a superficial perspective. When people are thinking about status, they in fact want to spend more—to demonstrate not only that they are environmentally conscious, but also that they can
afford
to be environmentally conscious.”
³⁹

Is it any coincidence, then, that in July 2007, according to data from CNW Marketing Research, when asked why they bought a Prius, most people gave the one answer that every marketer loves to hear? The main reason for buying a Prius, said 57 percent of owners, was because “it makes a statement about me.”
⁴⁰

I
guess it should come as no surprise, given the turbulence of these times and the return to basics that it has inspired in many of us, that spiritual marketing—the term for trying to pass off products as having soothing, magical, or summoning qualities—has become a popular strategy for all kinds of unlikely brands and products, ranging from candy to sports drinks to even
cars and computers.

Today, those seeking “a taste of nirvana” can munch Hampton Chutney or suck on “Classy Yoga Candy” or “Karma Candy.” And if this leaves you thirsty, Anheuser-Busch recently rolled out a series of ads featuring parched Tibetan lamas gazing longingly at a blimp labeled “Budweiser.” Still, when it comes to spiritual marketing, few edible products can compete with the invention of one Gao Xianzhang, a Chinese farmer who has actually come up with a way to grow Buddha-shaped
pears. Sure, they cost about $7.50 apiece, but that hasn’t stopped this ingenious farmer from selling close to ten thousand of them.

A commercial for the 2010 Hyundai Sonata features a “suggested daily routine for achieving inner peace” (essentially just a handful of yoga poses including one cleverly christened “the Sonata”),
⁴¹
while in one spot for Gatorade, basketball legend Michael Jordan hikes up a rocky mountain (Himalayan, no doubt) in search of a spiritual guru whose sage wisdom turns out to be the brand’s slogan, “Life’s a sport. . . . Drink it up.” And the computer maker IBM and Web search engine Lycos have both built advertising campaigns around Sherpas and Tibetan holy men.
⁴²

Sometimes holy people even participate in this brandwashing. For example, a rustic Cistercian abbey in the Midwest has a for-profit arm called
LaserMonks.com
. When not praying or fasting, these monks—yes, actual monks—will refill your used printer cartridges. The monks claim that they have served more than fifty thousand customers to date and that they process anywhere from two hundred to three hundred daily orders. Their 2005 sales? $2.5 million.
⁴³
(Oh, and the Web site also indulges Internet prayer requests.)
⁴⁴
And one Los Angeles company, known as
Intentional Chocolate, goes so far as to employ a recording device that captures the electromagnetic brain waves of real-life meditating Tibetan monks before “exposing” the recording to the chocolates in the assembly lines for five days per batch. According to company founder Jim Walsh, “Whoever consumes this chocolate will manifest optimal health and functioning at physical, emotional and mental levels and in particular will enjoy an increased sense of energy, vigor and well-being for the benefit of all beings.”
⁴⁵

If New Age spirituality has really become the new consumer religion, is it any wonder that there is a moisturizer called Hydra Zen or that a campaign for the beauty company ghd, which refers to itself as “a new religion for hair,” explains how users can live their lives according to the “gospel of ghd”? Or that the logo for Brazil’s Sagatiba, a popular sugarcane-based liquor, is Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer? Similarly, Guerlain, the upscale Parisian perfumer, distributes a fragrance known as Samsara, which is named after the Buddhist cycle of birth and rebirth and whose ad copy reads, “Samsara is the symbol of harmony,
of osmosis between a woman and her perfume” (the perfume stopper even resembles the eye of Buddha).

The reason all this works so well? Well, remember that our brains are predisposed to believe in something—anything. You might say that as humans we
need
to believe. Which is why companies are constantly coming up with new and ingenious ways to capitalize not just on New Agey spirituality but also on traditional, old-world faith and religion. To give one rather surprising example, I’ve noticed that in recent years the increasing number of modern-leaning Muslims in our society have presented companies with an unexpected yet very lucrative opportunity. A little background: If you’re a devout Muslim, your religion dictates that you can only eat foods designated “halal,” which is an Arabic term defined as “lawful” or “permitted” (among other things, this excludes pork and its by-products, animals not properly slaughtered, carnivorous animals, and alcohol). Now, historically, buying halal food meant going to a Muslim grocer or butcher, who cut the meat in accordance with Islamic principles.
⁴⁶
Such a person might not be hard to find in downtown Baghdad, but here in the States, there aren’t exactly Muslim butchers on every corner. Which is why food companies have begun to offer thousands of new products boasting the halal label. This business, according to the
Halal Journal
, is worth roughly $632 billion per year—a staggering 16 percent of the global food industry.
⁴⁷

Today companies are slapping the halal label on everything from food to makeup to even furniture (in this case, it could be the oil, paint, or soap used to stain the wood that claims halal certification). Canadian drug companies even sell halal vitamins, which claim to be “free of the gelatins and other animal derivatives that some Islamic scholars say make mainstream products
haram
, or unlawful,” and there are multiple halal
cosmetics lines, including a brand called OnePure, which has supposedly been certified in Malaysia by the same Islamic body responsible for certifying meats. “People are always looking for the next purity thing,” confirms Mah Hussain-Gambles, who built the halal makeup firm Saaf Pure Skincare.
⁴⁸
Whether or not all these religious claims are legitimate, they certainly are persuasive. A Muslim taxi driver in New York once told me that to make up for his lack of devoutness, he’d begun buying more and more halal-branded products; they made him feel better about his
spiritual lapses. Which is exactly the point. These shrewd brands aren’t really selling food and perfume and makeup; they’re selling purity, spirituality, faith, virtue, and in some cases atonement.

If you’re not a Muslim, and buying faith is what you’re after, never fear:
eBay has you covered. According to
Newsweek
, in 2008 the popular auction site offered strands of hair purportedly from the head of Saint Thérèse de Lisieux (bidding began at $40 per strand). Or you could purchase a fragment of bone supposedly from the thirteen-year-old saint Philomena, who, according to legend, was flogged, drowned, and finally beheaded for refusing to marry the Roman emperor Diocletian.
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All of which prompted the author of the article to wonder whether it was really possible to purchase “a piece of God’s grace and mystery with a credit card.”
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That’s not all. Among the strangest and arguably most ridiculous faith-based eBay offerings were a grilled cheese sandwich that appeared to be emblazoned with the face of the Virgin Mary (it was bought by an online casino for $28,000) and a Dorito that precisely resembled the Pope’s miter, or signature hat (it was bought by the same casino for $1,209). But don’t worry: those with more modest budgets need only shell out $3.26 for an item claiming to be “The Meaning of Life.” What exactly would be arriving at your doorstep after purchasing such an item was unclear; the only picture the seller provided was a vista of a beautiful rainbow.
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I can’t talk about selling faith without mentioning the phenomenon of the megachurch, which debuted in 1977 with Houston’s First Baptist—seating capacity 3,300—and today is nothing less than a marketing machine. Concentrated mostly in the South, mega
churches tend to look more like shopping malls than places of worship, outfitted with coffee bars, bookstores, video games, food courts, and even bowling alleys. Others more closely resemble cineplexes, as they’ve hired technological consultants to help them install multimedia screens on which the sermon is broadcast via the Web. With a high-velocity mixture of music, media, print, and Web, “the amount of technology . . . can rival a large concert hall,” says Jack Duran, executive vice president of Turner Partners Architecture, LP.
⁵²
Says another architect who has worked on transforming the look of American churches as well as theaters and
entertainment complexes, including one at Universal Studios, “When you get the children to come back again and again, the parents will follow.”
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Yet other churches have embraced the more corporate side of the coin. According to
Forbes
magazine, World Changers Ministries “operates a music studio, publishing house, computer graphic design suite and owns its own record label,”
⁵⁴
while the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church not only has a CEO in place but offers a “special effects 3-D Web site that offers videos-on-demand.”
⁵⁵
And the Great Barrington, Illinois–based Willow Creek Community Church is famous for its marketing conferences and seminars and for its “buzz” events, featuring speakers ranging from business consultant Jim Collins to President Bill Clinton to former Washington Redskins coach Joe Gibbs.
⁵⁶
Tickets can range anywhere from $25 to hundreds of dollars a pop.

W
hether the brand’s promise is health, happiness, or enlightenment, what all the marketing ploys we’ve been talking about in this chapter have in common is that they tap into our very human desire to return to the earth. To reclaim an innocence untainted by money or by the stresses of contemporary life. They’re all about selling us inner peace, spiritual fulfillment, and a better life.