by Ian Leslie
It was far from the only one to do so. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the failure rate of new drugs in trials against placebos was higher than it had been since such testing became standard. Expensively produced, highly effective anti-depressants consistently failed to prove themselves against placebos – as did new wonder treatments for schizophrenia, Crohn’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. It wasn’t just new drugs that were crossing the futility boundary. Drugs that had been around for decades, including some of the industry’s greatest hits, like Prozac, have faltered in recent tests against placebos. If they were to undergo testing by the regulatory authorities now, they might not pass. These medications aren’t any weaker than they used to be, and nor are new drugs becoming pharmacologically less sophisticated – quite the opposite. But in the competition to dominate our central nervous systems, the expensively developed drugs produced by the pharmaceutical companies are facing a seemingly much improved, terrifyingly effective competitor: the sugar pill. If they want to keep charging high prices for their drugs, they will need to find out why this is.
The answer probably doesn’t lie in the laboratory. We can get closer to it by way of wine-drinking, the ailments of war veterans and the marketing of breakfast cereals.
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For over seventy years the cereal brand Shreddies has been a fixture of the supermarket shelves and kitchen cupboards of Britain, Canada and New Zealand. Anyone who has grown up in those countries will instantly recognise these squares of waffled whole wheat. Shreddies is owned by Post Cereals, which is part of the global food company Kraft. For marketers, a brand like Shreddies is both a blessing and a problem. On the one hand, it is so well-known and so entrenched in the repertoires of shoppers that its sales can be relied upon to provide a steady stream of revenue. On the other, familiarity breeds passivity; consumers barely notice brands they know well and are easily distracted by more novel and exciting alternatives. The challenge for a brand manager, therefore, is to do what the Russian school of formalist criticism described as the task of literature: to defamiliarise the familiar. Or in this case, to make Shreddies seem new again.
This is hard – there are only so many things you can say about a square of wheat, and over the preceding decades pretty much all of them had been said. But this was the problem presented to the Toronto office of ad agency Ogilvy and Mather in 2006, when the Shreddies client asked the agency to come up with a new poster and TV campaign to give its venerable brand a jolt of excitement. It would be the first time for several years that serious money had been spent on advertising Shreddies, and the brief went to all of the agency’s senior creative teams, who were asked to work on ideas for a TV and poster campaign, and to make it their first priority. At the same time, another, somewhat less high-profile brief landed on the desk of a twenty-six-year-old copywriting intern called Hunter Somerville. He was asked to come up with a concept for the back of the Shreddies box – something new and fun to catch the eye of shoppers. He faced the same problem as his more senior colleagues, albeit in a miniature form: to say something about Shreddies that was neither a cliche nor a lie.
After a career as an improvisational comedian, Somerville had come to advertising on the basis that it couldn’t be that difficult to pen an advertising script that was funnier than most of those he saw on TV. As a consumer, one of the things that annoyed Somerville about ads was the way they constantly made up phony reasons to say ‘new’ when it was patently clear they had nothing new to say at all. ‘Now with added X’ or ‘Now with all X removed’; it all seemed fraudulent, and a little desperate. Now that he was on the other side, Somerville at least understood where the desperation came from. When deadline day arrived he only had one idea, and it was so absurd, so deeply silly, that he feared he might be marched out of the building the moment he shared it. ‘I just thought it was funny,’ he told me. Somerville’s idea was to show a picture of a Shreddie rotated by forty-five degrees so that it balanced on its tip. This, the copy announced, was a ‘new’ type of Shreddie – the ‘Diamond Shreddie’.
Later that day, the creative directors of the agency reviewed ideas for the new campaign and didn’t see anything that excited them. When Somerville presented his idea to them, there was a moment’s silence. Then his bosses began shaking with laughter. Diamond Shreddies was the funniest thing they’d seen all day. ‘It was almost embarrassing, how much they laughed,’ Somerville said later. He was asked to write TV scripts along the same lines, followed by posters, and a website. The more the creative directors saw how the idea might play out, the more they liked it. When they took it to Post’s director of marketing, she loved it too.
Somerville’s silly idea became the basis of a major advertising campaign, the premise of which was that Shreddies were launching an exciting new format – an ‘angular upgrade’, devised by a team of ‘cereal scientists’, that would revolutionise breakfast-time. Packs of Diamond Shreddies – with an outsized and upended Shreddie on the front – appeared on supermarket shelves and billboard poster sites. Mimicking the conventions of product launches, the agency conducted focus groups on the new format and filmed them. Two plates were presented to the group, each with several rows of Shreddies laid out on them. On one plate, the Shreddies were turned at an angle. The focus group moderator asked participants to sample one Square Shreddie and one Diamond Shreddie each. Consumers generally preferred the Diamond Shreddie: ‘It had more flavour,’ said one man; ‘It was crunchier,’ said another.
The campaign was tongue-in-cheek, though plenty of consumers took it seriously, writing emails to Post expressing either approval or disgust at the brand’s new manifestation. Others took the joke and ran with it; one man auctioned what he claimed to be ‘the last square Shreddie’ on eBay and sold it for thirty-six dollars.26 More than ten thousand people voted online for their favourite shape. In business terms the campaign proved a stunning success: after years of steady but unspectacular growth, sales of Shreddies soared. Hunter Somerville was delighted that so many people responded so positively, though he wasn’t particularly surprised. ‘Sometimes I believe the diamonds taste better myself,’ he laughed.
Rory Sutherland, a British ad executive and spokesperson for the industry, argues that the story of Diamond Shreddies is merely an extreme illustration of the way all modern branding works: as a form of placebo. Whether it’s sneakers or soft drinks, products in most categories haven’t changed fundamentally in years and aren’t likely to any time soon – and often there’s little to choose between competing offers. The job of advertising, says Sutherland, isn’t just to communicate information but to create ‘symbolic value’, for which consumers are willing to pay. If you believe that wearing this brand of trainers will make you a better basketball player, then you’ll pay a higher price for them.
You may just play better basketball as a result. Economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology approached students entering the university’s gym and offered to sell them a bottle of SoBe Adrenalin Rush, an ‘energy drink’ that promised to impart ‘superior functionality.’ Some of the students were sold the drink at full price; others bought it at a discount. After they had exercised the students were asked if they felt better or worse than they usually did after working out. Those who drank the SoBe said they felt a little less fatigued than normal. That was plausible enough – the drink contained a shot of caffeine – but more interesting was that those who paid full price for the drink reported less fatigue than those given the discount. Striking as it was, this result was based on self-assessment, so the researchers designed a more objective test, this time of SoBe’s claim to provide ‘energy for the mind’. Once again, half the participants were sold the drink at full price, and the others got a discount. They were then set a series of word puzzles. The people who paid the discounted price solved about thirty per cent fewer puzzles than those who paid full price. They were convinced that their drink was less potent, and this belief made the
m a little stupider.
Advertisers are often accused of selling lies to the public, but advertising can be deceptive without being dishonest. It’s true that, for example, no deodorant really has the power to turn adolescent boys into girl magnets. But the truth status of most advertising is like that of fiction; consumers are openly invited to suspend disbelief. Both the advertiser and the advertised-to generally understand that a little deception (or self-deception) is good for us. The person who prefers the taste of Heinz Baked Beans to other brands but fails a blind taste test isn’t necessarily being duped; the brand is a perfectly legitimate component of her pleasure in the food, and if the pleasure of using an Apple MacBook or driving a BMW is bound up with the associations we have with those brands, it seems reasonable for the brand-owners to charge more for the enhanced experience.
To think otherwise is to adopt a rather narrow view of the satisfactions people gain from shopping. It’s often assumed that people buy things solely to gain material satisfaction. But they are also paying, knowingly and willingly, to be deceived, in a mentally and emotionally stimulating way. In The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, the sociologist Colin Campbell proposes that consumption is not so much about mere acquisition as it is about the languorous pleasures of imagining. For Campbell, the modern consumer is a self-deceiving ‘dream artist’, with ‘the ability to create an illusion which is known to be false but felt to be true’; an illusion that is woven around the object of desire.
In her short story The New Dress, Virginia Woolf describes a young woman trying on a dress for the first time:
Suffused with light, she sprang into existence. Rid of cares and wrinkles, what she had dreamed of herself was there – a beautiful woman. Just for a second . . . there looked at her, framed in the scrolloping mahogany, a grey-white, mysteriously charming girl, the core of herself, the soul of herself; and it was not vanity only, not only self-love that made her think it good, tender, and true.
The dress allows Woolf’s protagonist to dream up – to try on – a new version of herself. When she first wears the dress to a party, however, the dream vanishes. Tortured by the conviction that everyone thinks she looks ridiculous, she is ‘woken wide awake to reality’. Campbell argues that the woman in Woolf’s story enacts the modern consumer’s oscillation between willed self-deception and disillusion. The reality of a product is never quite as good as the dream – but then if it was, there would be no reason to dream again. The product itself is merely an excuse to experience the pleasures of anticipation, longing and pretending. We pay for the reflection, not just the dress; a reflection that advertising helps to create.
Apart from anything else, says Rory Sutherland, enriching the symbolic value of the brand via advertising is a more environmentally responsible way of improving a product than using more or better materials. Meaning is not a finite resource.
Thinking about such mutually satisfactory deceptions can make us uncomfortable because we tend to imagine there’s a realm of pure, spontaneous, authentic experience, over which those wily advertisers draw a veil of deceit (it’s that serpent in the garden again). But our physical and aesthetic sensations are inextricable from the meanings we attach to things. The practice of wine-buying tells us something about the relationship between our experience and our beliefs. The fortunes of individual wines, and indeed entire wineries, turn on the decisions of experts who award ratings and dish out medals in competitions, a system built on the premise that a given wine has something like an objectively measurable and consistent quality. The work of Robert Hodgson, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, places a large question mark over this assumption.
Hodgson is a retired professor of statistics who runs a small winery in Humboldt County, California, and got interested in the question of why a wine of his might win a gold in one competition and come nowhere in another. So he did something nobody had done before: he performed a large-scale quantitative analysis of the judgements of wine experts, running his own blind taste tests with judges from the California State Fair Wine Competition, and analysing the data from hundreds of wine competitions. He found that judges often gave the same wine very different scores, and that gold medals seemed to be spread around at random, rather than following the same wines consistently.
Hodgson’s findings would come as no surprise to Frederic Brochet, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bordeaux who, several years before, had served fifty-seven French wine experts from two bottles, one with a Grand Cru label, the other with the label of a cheap table wine. The experts greatly preferred the Grand Cru and explained why with great eloquence – though both bottles contained the same wine. According to Brochet, the lesson of his experiment is that the brain is incapable of sending us objective reports on the world; what we experience is always a mixture of the raw data coming in and our expectations, which ‘can be much more powerful in determining how you taste a wine than the actual physical qualities of the wine itself’. These expectations are, of course, inherited from others. Brochet’s subjects were wine critics; if they’d been from a culture where the name Grand Cru meant nothing, the wine would have tasted differently.
The same goes for that frequent accompaniment to wine, cheese. The psychologist Edmund Rolls presented twelve subjects with an ambiguous, cheesy-smelling odour that was labelled either ‘cheddar cheese’ or ‘body odour’. People rated the smell as much more pleasant when it was labelled cheese. In fMRI scans, the brain regions involved in interpreting smells and connecting them to feelings were activated more strongly by the positive label. The food scientist Harold McGee has pointed out that the pungent smell of certain cheeses, like Vieux Boulogne, is the smell of decay – something we are hard-wired to find disgusting (and thus to avoid for our own good). That some people, in certain countries – especially France, of course – find such smells appetising is testament to the extent that our senses are in thrall to the beliefs we inherit from the culture in which we live.
One of our beliefs is that more expensive wine tastes better. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and Stanford organised a wine-tasting for members of the Stanford Wine Club, serving them five different cabernet sauvignons that were only distinguishable by price. What the subjects didn’t know was that there were only three wines – so sometimes they’d be tasting the same wine with a different price label. They consistently reported that the same wine tasted better when the label said it was more expensive. Similar experiments have been carried out before, but in this one the subjects sipped wine while lying supine inside an fMRI machine (the wine was pumped through tubes into the subjects’ mouths). When subjects thought they were drinking more expensive wines, the scans revealed more activity in the brain region that determines whether or not we find an experience pleasurable. Higher prices primed them for pleasure, and so pleasure is what they experienced.
When we take a sip of Grand Cru (if we’re lucky enough to do so), we’re drinking a belief first and a liquid second. The same goes for when we go and see a well-reviewed film or look at a painting we’re told is by Picasso. Of course, if the film is really bad or the painting is truly appalling, we might notice, and adjust our response accordingly. But our beliefs (preconceptions, assumptions, expectations and desires) determine our responses much more than we like to think. What’s more, we don’t even originate these beliefs; they are stories that come to us through the cultural ether – Picasso is a great artist, expensive wines taste better – and are written by other people, living and dead. Our conviction that we can escape these shared preconceptions and experience the world purely as individuals is just another of the stories we tell ourselves.
Pain Stories
During his stint in the combat zone, the potency of deception wasn’t the only thing by which Henry Beecher was amazed. Men bearing the most terrible injuries seemed to feel far less pain than he would have expected. Given that Beecher wanted to preserve his limited
supplies of morphine for those most in need, he started to ask his patients if they wanted a painkiller injection before giving it to them, being careful to phrase the question so that they could accept it without embarrassment. ‘Are you in pain?’ he would ask. If the answer was yes, he would then say, ‘Could you do with some help for it?’ Time and again came the answer – from men with fractured bones, burnt skin, and stomachs ruptured by shrapnel – ‘No Doc, I’m OK.’ Keen to further his research even in battle, Beecher kept a tally of their responses. Three-quarters of the badly wounded men said they felt no need for a painkiller, long after the effects of their last morphine injection had worn off.
In a paper published after the war, Beecher presented his puzzling findings and speculated on their cause. He compared the situation of these injured soldiers to the kind of case he was used to dealing with as a hospital anaesthetist back in Boston. A man who crashed his automobile on the highway might suffer exactly the same wounds as one of the soldiers at Anzio, yet his pain would be far more intense. Perhaps, thought Beecher, this had something to do with how each man regarded the significance of his injury. Almost as soon as the car accident happens, a civilian begins to think about a future that has been radically transformed, and not for the better: possibly permanent physical damage; insurance claims; time off work leading to financial problems; the strain that all this will put on his wife and family. By contrast, when a soldier in a war zone is hit by a bullet, he is suddenly released from a dangerous and terrifying environment. He knows that he will be taken to the safety of the hospital and allowed to recuperate at his own pace, and, thinking further ahead, he envisages himself returning home, acclaimed as a war hero. ‘His troubles are over,’ wrote Beecher, ‘or at least he thinks they are.’ The civilian’s accident represents a calamity and the beginning of uncertainty; the soldier’s injury is a dignifying liberation from chaos.
