Brandwashed!

Martin Lindstrom, the author of “Brandwashed” went to visit the Whole Foods grocery store located on Columbus Circle in New York City. Whole Foods is a high end grocery chain that promotes itself as selling, “The highest quality, freshest, and most environmentally sound produce.” How companies present themselves is a meticulously studied problem. Everything you see in a successful store, like Whole Foods, is the result of careful planning and sound psychological research designed to part you from your money.

The first thing that greets a shopper at Whole Foods is freshly cut flowers. Lindstrom notes, “These are what advertisers call "symbolics"--unconscious suggestions.” Nothing in the world is fresher than a freshly cut flower, planting the seed in your mind that nothing is fresher than anything you buy at Whole Foods. Lindstrom asks, “Consider the opposite--what if we entered the store and were greeted with stacks of canned tuna and plastic flowers?” Guess he doesn’t do much grocery shopping at Walmart.

In Whole Foods stores the price for all fruits and vegetables appears to be hand written on artfully broken pieces of black slate, “A tradition of outdoor European marketplaces,” just as though the display was set up by a farmer who had just unloaded his locally grown produce. Ha! Like every other grocery chain, Whole Foods buys its produce in huge quantities from wholesalers, distributes it to the individual stores and sets the price at its corporate headquarters in Texas. Lindstrom notes, “Not only do the prices stay fixed, but what might look like chalk on the board is actually indelible; the signs have been mass-produced in a factory.”

Grocery stores put ice everywhere, not because it is necessary, at least not in every case but to convince you they are making superhuman efforts to preserve the freshness of your food experience. Another marketing ploy is spraying the produce with a mister. Research in Demark determined, we perceive fruits and vegetables covered with drops of water as fresher and purer than a dry product. Lindstrom observes, “Ironically, that same dewy mist makes the vegetables rot more quickly than they would otherwise. So much for perception versus reality.”

One of the problems I have with one of my local grocery store is green bananas. I don’t want green bananas. I want to buy yellow bananas. Dole and the other producers of bananas know this and have raised “banana perception” to a science. They have even issued banana color guides to retailers so that they will know when to put the bananas on sale, really! Lindstrom’s comment, “Each color represents the sales potential for the banana in question. For example, sales records show that bananas with Pantone color 13-0858 (otherwise known as Vibrant Yellow) are less likely to sell than bananas with Pantone color 12-0752 (also called Buttercup), which is one grade warmer, visually, and seems to imply a riper, fresher fruit.” Dole even selects locations with soil and growing conditions most likely to produce the right color bananas.

Everything, and I do mean everything you experience in a well run retail store is carefully designed by experts to seduce you into spending your money on their product. They are masters at their craft. That is why they are so successful when in many cases their competitors are selling the exact same products. Be aware of your own vulnerabilities and be skeptical, very skeptical, anytime anyone tries to separate you from your money.