‘We delude ourselves when we say that we are not influenced by advertising, and we trivialise and ignore its growing significance at our peril.’
Jean Kilbourne1
FOOD CUES RANGE from the obvious, logos, advertising posters and television commercials, to the more subtle, including colours, aromas and slogans. By using what is termed ‘contextual cueing’ – that is delivering their consumption message at exactly the right time and in precisely the right place – advertisers and marketers are able to trigger a desire to eat at a non-conscious level. The result is a sudden desire to eat which is overwhelming, impulsive and typically mindless.
In this chapter we examine a dozen of the most frequently used and potent cues, many of which you have probably already encountered several times today, perhaps without consciously being aware of them.
The colours, images and symbols of company logos have become a ubiquitous visual language in the modern world. These simple graphics enable brands to be instantly identified and furthermore require no translation, meaning companies can use them worldwide. Today, with thousands of brands competing for attention in an increasingly crowded commercial space, logos for food and beverages are among the most energetically and expensively promoted of the lot.
Take McDonald’s, for example. With a current advertising and marketing budget in excess of $2 billion, McDonald’s spends more money on getting itself noticed than four of America’s other most popular fast-food chains combined.2 A survey, conducted in the 1990s, found that while just over half (54%) those questioned worldwide were able to recognise the Christian cross, almost nine out of ten (88%) could identify the Golden Arches.3 And Dr Emma Boyland, from the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society at the University of Liverpool, comments that children: ‘Often learn the McDonald’s symbol for M faster than the letter “M”.’4
In an article entitled ‘Love on a bun: How McDonald’s won the burger wars’, James Helmer from McMaster University concluded that the victory of McDonald’s over its rivals in the fast-food wars of the 1980s was the result of the power of an advertising campaign which persuaded families that, beyond those golden arches they would discover: ‘A potential source of love and human happiness . . . A place for being a family.’5 This is an important point – that logos and other cues can affect behaviour, not just by triggering a desire for food in itself, but potentially by creating associations between that food and other qualities or attributes. For example, Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford DeVoe from the University of Toronto found that participants in a study who were exposed to well-known fast-food logos became less patient, less able to slow down and less likely to save money. ‘The consequences of fast food’s ubiquity . . . are not adequately understood’, they comment. ‘The time-saving principle embodied by fast food can automatically induce haste and impatience.’6 Nowhere is the cueing power of brand logos more apparent than in their influence over the very young.
According to author Juliet Schor, children are able to identify many logos before the age of two and will ask for products by their brand name at the age of three.7 Also as early as three, children assert that food wrapped in paper printed with the McDonald’s logo has a more pleasing taste; this holds true even when the food has not come from McDonald’s. By eight, boys will start enjoying beer commercials (a firm favourite among this age group). At the same age, both sexes will have come to prefer fast food, high energy-dense snacks and sugar-laden soft drinks to home-cooked meals and less sweetened beverages.
While all children are vulnerable to food logos, research suggests those with an existing weight problem are especially at risk. When Amanda Bruce and her colleagues from the Hoglund Brain Imaging Center at the University of Kansas Medical Center used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure response to food logos in the brains of both healthy weight (HW) and obese youngsters, they found important differences between the two. Obese children showed the same level of activation in response to food logos after eating a satisfying meal as they did beforehand. This was not the case with healthy weight children, suggesting that the basic cause of obesity can be traced to dysfunctional hyper-responsiveness to food in early life.
‘Obese youngsters failed to show significant post-meal reduction of activation in the prefrontal, limbic and reward processing (ventral striatum) regions,’ Bruce explains. ‘Whereas the Healthy Weight subjects showed a significant reduction in prefrontal and limbic activity after eating. These results indicate that the neural networks of the Healthy Weight subjects are more modulated after eating a meal.’8 This means that the Healthy Weight children responded in a way more in line with a physiological, as opposed to psychological, motivation for eating. Their brains registered they had eaten, and therefore when viewing food cues showed decreased activation in areas related to eating motivation. The same was not the case for obese children, whose brains showed high levels of activation in response to food-related imagery, in both a hungry and sated state.
This research provides further confirmation that overweight children are hypersensitive to food cues at a very early age, and are therefore likely in the process of developing a diminished sensitivity to satiety signalling. Learning to eat beyond satiety is a pattern of food consumption that is carried into adulthood, making it a critical factor in the obesity problem.
In a landmark study of the power of TV food advertising to encourage overeating among small children, Jennifer Harris and her colleagues at Yale University divided 118 seven- to eleven-year-olds into two groups. One group watched a cartoon that included four 30-second food commercials, while the other group saw the same cartoons but without any commercials. The foods advertised were ‘of poor nutritional quality using a fun and happiness message (a high-sugar cereal, waffle sticks with syrup, fruit roll-ups, and potato chips) and were chosen to represent the types of food commercials that are most commonly shown on children’s TV.’9 Each child was handed a bowl of cheese crackers and told they could eat as many as they liked while watching. After the children had left, researchers weighed the remaining crackers and found that those who had seen the food commercials consumed almost half as many crackers again as those who saw the cartoons without any commercials.
‘Food advertising that promoted snacking, fun, happiness, and excitement, i.e. the majority of children’s food advertisements, directly contributed to increased food intake,’ Harris summarised. ‘These effects occurred regardless of participants’ initial hunger, and amount consumed after viewing snack advertising was completely dissociated with participants’ reported hunger.’10
Young children are especially vulnerable to food commercials because they are less able to appreciate the persuasive intent of advertisements, naively regarding them accurate and trustworthy sources of information about the world.11 Bright primary colours, which are particularly attractive to children, are significantly more likely to feature in food commercials aimed at this demographic. The advertisements are also scripted, photographed and edited to match the cognitive abilities and emotional needs of pre-teen viewers.12 The good news for parents and health professionals is that, under pressure from regulators, advertising high energy-dense foods to children is far more restricted than in the recent past.
The bad news is that advertising for these products is migrating away from TV to mobile devices, such as phones and iPads. Here the marketing messages can be made far more powerful and much less easy for adults to monitor and control. We will examine this phenomenon in greater depth shortly.
One of the ways advertisers try to match their content to the mental and emotional maturity of a young audience is by using cartoon characters to promote products. Apart from being associated with enjoyable TV shows, cartoon characters can be drawn in such a way to connect very directly with a small child’s sense of wonder and desire for companionship. Aside from TV commercials, the place children are most likely to encounter cartoons is on boxes of breakfast cereals. Cereal companies spend more on marketing their products to children than to any other group of consumers.13
In the US, the cereal industry spends a total of $3 billion annually on packaging targeted at children. Since the fronts of cereal boxes are especially important to attract young consumers they almost invariably feature brightly coloured cartoon characters known in the trade as ‘spokes-characters’.14
These graphics both aid brand recognition and communicate fun, enjoyment and trust. Unfortunately, while having a colourful cereals package on the table may make breakfasts more fun, they are not the most nutritionally sound way to start the day. Researchers have found that eight out of ten of the least nutritious cereal brands feature cartoon characters, compared to just two of those rated ‘most nutritious’.15 Cereals advertised to children have, on average, 57% more sugar and 50% more salt than adult brands, but 52% less fibre.16 By the age of two, most children can recognise a variety of cartoon characters, and will have formed a strong emotional bond with their favourites.17 They identify closely with the cartoon and aspire to emulate them.18 When given identical foods to taste, where one features a familiar cartoon character on the packaging and one does not, children believe that the food with the cartoon tastes better.19
Adding to the power of some spokes-characters as food cues, is their longevity. Tony the Tiger, who appears on packets of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, was created by graphics artist Eugene Kolkey in 1951. The sweetened corn and oats breakfast cereal fronted by Cap’n Crunch dates back to 1963. As a result, parents and grandparents may experience a sense of nostalgia when seeing them on the supermarket shelves. This helps generate trust in the brand and makes it more likely they will encourage their children and grandchildren to eat this cereal, since they did so themselves.20
And it seems that some spokes-characters are eye-catching in a far more literal way than simply through being bright and colourful. When Aviva Musicus, from the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, and Brian Wansink, from the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell, examined more than 80 different cartoon characters on cereal brands aimed at children, they found something quite remarkable. The gaze of these characters seemed to make direct eye contact with a small child looking up at the box on a supermarket shelf. When someone meets our gaze we subconsciously evaluate them as friendlier and more open, honest and trustworthy. If, on the other hand, they avoid our gaze we tend, again often subconsciously, to view them as unfriendly, dishonest and untrustworthy. Remarkably, the same seems to hold for cartoon characters on cereal packets.21
In their report, entitled ‘Eyes in the Aisles: Why is Cap’n Crunch Looking Down at My Child?’, Musicus and Wansink described how 57 of the cartoon characters were drawn with a downward gaze of just under 10 degrees. This meant that when displayed on shelves slightly higher than a child, they made direct eye contact. By contrast, characters on cereals marketed at adults gazed upward at around 0.43 degrees. These boxes were, typically, placed on the top two shelves at a height of around 54 inches, once again perfect for making eye contact, but this time with the average grown-up shopper. Musicus and Wansink also examined the extent to which eye contact with cereal-box characters influenced feelings of trust and connection with a brand. University students were randomly presented with one of two versions of a cereal box featuring a cartoon rabbit. On one, the animal looked directly back at the viewer, while in the second its eyes were shown looking down. The results showed that the eye contact rabbit increased trust in the brand by 16% and the feeling of connection by 28%.22
The study attracted a lot of attention, generating a heated debate on social media and a firm rebuttal from cereal manufacturers and even a few criticisms from academia. Tom Forsythe, vice president of Global Communications for Minneapolis-based General Mills, wrote on his blog: ‘When should companies respond to poor research – and pseudo-science? . . . Sometimes it’s best to just let stuff go . . . this one is getting a response—because it’s absurd.’23
What no one disputes is that cartoon spokes-characters are a hugely effective weapon in the battles between rival breakfast cereals. They are one of the main reasons children develop a taste for a particular cereal in the first place, and by establishing a connection with children at a young age, cereal makers, whether deliberately or not, are creating a connection with these cartoon characters that will shape consumers’ tastes for the rest of their lives.
In recent years there have been both positive and less positive changes in cereals marketed to children. On the plus side, the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity reports that – between 2008 and 2011 – the overall nutritional quality of 13 out of 16 brands targeted at children increased by an average of 10%.24 Ten out of twenty-two brands examined reduced sodium and seven reduced sugar, while five increased fibre. Some child-targeted websites and games were discontinued and one major company, General Mills, reduced banner advertising on children’s websites by 43%.
However, ‘Total media spending to promote child-targeted cereals increased by 34%, from $197 million in 2008 to $264 million in 2011,’ report Jennifer Harris and her Yale Rudd Center colleagues.25
Harris also states that in 2011, the number of child visitors increased for eight out of ten child-targeted cereal websites with an average of 162,000 children a month visiting Kellogg’s frootloops.com and 116,000 children a month visiting applejacks.com. Companies also increased the amount of banner advertising on children’s websites, in one case by 185% (for Honey Nut Cheerios).
Less encouraging was the finding that advertising to children for many of the least nutritious cereals still rose substantially overall. While these are American findings, a similar pattern of results could reasonably be predicted in other developed nations.
In the world of marketing HED foods, sporting icons and exhortations to exercise reign supreme. On the surface this might seem counterintuitive, but of course there’s a very good reason for it; by priming customers to associate a particular soft drink, chocolate bar or energy drink with sport, manufacturers are able to cue consumption through subconscious associations with fitness and health. This is why so many food companies sponsor major sporting events, including the Olympics. Some even host conferences on nutrition. They are effectively giving obesity a sporting chance.
Marie Bragg and her colleagues from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University examined more than a hundred products which featured some kind of reference to sports on supermarket shelves (fifty-three foods and forty-nine beverages). They found that the vast majority (73%) depicted people taking exercise on their packaging.
Four out of ten products (42%) carried an endorsement by at least one professional athlete, elite sports organisation or well-known sports team. A third offered the chance to win some kind of prize. Three-quarters depicted at least one type of sports equipment, while one in ten (9%) were manufactured to resemble sports equipment; for example the special edition football-shaped Oreos. Finally, taking us back to the issue of priming consumers at a young age, a third of the products were targeted specifically at children, featuring either a cartoon character on their packaging or a word synonymous with ‘child’.26
None of these ‘sporty’ foods were especially nutritious, while many were downright unhealthy. More than two thirds of the beverages, for example, were 100% sweetened with sugar. Rated on a scale from between 1 (unhealthiest) and 100 (healthiest), the median score of these randomly selected products was just 36.
Celebrities are paid handsomely to endorse a wide range of food products, companies and retailers. Having a brand associated with a well-known sportsperson, television personality or film star is an extremely effective way of creating recognition, enhancing credibility and adding value.
In a second study by Marie Bragg and her colleagues in 2014, it was found that around four out of every five food endorsements by influential athletes involved products high in calories but low in nutrients. After analysing TV, radio, newspaper and magazine endorsements by the top 100 professional athletes, they reported that 79% of the heavily promoted food products offered few nutrients and had high calorie counts. In just over 93% of the endorsed drinks, added sugar accounted for all the calories provided.27
‘The promotion of energy dense, nutrient-poor products by some of the world’s most physically fit and well-known athletes is an ironic combination that sends mixed messages about diet and health,’ Bragg comments. ‘It is possible that food companies associate with athletes simply because they are celebrities, but research shows that athlete endorsements are associated with higher healthfulness ratings on the products they endorse.’28
A case in point from the UK is the twenty-year endorsement of Walkers Crisps by former England international footballer Gary Lineker, now a popular sports commentator. Emma Boyland and her colleagues from the University of Liverpool conducted research into the impact such endorsements have on children.
Boyland asked 181 children, aged between 8 and 11 years old, either to watch a 20-minute Simpson’s cartoon, into which was embedded one of three different advertisements (one for Walkers Ready Salted Crisps, endorsed on screen by Gary Lineker; one for a brand of salted peanuts, Nobby’s Nuts; and one for a non-food-related toy), or to watch a programme featuring highlights from Match of the Day with Lineker as the main presenter. The children were also provided with two bowls of crisps, one labelled ‘Walkers’ and the other ‘Supermarket’ – although both actually contained Walkers Crisps.
At the end of the session the quantity of crisps remaining in each child’s bowl was recorded. It was found that the children who saw the commercial for Walkers Crisps endorsed by Gary Lineker, or the football highlights programme which he presented, both consumed considerably more of the Walkers Crisps than the children who watched either the Nobby’s Nuts or toy advertisements. So the experiment strongly suggests that celebrity endorsements do encourage increased consumption by children.29
‘The study demonstrated for the first time, that the influence of the celebrity extended even further than expected and prompted the children to eat the endorsed product even when they saw the celebrity outside of any actual promotion for the brand,’ commented Boyland. ‘If celebrity endorsement of HFSS (High Fat Salt and Sugar products) continues and their appearance in other contexts prompts unhealthy food intake then this would mean that the more prominent the celebrity the more detrimental the effects on children’s diets.’30
‘There’s no doubt,’ says Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity expert and assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa, ‘that the presence of their [children’s] heroes, heroes who themselves are the embodiment of physical fitness and health, serve to very clearly “health-wash” the products.’ Freedhoff observes that the least nutritious foods tend to be the food industry’s biggest profit drivers and that celebrities and athletes help to fulfil commercial pressures to maximise profit. 31
Paradoxically, the rise in obesity has recently been matched by an increasing emphasis on the importance of healthy eating, with products being heavily marketed as low in fat, sugar and salt. Such claims both increase sales and lead consumers to overestimate just how healthy the product actually is.32 For example, a reduction in fat may be accompanied by an increase in sugar to compensate for the reduction in taste. If someone is under the impression that a product is ‘healthy’, they may well feel free to consume more of it than they would otherwise.
By associating their brand with a specific colour, food companies can spark brand recognition faster than is possible with even the slickest slogan or brand name. The brain takes far less time to recognise a colour than interpret a text. For example, Bailey Dougherty, account director at Boom! Marketing, a leading Canadian Experiential Marketing Agency, believes that the net worth of the colour purple to Cadbury’s is ‘almost priceless,’ since ‘it is associated with a series of feel good emotions. Cadbury Purple is regal yet accessible – and you may have noticed, that seeing the colour does make you think of chocolate.’33 In the world of modern advertising even something as apparently general as a colour can be imbued with specific associations which turn it into a food cue.
The next time you visit a supermarket or department store, have a good sniff. It’s increasingly likely that you will catch a whiff of an aromatic food cue designed to whet your appetite and encourage you to spend more money. Some stores use just one scent, such as freshly ground coffee or newly baked bread, while others use a sophisticated variety; in a Net Cost Market in New York, for example, the aroma of chocolate hangs in the air around the sweet snacks displays, the scent of grapefruit wafts through the produce department and you can smell rosemary focaccia in the bakery section. Since introducing these aroma cues, the store reports that sales have risen by almost 10%.34
Nor are aromatic food cues only found inside stores. You may even encounter them in bus shelters and, in some parts of the world, on commuter buses. In 2012, McCain foods used a combination of heat and aroma cues to boost sales of a new range of microwaveable baked potatoes. The campaign involved fitting UK bus shelters with heaters disguised as jacket potatoes; when a waiting passenger pressed the button to get some warmth, the shelter was filled with both hot air and the aroma of freshly baked potatoes. Because the promotion was launched during a miserably cold February, the heaters proved extremely popular with the shivering public. The warmth and the accompanying smell no doubt evoked memories of the comforts of home and the enjoyment of eating a freshly baked potato. These cues were apparently irresistible to many people, since McCain’s sales increased significantly.35
A somewhat similar approach was used in South Korea, by Dunkin’ Donuts. They introduced the smell of freshly brewed coffee into buses whenever their advertisement was played on the radio. This reportedly increased the number of customers visiting their stores by 16% and sales by 29%.36
Many food brands use words and phrases either to cue a desire to eat at that precise moment or else to foster a notion that by consuming their particular product one can become healthier, fitter, more energetic, happier and so on. They focus on such basic human motivations as the need to feel loved, wanted and socially accepted; by marketing a food or beverage as being able to help consumers meet one of these needs they can significantly increase that product’s attraction.
Copywriters strive to produce memorable phrases that are effortlessly brought to mind when triggered by a particular location, occasion, emotion or even the time of day. McDonald’s famous slogan, ‘I’m lovin’ it’ (from the Justin Timberlake song of the same name written by Pharrell Williams), was dreamed up by Paul Tilley for the advertising agency DDB in 2003. It proved so universally successful that it has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Notice that it’s ‘I’m lovin’ it’, rather than ‘You’re lovin’ it’. Telling people to behave in a certain way risks generating psychological resistance that can actually cause them to do the exact opposite. But the easily remembered phrase ‘I’m lovin’ it’ is personal without being instructional. It can echo in your head as a form of autosuggestion, subtly persuading you that, yes, you really do ‘love’ McDonald’s.
‘Emotional states are trance states, and memories are state dependent. That means that if a company can link their brand with both an emotion and with a real world trigger, not only will that trigger remind a consumer of the brand, but it will also make them more likely to feel that emotion. And potentially even more powerfully, when the consumer feels that emotion in other contexts, they will also be more likely to think about the brand,’ explains hypnotherapist Dan Jones.37
Before leaving the topic of food cues, we need to consider how digital technologies are transforming food marketing, particularly to children. While TV is still significant when marketing to younger children, for teens and increasingly pre-teens, television has started to take a back seat to digital media. A US survey published in 2013 found that almost four out of ten children (38%) under the age of two were familiar with mobile phones and tablets.38 By the time they start primary school, 70% of that cohort have mastered them completely. Before their eighth birthday, 72% of children will have used a mobile device for playing games or watching videos.
Talking about the relationship many children now have with their mobile devices, Steve Smith, editor of Mobile Marketing Daily says, ‘They say they will never leave home without it. They even report feelings of withdrawal from leaving their phones at home.’39 Mobile technology is at the centre of the lives of many children and teenagers.
Never before has so much personal information been available to food and beverage companies, and digital marketing offers one of the broadest and most far-reaching platforms in history. The extensive amount of personal information we give on social media is incredibly valuable to companies, so much so that they are willing to buy it. They are then able to craft bespoke cues that cater specifically to an individual’s likes and dislikes.
For example, the more you engage with certain restaurant chains (say, by checking in via Facebook), the higher the probability that you will receive pop-up promotions from this organisation on your news feed.
And it doesn’t end there. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) mean that the physical location of a device can be taken advantage of for marketing purposes. Two students in the laboratory of Stanford University computer specialist Brian Fogg came up with a clever way of exploiting this technology. They designed a cuddly toy bear that a fast-food chain could either give away to children or sell at a low cost. Whenever the bear came close to a branch of that restaurant chain, it would start to sing a jingle about how delicious French fries are and how much it enjoyed eating them. Fortunately for the sanity of parents, the bear never got beyond the prototype stage. Had it ever been put into production, its potential for causing small children to demand a burger could have been considerable, though one imagines it would also have generated significant public backlash.40
However, given the commercial potential of digital marketing it comes as little surprise that companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, and Burger King are leading the way in developing other location-marketing technologies. Increasingly, companies are designing their websites to run on mobile phones and are encouraging users to download apps which tell marketers their location – this information can then be used to target them with specific messages and offers.
For example, a person walking down the street could be sent a text offering a 25% discount, a free serving of fries or a supersized coke – an incentive to call in at their favourite fast-food outlet. The text could even point them in the direction of the closest branch. Such suggestions are especially likely to prove of interest if deliberately timed to coincide with the mid-morning or mid-afternoon dip in energy many people experience.
Known as SOLOMO (Social – Local – Mobile), this type of digital marketing is the latest way to attract customers and cue them to eat more food. ‘So-Lo-Mo isn’t a fad that’s going away,’ says writer Lindsay Scarpello. ‘It’s here, it’s real, and it’s important for brands and retailers, as well as marketers, to get hip to this trend.’41
Where teenagers and young adults are concerned, one of the most powerful and effective ways of spreading the word about a food brand is to catch their attention while they are playing online games.
Computer games first arrived on the scene with the invention of Pong during the early 1970s. Forty years on, and the use of high-definition graphics, motion tracking and other technologies is blurring the distinction between games and reality. Players are invited to immerse themselves in a fantasy that stimulates all their senses, which today can even include smell and touch. Such total immersion in an emotionally arousing virtual world undermines self-control by depleting the mental resources needed to inhibit impulsive behaviours. As we saw in Chapter 8, impulsive eating is one of the key causes of overconsumption, so anything which makes it harder to resist such impulses is a potential health problem.
However, the issue is not only the potentially negative consequences of playing games in and of themselves. Games also enable companies to integrate advertising and product placements into the action, and to do this so naturally that, for the average player, these messages become an integral part of the game world itself.
In 2013 Kellogg’s released the first food-company, child-targeted ‘advergame’ – an app called ‘Race to the Bowl Rally’. It could be downloaded for free and played on a computer, mobile phone or tablet. The game involved racing through a frozen landscape and collecting pieces of Kellogg’s Apple Jacks cereal along the way. With a nutrition score of 44, in 2012 this cereal was described by the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity as among the worst on the market in terms of sugar content and absence of fibre.42
Race to the Bowl Rally is just one of a number of advergames used by cereal companies to promote their products to children. In 2011, Post and General Mills launched PebblesPlay.com, HoneyDefender.com (promoting Honey Nut Cheerios) and CrazySquares.com (promoting Cinnamon Toast Crunch).43
Children who play such games will quickly come to associate the fun of playing them with the brand and its products. And there are even more sophisticated forms of branded online gaming out there. Four years before Race to the Bowl Rally, Frito Lay launched a scary Halloween-themed game targeted at tweens and teens. Their marketing objective was to ‘bring back from the dead’ Doritos Black Pepper Jack and Smoking Cheddar, two flavours that had fallen out of favour with younger consumers.
The game they devised was called Hotel 626. In it, players found themselves trapped in a haunted hotel, from which they had to escape by completing a series of scary challenges involving webcams and mobile phones. A live Twitter feed enabled players to share their experiences and they were encouraged to ‘send a scare’ to friends on Facebook. To add to the ‘scare quotient’ the game could only be played after dark. This combination of real and virtual realities produced intense emotions, while simultaneously promoting the consumption of a highly palatable snack. The game was effectively priming its youthful players to develop a powerful emotional connection with Doritos.
Costing less than $1 million to launch, Hotel 626 proved an overwhelming marketing success. Within a few weeks, over four million young people from more than 136 countries had checked in and played for an average 13 minutes. Over 2 million bags of the relaunched flavours were sold within three weeks.
Two years later, an even more sophisticated version of the game was released. In Asylum 626, players were chased through the corridors of a mental asylum, by nurses wielding chainsaws. This game differed from the first in that players were able to physically interact with the game world.
‘We employed head tracking in one scene, so the player literally must move to avoid an attack,’ explained Hunter Hindman, the campaign’s creative director. ‘We used the webcam in new and innovative ways to actually place the player into the game-play itself. We asked people to give us more access and information this year, telling them upfront that the more they gave us, the scarier the experience. We used social networking in ways that hadn’t been done before. Specifically, we bring their friends into the experience and the gameplay itself. All of these changes began to add up to . . . a more immersive, more frightening experience.’44
In order to finally make their escape from the asylum, players had to present their webcam with a marker printed on bags of the two flavours being promoted, meaning that completing the game was contingent upon making a purchase.
Both of these games appealed to adolescents. This is a significant point, since the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which plays a critical role in decision-making, does not reach full maturation until early adulthood. As a result, tweens and adolescents are especially vulnerable to fear-related stimuli and far more receptive to the rewarding properties of HED food.
Researchers at the University of California Irvine report that a game of this type ‘purposefully evokes high emotional arousal and urges adolescents to make consumption decisions under high arousal,’ exacerbating their tendency for poor decision-making when emotionally aroused, and also their tendency to self-medicate using foods high in sugar and fat.45 These findings confirmed an earlier study by Microsoft, which reported that such campaigns: ‘Evoke stronger emotional connections with consumers and more positive emotional association with the brands.’46
The power of music to trigger emotion is well known – whether that emotion is joy, depression, or spine-tingling excitement. This, too, is something that can be taken advantage of to market food products. Just a few bars of music – known as a ‘sonic signature’ – can be enough to trigger a memory and bring a brand to the forefront of a consumer’s mind, in a process known as ‘involuntary music imagery’ or INMI. INMI is defined as ‘a conscious experience of reliving a musical memory without deliberately attempting to do so,’ explains Dr Lassi Liikkanen, a researcher at Aalto University, Finland.47
Although the reasons INMI occurs remain unknown at the time of writing, it’s hard to refute that the more often one hears a simple piece of music, the more likely it is to stick in one’s head. It can be almost impossible to banish from the forefront of one’s mind, at least for a while. Which may be irritating for the consumer, but it is literally music to the ears of marketers, advertisers and retailers.
When listening to music the brain’s auditory, motor and limbic (emotional) regions are simultaneously engaged. This helps to ensure that an associated visual cue, such as a logo, is remembered for longer and in much greater detail because it is being encoded at a more basic and primary part of the brain (the limbic system). Music cues also work even when consumers are not consciously aware of them. For example, Charles Gulas, an associate professor of marketing at Wright State University, and Charles Schewe, professor of marketing at the University of Michigan, found that baby-boomers were more likely to spend money in shops playing classic rock, despite the fact that 75% of customers were unable to recall what type of music they had heard in the store when asked afterwards.48
Similarly, when classical music, as opposed to tunes from the Top 40, was played in a supermarket’s wine department, customers purchased more expensive wines.49
Music with a rapid tempo encourages diners in fast-food restaurants to eat quickly, while slow, classical music in a high-class restaurant slows down the pace of eating and encourages diners to linger. Paradoxically, we may eat less when encouraged to slow down and enjoy the ambience. That means that pop music played in a fast-food restaurant may well result in the rushed consumption of greater quantities of food.
Before leaving the topic, it is worth mentioning two subtle, attention-grabbing forms of audio branding known as ‘Earcons’ and Icons. Earcons were originally designed in the late 1980s as audio messages ‘used in the user-computer interface to provide information and feedback to the user.’50 For example, the sound your computer makes when you turn it on, or the generic ring applied to all iPhones when first bought. Today the term is applied to any brief series of notes, such as the ‘Bah-da-ba-ba-baahhhhh’ used by McDonald’s in their ‘I’m lovin’ it’ campaign, mentioned earlier.
Auditory icons, on the other hand, use not music but everyday sounds. These aural associations have to be learned, but once established they can serve as powerful food cues. You might, for instance, hear the sound of a steak sizzling when you click on a restaurant’s icon or the hiss of an espresso machine as you pass a coffee shop. Both could trigger a sudden desire – to visit that restaurant or to have a coffee.51
In his 1924 book Behaviourism, psychologist John Broadus Watson boasted that given a dozen healthy infants and his own world in which to raise them, he would: ‘Guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocation, and race of his ancestors.’52
This pretty much sums up the attitude of those whose business is to target today’s food consumers, especially the younger and more easily impressionable ones. However, their interest is not in guiding the careers of the upcoming generation, but rather in controlling their appetites; implanting food cues within their subconscious that will influence their eating habits throughout life.