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But today, Bacardi finds itself a little bit trapped. There are many other ways we often can behave irrationally when it comes to products.

When I was around five years old, I contracted an extremely bizarre disease known as Schonlein-Henochs, an allergic reaction that typically follows a respiratory tract infection, symptoms of which include internal bleeding and kidney inflammation.

I turned as red as a Christmas stocking. For more than a month, I was confined to a hospital bed in a sound-isolated room. It was painful to move. I was extremely sick for two years. So I would have something to do while everybody else my age was outside playing football, my parents gave me a box of Legos. Bad move. It was the beginning of a decade-long love affair.

They became my life. A year later, I entered my first big construction—a replica of a Scandinavian ferryboat—in a local Lego competition.

Which was—guess what—another big box of Legos. Energized by my success, I came up with the idea of constructing my own version of Legoland. I traveled to Sweden to get a special kind of grainy rock and a special brand of foam for my mountains. I bought my own custom-made engine to power the canal system—there was even a mini-landscape of bonsai trees.

I was eleven at the time—what can I say? When no one showed up, I was heartbroken. In the end, after lots of back and forth, I ended up renaming my version Mini-Land. The point is I know a little something about collecting, and a lot about obsession with a brand. And in many ways, brand obsession has a lot in common with rituals and superstitious behavior—both involve habitual, repeated actions that have little or no logical basis, and both stem from the need for a sense of control in an overwhelming and complex world.

Currently there are 49 million users—many of them collectors—registered on the eBay Web site. To take an extreme example, today more than twenty-two thousand different Hello Kitty products are in circulation in Asia and throughout the world, including Hello Kitty pasta, Hello Kitty condoms, Hello Kitty navel rings, and Hello Kitty tooth caps, which talk about branding actually leave behind a Hello Kitty impression on every piece of food you chew.

Less extreme cases of brand obsession typically take root in adolescence and even earlier. When we are stressed out, or when life feels random and out-of-control, we often seek out comfort in familiar products or objects. We want to have solid, consistent patterns in our lives, and in our brands.

Ritual and superstition can exert a potent influence on how and what we buy. And after years of studying product rituals and their effect on branding, it struck me: might religion—which is so steeped in familiar and comforting rituals of its own—play a role in why we buy as well? In my next experiment, I set out to discover what connection, if any, exists between religion and our buying behavior.

Would certain brands provoke the same kind of emotions in us or inspire the same sense of devotion and loyalty provoked by religion? Turns out I was right. Ranging in age from twenty-three to sixty-four, the fifteen women participating in this study were members of the cloistered Carmelite order, an austere Roman Catholic sect of monastics whose roots go back to medieval times.

Overseen by Dr. Mario Beauregard and Dr. It was simply to use neuroimaging to find out more about how the brain experiences religious feelings or beliefs. Another activated area was the insula, which the scientists theorized relates to feelings associated with connections to the divine.

Interestingly, the activity recorded in these scans was markedly different. As the next part of our study would show, when it comes to religion and faith, a number of integrated, interconnected brain regions work simultaneously and in tandem. Consider the following story: One early winter afternoon in , a small, excited crowd gathered at the storage bin at Port Newark in New Jersey, awaiting the arrival of a simple container.

Most of the onlookers were formally dressed in white gloves, long black coats, and wide-brimmed hats. A rabbi stood in the center of the group, while a few photographers snapped away.

This was holy dirt, brought to our shores courtesy of Holy Land Earth, a Brooklyn-based company, the first business in the world to export soil directly from Israel to the United States. But what do people want with Israeli dirt, you might be wondering? Well, as it turns out, a handful of soil from the Holy Land can add a perfect touch of the sacred to religious burials.

It can also be used to bless plants and trees, houses and buildings. Many religions consider the ground of Israel to be sacred, he explained; his company was now importing this divine soil to anyone who wanted a small piece of the Holy Land in their lives. In fact, the soil had the official stamp of approval from Rabbi Velvel Brevda, the director of the Council of Geula in Jerusalem. Steven Friedman was hardly the first person to dabble in sacred dirt.

In the late s, an Irish immigrant named Alan Jenkins spent nine years securing U. His reasoning? When the Irish came to America, they brought with them their churches, schools, and music—the only thing they had to leave behind was their soil.

So, teaming up with an agricultural scientist, he doggedly petitioned both the U. For Irish immigrants, the soil of their native land has an almost religious significance because, like many Jews, quite a few Irish immigrants pine to be buried in the soil of their homeland.

Funeral directors and florists have ordered the topsoil by the ton. Even wholesalers in China have found dirt to be a lucrative business, as Chinese customers have been seduced by the legend of Irish luck. If companies can make money off holy dirt, why not holy water? Not to be outdone, a Florida company has just rolled out a product called Spiritual Water, which is basically purified municipal water, adorned with nearly a dozen different Christian labels. So I set out to prove it. But before I could attempt to identify the link between the two, I had to find out exactly what qualities characterize a religion in the first place.

What I discovered was that despite their differences, almost every leading religion has ten common pillars underlying its foundation: a sense of belonging, a clear vision, power over enemies, sensory appeal, storytelling, grandeur, evangelism, symbols, mystery, and rituals.

And just as I suspected, these pillars happen to have a great deal in common with our most beloved brands and products. Have you ever smiled knowingly at the person on the treadmill next to you when you notice he or she is wearing the same brand of running sneakers? This sense of belonging is a profound influence on our behavior. Think about such seemingly unrelated groups as Weight Watchers at a meeting, the fans at the Super Bowl, and the audience at a Rolling Stones concert.

In fact, Whittier College professor Joseph Price, who studies parallels between the worlds of sports and religion, has likened the Super Bowl to a religious pilgrimage. Most religions also have a clear vision.

And of course, most companies have unambiguous missions as well. As such he should be above systems and structures, and not subordinate to them. Successful religions also strive to exert power over their enemies. Having an identifiable enemy gives us the chance not only to articulate and showcase our faith, but also to unite ourselves with our fellow believers.

This kind of us vs. Coke vs. Verizon, Visa vs. This us-vs. Close your eyes and walk into a church, a temple, or a mosque. Maybe a bell is sounding, or an organ is playing, or a priest or rabbi or minister is speaking.

Products and brands evoke certain feelings and associations based on how they look, feel, or smell. Think of the unmistakable sound of a Nokia ring tone. Or the pristine, leathery scent of a brand new Mercedes-Benz. Or the sleek, aesthetically pleasing lines of an iPod. Or consider Toblerone. Another integral part of religion is storytelling. Whether the New Testament, the Torah, or the Koran, every religion is built upon a heft of history and stories—hundreds and hundreds of them sometimes gruesome, sometimes miraculous, and oftentimes both.

And the rituals that most religions draw upon and ask us to participate in—praying, kneeling, meditating, fasting, singing hymns, or receiving the Sacrament—are rooted in these stories upon which the faith is built. In the same way, every successful brand has stories connected to it. Think of the small canisters of salt and pepper that you picked up the last time you flew to London on Virgin Atlantic, the ones that say Nicked from Virgin Atlantic.

Sensing a story they could complete with their own meaning, consumers lined up in droves and the bags sold out almost immediately. Most religions celebrate a sense of grandeur, as well although a few emphasize austerity. Have you ever paid a visit to the Vatican?

Preserving this sense of grandeur is so important, in fact, that no building in Rome is permitted to be higher than St.

Think of the splendor of the Temple of the Golden Buddha in Bangkok, adorned with a nearly eleven-foot-tall Buddha. All marketed to stir up notions of grandeur.

Certain companies and products inspire wonder just by the scope of their vision. Consider how Google Maps, with its ability to scan the landscape from Maine to Mars, has lent the company an omnipotent, omnipresent grandeur, as if they now own the maps of the skies and even outer space. What about the notion of evangelism—the power to reach out and secure new acolytes? When Google rolled out its Gmail service, it attracted followers in a devilishly shrewd way. American Express had a similarly successful invitation-only strategy when it released its ultra-exclusive Centurion Black Card in the United States; tens of thousands of consumers called up asking to be placed on the short list.

Symbols, too, are ubiquitous in most religions. The cross. A dove. An angel. A crown of thorns. Just as religions have their icons, so, too, do products and brands.

And although, as we saw in Chapter 4, the logo is no longer as powerful as companies once believed, as the marketplace gets more and more crowded, certain simple yet powerful icons are increasingly taking hold, creating an instant global language, or shorthand. For example, every Apple icon—from the Apple logo itself, to its trash can, to the smiley face you see when you turn on the computer—is singularly associated with the company, even when it stands alone.

Did you know that Apple today owns three hundred icons, and that Microsoft owns five hundred? Symbols like these can have an extremely powerful impact on why we buy. Think about Jimmy Buffett, the singer-songwriter who, in a woefully depressed music industry, is one of the few entertainers to consistently sell out his concerts year after year—in minutes, too, thanks to his millions of fans who cheerfully refer to themselves as Parrotheads.

So what is this sixty-one-year-old tycoon selling, exactly? These symbols remind us that no matter how hectic our lives, we can all still let go, indulge our fantasies, and enjoy ourselves. It is a brand that Buffett has expanded with a chain of Margaritaville restaurants, books, and a successful satellite radio show.

In religion, the unknown can be as powerful as the known—think of how many years scholars have spent pondering the mysteries of the Bible, or the ancient Shroud of Turin, or the Holy Chalice.

When it comes to brands, mystery can be just as effective in attracting our attention. Coca-Cola, for example, draws on a sense of mystery with its secret formula—a mysterious yet distinctive recipe of fruit, oils, and spices that the company keeps in a safe-deposit box inside an Atlanta bank.

The formula is so mysterious, in fact, that many schemes to obtain it have been attempted. Another story goes that when Unilever was getting ready to launch a shampoo in Asia, a mischievous employee with time on his hands wrote on the label, just for the hell of it, Contains the X9 Factor.

This last-minute addition went undetected by Unilever, and soon millions and millions of bottles of the shampoo were shipped to stores with those four words inscribed on the label. It would have cost too much to recall all the shampoo, so Unilever simply let it be.

None of the customers had any idea what the X9 Factor was, but were indignant that Unilever had dared to get rid of it. It just goes to show that the more mystery and intrigue a brand can cultivate, the more likely it will appeal to us. Ever owned a Sony Trinitron? What the heck is a Trinitron, anyway? Patent Pending. In fact, as the results of our brain-scan study would show, the most successful products are the ones that have the most in common with religion.

Take Apple, for example, one of the most popular—and profitable—brands around. Sitting in a packed convention center in San Francisco among ten thousand cheering fans, I was surprised when Steve Jobs, the founder and CEO, ambled out onstage, wearing his usual monkish turtleneck, and announced that Apple was going to discontinue its Newton brand of handheld computers.

Jobs then dramatically hurled a Newton into a garbage can a few feet away to punctuate his decision. Newton was done. In fury and desperation, the man next to me pulled out his own Newton, threw it to the floor, and began furiously stomping on it. On the other side of me, a middle-aged man had begun to weep.

Chaos was erupting in the Moscone Center! It was as though Jobs had announced that there would be no Second Coming after all. And the results turned out to be as groundbreaking as the study itself. Try smashing a brand yourself. Hide the scrap with the polo pony on it. If you examine an individual piece, can you tell that Ralph Lauren manufactured the shirt? I doubt it. Once, when visiting a factory in China, I discovered that the factory tables were packed with one brand of clothing in the morning, another brand in the afternoon.

The only difference: the cotton logo, which, as a finishing touch, workers placed carefully on each shirt, sweater, and hoodie, creating the sole, and staggering, price differential between branded shirts and unbranded ones. Well, a few drops of Guinness are just as recognizably Guinness as a whole pint; the wheels of a Harley are as unmistakable as the bike itself; and a piece of scrap metal from a totaled Ferrari could be nothing else—thanks to its signature shade of red.

In fact, take a look at the front of your iPod right now. Do you see the Apple logo anywhere? But yet, would you ever mistake it for any other brand? I doubt that, too. I used smashable brands in this portion of the study because those are the brands that tend to be stronger and more emotionally engaging—in other words, they enjoy a passionate and loyal following.

So I included Microsoft, BP, and countless other brands sharing the same profile. Why these? Well, these are all brands that I consider to provoke limited or even negative emotional engagement among consumers. In other words, they leave most of us cold. Before our study got under way, we asked our sixty-five subjects to rate their spirituality from one to ten, with ten being the highest.

Most termed their devoutness between seven and ten. After all, just like members of religions, sports fans have a strong sense of belonging, usually to a hometown or favorite team; teams have a clear mission to win ; and, of course, a strong sense of us vs. Sports also offer a strong sensory appeal think of the smell of a fresh-mown football field on game day, or the mouthwatering aroma of stadium hot dogs, or the sound of the national anthem played before the game begins.

Few things seem grander than a championship title or a medal or a trophy, and stories and myths the Curse of the Bambino, for example abound everywhere in the sports world. So I decided to compare how the brain responded to sports icons and sporting paraphernalia, compared with how they responded to religious imagery.

One by one, over the course of a few days, our volunteers filed into Dr. The room went dark and the images began to flicker past: A bottle of Coca-Cola. An iPod. A can of Red Bull. Rosary beads. A Ferrari sports car. The eBay logo. Mother Teresa. An American Express card. The BP sign. A photograph of children praying. The Microsoft logo. Finally, images of selected teams and individuals from the worlds of football, soccer, cricket, boxing, and tennis.

And so on. CALVERT analyzed the fMRI data, she found that strong brands brought about greater activity in many areas of the brain involved in memory, emotion, decision-making, and meaning than weak brands did. After all, it makes sense that an image of BP Oil would inspire less emotional engagement than a shiny red Ferrari.

But it was Dr. She discovered that when people viewed images associated with the strong brands—the iPod, the Harley-Davidson, the Ferrari, and others —their brains registered the exact same patterns of activity as they did when they viewed the religious images.

However, exposure to sports stars did activate the part of our brains associated with our sense of reward the middle inferior orbitofrontal cortex in a way that was similar to the patterns of arousal prompted by religious icons, suggesting that the feelings of reward associated with a victory on the soccer field were similar to the feelings of reward associated with, say, a moving church sermon or prayer.

Both strong and weak brands, however, were far more powerful than the sports imagery in stimulating the memory storage and decision-making regions of the brain.

To sum up, our research showed that the emotions we at least those of us who consider ourselves devout experience when we are exposed to iPods, Guinness, and Ferrari sports cars are similar to the emotions generated by religious symbols such as crosses, rosary beads, Mother Teresa, the Virgin Mary, and the Bible. In fact, the reactions in our volunteers to the brands and religious icons were not just similar, they were almost identical.

Clearly, our emotional engagement with powerful brands and to a lesser extent, sports shares strong parallels with our feelings about religion. Which is why marketers and advertisers have begun to borrow even more heavily from the world of religion to entice us to buy their products. Once, at a senior management meeting in Paris, a CEO of a major perfume company raised his hand.

The engineer wrinkled his brow. Lego was one of the first companies to infuse ritual and religion into their products. I was working for the company back then and had what I thought was a dazzlingly good idea to roll out a virtual advent calendar on the company Web site. Lego loved the idea; it was inexpensive and risk-free. Or so they thought. At which point the shit hit the fan.

But the second problem, which turned out to be a much bigger one, is that advent calendars are specific to Christianity, and almost overnight, Lego was perceived as promoting a religious agenda.

Thousands of angry e-mails from all over the world filled my company in-box—and I was the one responsible for responding to each one. According to an article in the U. Guardian, Vodafone will also offer another text message service through which subscribers can receive a daily picture of a saint, accompanied by his or her most popular quotation. What makes you pick a Samsung over a Philips?

Which will lead us into an experiment involving one of the best-known—and most unanimously hated— sounds in the world, revealing a finding that left the marketing executives at Nokia flabbergasted.

The generic supermarket offering, plus a few virtuous organic brands—salt-free, no sugar added, the sort where the oil rises to the top.

Most consumers think about their choice for all of two seconds. Was your decision rational? It costs 30 cents less, which makes me suspicious. In my experience, you get what you pay for…The organic stuff? Except they are rarely if ever uttered aloud. Instead, we rely on almost instant shortcuts that our brains have created to help us make buying decisions.

Our next stop is bottled water. There are dozens of glistening bottles, both glass and plastic, and in all shapes and sizes, too. By far the most beautiful bottle on the shelf. Because when we make decisions about what to buy, our brain summons and scans incredible amounts of memories, facts, and emotions and squeezes them into a rapid response—a shortcut of sorts that allows you to travel from A to Z in a couple of seconds, and that dictates what you just put inside your shopping cart.

A recent study conducted by German brand and retail experts, Gruppe Nymphenberg, found that over 50 percent of all purchasing decisions by shoppers are made spontaneously—and therefore unconsciously—at the point of sale. These brain shortcuts have another name: a somatic marker. Opening the oven door, you spy a navy-blue Le Creuset pot.

You begin to pull out the pot when you recoil backward, your fingertips stinging. Sown by past experiences of reward and punishment, these markers serve to connect an experience or emotion with a specific, required reaction. By instantaneously helping us narrow down the possibilities available in a situation, they shepherd us toward a decision that we know will yield the best, least painful outcome.

Remember: it took you less than ten seconds to choose the Jif and the Iskilde, based on a completely unconscious series of flags in your brain that led you straight to an emotional reaction. Every day, we manufacture new ones, adding them to the bulging collection already in place. For example, why do many consumers choose to buy an Audi over other cars with equally attractive designs, comparable safety ratings, and similar prices?

Most people will guess correctly that the phrase is German. High standards. The result: we walk out of the showroom holding the keys to a new Audi. We are rarely conscious of it, but the fact is that in a world teeming with cars that are for the most part indistinguishable, a somatic marker that connects Germany with technological excellence comes alive in our brain and ushers us toward a brand preference.

Even with the vast array of features—optical zoom, tony image processors, face detection gizmos, red-eye correctors—most of them look exactly the same. So why do you find yourself gravitating toward the ones that come from Japan?

But now anything Japanese seems to you a marvel of cutting-edge sophistication. Again, based purely on a series of unconscious markers, your mind has linked together Japan with technological excellence and you leave the store with a new Japanese camera under your arm. This is all very well and good, but by now you might be wondering, how do these markers form? And do companies and advertisers work to deliberately create these in our brains?

You bet. Take TV commercials. In truth, your brand preference has very little to do with the tires themselves, but instead with the somatic markers the brand has carefully created. Remember the cute baby Michelin once used in their advertising? Or what about the Michelin man, whose plump, round appearance suggests the protective padding of a well-made tire? And then there are the Michelin Guides, those slender, authoritative, high-end travel and food guides which the company invented so that consumers would drive around in pursuit of the best restaurants—and thus purchase more tires.

Point is, all these seemingly unrelated bookmarks deliberately forge certain associations—safety for your child passengers; sturdy, reliable durability; and a high-quality, top-of-the-line, European experience.

Professor Robert Heath, a British consultant who among other things has written extensively about somatic markers, has examined the success of a brand of British toilet paper known as Andrex that outsells its nearest rival, Kleenex, in the United Kingdom by an almost two-to-one margin.

Both companies spend the same amount of money on TV ads, both are of equally high quality, and both cost approximately the same. A small Labrador puppy. But what, pray tell, does a little dog have to do with an eight-pack of toilet paper? In a series of commercials, the puppy is seen skidding down a snowy hill on a sheet of toilet paper; in another, a woman holds the puppy while behind them a long lacy banner of Andrex toilet paper billows and flutters behind a speeding car.

At first, the connection between puppies and toilet paper seems obscure, kind of random. The connections between any of these concepts and the puppy associations can be created and reinforced every time the ads are seen. How do you know to look both ways when you cross the street? Chances are you once had a close call that came as a shock—and that shock has stuck with you ever since. Which is why, in attempting to hook our attention, advertisers aim to create surprising, even shocking associations between two wildly disparate things.

Take a guy by the name of Tom Dickson. Tom Dickson resembles any midwestern, middle-aged suburban dad. But this suburban dad has a rather out-of-the-ordinary job. He sells blenders. As viewers look on saucer-eyed, Tom Dickson proceeds to grind, chop, mash, mince, puree, and annihilate a series of objects inside his kitchen blender.

Bic lighters. A tiki torch. A length of garden hose. Three hockey pucks. Even an Apple iPhone. Every week, Tom Dickson makes it his mission to pulverize something new and seemingly unpulverizable. We hate spam and promise to keep your email address safe. Please read our Privacy Policy. Close Menu. Order Now here. Newsletter Name. Send Me My Download. Discover which categories and brands are likely to thrive like never before in the upcoming post-pandemic world.

BY : Dimitris Chassapakis. Eva Garc? Federico Garc? Gabriel Garc? George Orwell Download Rebeli? Juan Gomez-Jurado - Download La leyenda del ladr? Matthew Henry - Download Comentario B? Pablo Neruda Download Veinte poemas de amor y una canci? Pam Mu? Quino - Download 10 A? However, innovation is more than a great concept — it is the fine balance of preserving an idea whilst turning it into reality.

Metaphorically speaking, we see a powerful concept as a rectangle representing four sharp corners. The sharper the corner, the stronger the concept.

Far too often bureaucracy takes its toll on the corners, rounding these while the concept implements and resulting — as is so often the case — in a compromised idea which can be pronounced dead on arrival. Close Menu. Order Now here. Newsletter Name. Except, somewhere along the way we lost the plot… Brands have now got locked into departments.

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