Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [51]
I’m sorry, but what does any of this mean? It’s crazy talk—but it’s a mystery.
Ritual, superstition, religion—whether we’re aware of it or not, all these factors contribute to what we think about when we buy. 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.
I’ll never forget the Apple Macromedia conference I attended in the mid-nineties. 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. Cooked.
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. It occurred to me suddenly—as it would again, years later, when I paid a visit to the temple-like Apple store in midtown Manhattan and stood in awe as a slant of mid-morning light streamed in through the clear glass, beaming off the Bethlehem star–like Apple logo suspended by filament from the ceiling—that this wasn’t any ordinary product demonstration. For its millions of fervent constituents, Apple wasn’t just a brand, it was a religion.
NOW YOU MIGHT be thinking, this is all well and good, but is there scientific proof that brands have a great deal in common with spirituality and religion?
That’s what my next brain-scan study would find out. It was the first time that anyone had tried to prove a scientific link between brands and the world’s religions. And the results turned out to be as groundbreaking as the study itself.
For this portion of the study, I chose to examine the power of such powerful brand icons as Apple, Guinness, Ferrari, and Harley-Davidson, not just because they are popular brands, but because they were also what I refer to as “smashable” brands. “Smash Your Brand” is a phrase that goes back to 1915, when the Coca-Cola company asked a designer in Terre Haute, Indiana, to design a bottle that consumers could still recognize as a Coke bottle, even if it shattered into a hundred pieces.
Try smashing a brand yourself. Pick up that new, linen, lime-green, button-down Ralph Lauren shirt you just forked over $89.50 to buy. Since you can’t physically smash fabric, take a pair of scissors and cut the shirt into a hundred little pieces. 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. The quality of the linen fabric might indicate that what you’re holding probably costs a lot more than an everyday brand, but without the pony, there’s no way to tell whether your shirt was designed by Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, Perry Ellis, Tommy Hilfiger, or anyone else. (Once, when visiting a factory in China,