Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [83]
This kind of fear works. And now more than ever, companies realize it.
What’s more, branding as we know it is just beginning. Expect anything and everything to be branded in the future—because as our brain-scan study has shown, our brains are hardwired to bestow upon brands an almost religious significance and as a result we forge immutable brand loyalties.
Take fish, for example.
Twenty miles off the Japanese island of Kyushu sits Japan’s Bungo Channel, where the waters of the Pacific Ocean converge with the Seto Inland Sea. Here’s where the hunt begins for a small, grayish-pink mackerel known as the Seki saba. Until the late 1980s, fishermen regarded Seki saba as a meal fit only for the poor. It was plentiful, cheap, and it went bad overnight. Until 1987, Seki saba yielded merely 1,000 yen apiece—around ten dollars—and its low rate of return left many fishermen with little to show for a day’s work but the mackerel itself.
But in 1988, something happened that shook up and redrew the rules of Japan’s local and national mackerel market: over the course of that year, the retail price for Seki saba skyrocketed by approximately 600 percent. So how had an unexceptional fish become one of the hottest things in Japan practically overnight?
By becoming a brand. In 1998 the Japanese government awarded Seki saba an official certificate attesting to the fish’s superior taste and high quality. And this stamp alone was enough to transform popular perception—in a country of approximately 125 million people—to such a degree that it could justify a 600 percent price increase. “We knew if we could differentiate, we could charge a higher price,” confirmed Kishichiro Okamoto, who heads the Saganoseki branch of the Oita Prefecture fishermen’s cooperative. First, Okamoto branded the Seki name, linking the mackerel with the Saganoseki region in which it could be found. Then he drew up a set of rules dictating which fish could be considered authentic Seki saba and which could not. Under the new rules, only saba caught with rods qualified as Seki saba, as fish caught with traditional nets were considered too bruised and damaged. According to Okamoto, Seki saba must also be killed by a local technique known as ikejime that involves puncturing holes near the gills and tail to drain the fish’s blood cleanly and efficiently. And in order to bypass excessive handling, Seki saba was not to be weighed or measured. Instead, wholesale purchasers had to engage in “face buying” and select their Seki saba just by giving the fish a thorough visual once-over.
By the time I left the Tokyo fish market at dawn one cold September morning, nothing was left of the Seki saba displays but empty boxes. It didn’t matter that Seki saba looked exactly like Seki isaki and Seki aji, its fishy brethren. Japanese fish buyers had to have the Seki saba brand.
Every one of us ascribes greater value to things we perceive—rationally or not—to be in some way special. Let’s say you’re turning forty today, and in honor of your birthday, I hand you a beautifully wrapped box. Undoing the paper, you remove a small gray rock. Dull, average, ugly, the sort of rock you might see lying on the side of road. “Thanks a lot,” you’re thinking.
But what if I proceed to tell you that this isn’t just any rock you’re holding, but a one-of-a-kind rock, a historical symbol, a fragment of the Berlin Wall that was smuggled out of the country days after the wall’s destruction in 1989, when East and West Berliners began snatching up chips and chunks of the fallen barrier as keepsakes. You now have in your possession a talisman symbolizing the end of the cold war.
“Thanks a lot,” you say, this time meaning it.
“Anytime,” I answer. “Here’s to turning forty.” A moment goes by. Then I tell you