Buyology by Martin Lindstrom; Paco Underhill

Author:Martin Lindstrom; Paco Underhill
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780385523882
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2008-10-15T10:00:00+00:00

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, 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.)

So why are products like Guinness, Ferrari, Harley-Davidson, and Apple “smashable”? 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. And though it may make you wince to hurl that iPod against a brick wall, when you’re gathering up the pieces, you’ll know what “smashable” truly means. In fact, take a look at the front of your iPod right now. Do you see the Apple logo anywhere? I doubt it, because there isn’t one. 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. But in order to get a better picture of our relationship to strong

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