Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Driven by a booming economy, a corporate obsession with brand-building and a feelgood philosophy, a motley crew of ex-grad students, starry-eyed admen and hypnosis gurus are probing the consumer unconscious to sell soap.
Sep 27, 1999 | Sixtus Oeschle, manager of corporate advertising for Shell Oil, was at his wits' end. For months, he and his team of researchers had pumped the consumer psyche, desperate to uncover the real reason behind a decade-long sales slump at the $26 billion conglomerate. For months, they'd come up empty. "We tried psychographic memory triggers," Oeschle recalls. "We tried dream therapy. We tried what I'll call tangible manifestation exercises." All to no avail. "We weren't generating anything that was breakthrough," he says. "It was all kind of the same sort of stuff." At one point, respondents were given mounds of wet clay and urged to mold figures that expressed their inner feelings about Shell. When that, too, proved a dud, Oeschle passed out sketchbooks and Crayolas. "We said, 'Draw what Shell is to you,'" Oeschle recalls. "Then we said, 'Draw what you would like Shell to be to you.'" The results, while eye-opening, were not particularly useful from a marketing standpoint. "I can't tell you what they drew," Oeschle says glumly. "Let's just say it was something so magisterial, so huge, that there was almost no way a corporate entity could do that."
It was time, Oeschle decided, to try something radical. "All the techniques I've just mentioned -- they're all legitimate tools for arriving at consumer insight," he says. "But they only operate on the surface level." To craft a more potent appeal for its brand of gasoline, Oeschle concluded, Shell would have to go deeper -- much deeper. Oeschle decided to call in Hal Goldberg, an Irvine, California-based consumer researcher who specializes in focus groups conducted under hypnosis.
The decision to put respondents in a trance, Oeschle recalls, was a controversial one. "My own research staff fought me on it," he says. "A number of people at Shell said, 'What the hell is this?' They thought it was unethical. They gave me all the reasons I shouldn't even embark on it."
The results, Oeschle says, wowed even the skeptics. "I've got to tell you, it was fascinating, fascinating stuff," he says. After dimming the lights, Goldberg asked respondents to fix their eyes on a green spot on the wall. Then he took them back, back -- back to the last time they purchased gasoline. "What were you doing?" asked Goldberg. "What were you thinking?" Goldberg didn't stop, Oeschle recalls, until the participants had regressed to a state of mewling infancy. "He just kept taking them back and back," he says. "Until 40 minutes later, he's saying, 'Tell me about your first experience in a gas station.' And people were actually having memory flashbacks. I mean, they were going there. They were saying, 'I was three-and-a half years old. I was in the back of my dad's brand new Chevy.' It was like it was yesterday to them. I was stunned."
The real breakthrough, however, came after the respondents awoke out of their trance. "When Hal brought them all back out, he asked them who'd they prefer as a gasoline purveyor," Oeschle says. "What staggered me was that, to a person, it was always linked to that experience in their youth." One woman volunteered that she always made a point of filling her engine at Texaco. "We asked her why," Oeschle recalls. "And she said, 'I don't know, I guess I just feel good about Texaco.' Well, this was the little 3-
Shell is now in the process of coming up with some new customer-catching techniques -- derived, Oeschle says, from the insights gleaned from his groups of mesmerized motorists. "It dawned on us, as a result of this process, that we'd better figure out how to favorably impact people from an early age," he says. Where Shell had gone wrong, it seems, was in reasoning that, since people don't start buying gas until at least age 16, there was no need to target the tiniest consumers. "They weren't even on Shell's radar," Oeschle laments. To remedy that oversight, the company is now moving forward with a "multifaceted campaign" aimed at conditioning youngsters to be loyal enthusiasts of Shell products. Oeschle politely declines to divulge the specifics of the company's plan to mold young minds. "Some of the things we're going to do down the road, I can't talk about right now, because they're still in the potential launch phase," he explains. "I'm not interested in tipping my hand before we launch a program. We want to own this position. We don't want to be running up a mountain against somebody else."
At first blush, petroleum gasoline might seem a humdrum commodity, an improbable receptacle for consumers' hopes, dreams and misty hidden yearnings. But Shell is only the latest blue-chip company to conclude that the secret to a healthy bottom line lies not in tracking surveys or usage studies, but in the murky depths of the consumer unconscious. Ironically, even as Freudianism is increasingly viewed as suspect in society at large, it has been worshipfully embraced by no-nonsense, jut-jawed captains of industry. A growing number of CEOs have become convinced that they cannot sell their brand of deodorant, or deli meat, or automobile until they first explore the Jungian substrata of four-wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; or deconstruct the sexual politics of bologna.
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