With little notice until recently, a shortage of medicine is starting to impair treatment at America’s hospitals. Common, cheap and necessary drugs needed to fight bacteria or cancer, to ease pain or to nourish premature infants are running out.

Many of these meds are injectables, which must be made under sterile conditions. All are generics, which sell for pennies compared to the buck-buster drugs that feed the bottom lines at the big-name drug companies.

Most shortages are unnanounced until a wholesaler’s shipment arrives lacking an ordered drug. “It’s unbelievable,” says Sara Shull, manager of the drug policy program at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics in Madison. “Today I was trying figure out alternatives to papaverin,” an old drug used to prevent spasm in the many surgeries that involve grafting a blood vessel. “We have identified some alternatives, and I am now I working with the surgeon to figure out how to dose them, how to apply them. Is it bathed on? Sprayed on? He’s busy, we’re all busy, and sorting this all out takes a lot of time. The continual need to find replacements gives me a headache.”

Shortage-induced substitution played a role in Alabama, where nine hospital patients were killed by intravenous nutrients this summer, says Allen Vaida, executive vice president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a non-profit that targets medicine hazards. “Because of a shortage, this compounding pharmacy was making a product from raw material, and it got a bacterial contamination.” (The maker of the nutrient solution, Meds IV pharmacy in Birmingham, Ala., is apparently out of business.)

Medications on this rack will restock a robot that fills individual patient envelopes that will be sent tomorrow to nurses’ stations in the hospital. Actually, the robot restocks itself in its 24/7 delivery of thousands of prescription drugs.

Photo: The Why Files

ENLARGE

Source: U.S. House of Representatives

Shortages are growing, especially for injectable medicines.

Running long on shortages

Pharmacists have always had to find substitute medicines, as patients keep coming through the door, but Vaida cites Food and Drug Administration numbers to argue that shortages are now at “crisis” proportions. “The FDA shows 70 shortages in 2006, 129 in 2007 and last year, there were 211. So far this year, we are already above 200 shortages, and the year isn’t done. Shortages have been around forever, but they have never reached this number.”

Some drugs can be substituted, says Vaida, but “especially with chemotherapy and nutritional products, it’s not like are three alternatives for some medications, as there are with blood-pressure drugs. Some chemotherapies are specific for certain cancers, and if they are not available, you may have no alternative or [you] may have to use a third-line alternative.”

The pharmaceutical situation has never been more complicated, with more than 45,000 prescription drug products on the market, from about 1,400 manufacturers. Although we could not easily find numbers, drug shortages are also rising in the United Kingdom, where the supply situation is complicated by the restriction on exports within the European Union.

Shortages have many possible causes, but because manufacturers tend to be closed-mouthed, it’s not clear which problems are most momentous or easiest to solve:

How short is short?

A drug is considered “short” if a specific dosage and formulation is unavailable, and in some cases, a similar item can be substituted. But Shull says that’s still a problem in a big hospital. If a product that is normally purchased in a pre-loaded syringe is only available in a vial, University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics can no longer send a “unit of dose” to the nurse, and “that’s what the nurses are expecting,” Shull says.

Changing procedures complicate care and raise costs, Shull adds. “All our people are working in a complex system, with lives on the line. These shortages can be a recipe for increased errors.” Her hospital must dedicate one staffer to securing supplies of the common blood-thinner heparin, she says. Searching for alternate sources is less rewarding than studying the efficacy of various medication treatments, she adds. “It’s not what I was taught in pharmacy school, but when your back is up against the wall, you have no other options.”

Beyond impairing patient care, shortages have also become a major burden in medical research. Tests of new medicines, often set up to run at several hospitals nationwide, must give standardized meds to the treatment and control groups, and chaos can result when the drugs become unavailable. “These shortages are now affecting clinical trial options for patients with cancer,” Robert DiPaola, director of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health on Sept. 23. “Due to the uncertainty of being able to obtain many of these drugs, enrollment of patients on clinical trials has been delayed or stopped in several of our trials.”

Howard Koh, assistant secretary of health and human services, reinforced that message to the committee: “Many of the cancer drugs in short supply … are mainstays of the anti-cancer arsenal, and were largely developed through federally funded research begun 20, 30, even 40 years ago. They are still essential to treatment and research,” he said. The National Cancer Institute is currently sponsoring 349 clinical trials that require these drugs, Koh added. “Taken together, these studies represent thousands of patients, as well as a significant federal investment in clinical trials research.”

At the same hearing, Mike Alkire, chief operating officer of Premier healthcare alliance, told Congress how widespread the shortages have become. In a recent Premier survey, 53 percent of hospital pharmacists said they had faced at least six shortages “that had the potential to cause a medication safety issue or an error in patient care.” And 34 percent of respondents said at least six shortages had “resulted in a delay or cancellation of a patient-care intervention.”

Premier estimates that the 2,500-plus non-profit U.S. hospitals in its membership pay an extra $66 million per year due to these shortages — which translates to $415 million at all U.S. hospitals.

Market going gray?

When the usual sources run dry, hospital pharmacists often get emails, faxes and phone calls from the “gray market,” sources outside the usual supply chain. In the summer of 2011, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices surveyed 549 hospitals and found that:

Alkire, of the Premier alliance, told Congress that the gray market is “appalling,” with an average markup of 650 percent. Forty-five percent of the offers were marked up at least 1,000 percent above normal price, and drugs for leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma were marked up 4,000 percent. “We saw similar markups for medicines for sedation during surgeries; to dilate veins and prevent brain or heart spasms; and to prevent damage during a heart attack,” Alkire said.

For these reasons, University Hospital at UW-Madison does not buy gray, says Shull, although it does buy from a wholesaler that seems to have supplies of drugs when nobody else does.

The gray market arouses suspicion: How do some firms know about shortages before anybody else? How do they obtain drugs when normal sources are short?

“There is speculation going on,” says Vaida. “Some secondary wholesalers may try to buy up some available drugs and sell them for higher prices. Often times, they are looking for people who need the product, and try to obtain it from whatever sources. Some are playing it almost like Wall Street, anticipating what may go on shortage — if two manufacturers have just consolidated, and there’s a generic product that is only going to be made by one of them.”

Cures for missing meds

Many measures have been proposed to ease the medication shortage:

Photo: Armin Kübelbeck

Generic, injectable drugs comprise the majority of shortages.

The FDA seems to be getting the message. In testimony to the subcommittee on Sept. 23, Koh claimed that the agency had already headed off 99 looming shortages in 2011, compared to 38 for all of 2010. But Koh added that today’s shortages “include standard therapies for the treatment of lung, breast, ovarian, testicular and colorectal cancers, as well as several types of lymphomas and leukemias.”

Sometimes, Koh said, common-sense, proven measures can sidestep shortages. “… the FDA was able to mitigate a shortage by allowing the use of a filter to safely remove foreign particles contained within vials of injectable drugs, averting the obvious risk to patients of having metal shavings or other particulate matter injected into their veins.”

A pessimist, of course, could say the higher number of averted shortages simply reflects the greater number of shortages overall.

At any rate, organizations concerned with shortages say they are in a vise. “From our members’ perspective, it’s become [a] crisis,” says Hill. “We are seeing shortages nationwide. We have been tracking this for about 10 years, but in the last few years, we’ve seen a spike in the numbers.”

Given the problem’s multiple and sometimes obscure, roots, Hill sees “no single solution, and that’s the troublesome part. Unfortunately we will be dealing with this for a while. But there are some things we can do. We’d like to establish a mandatory early-warning system, so a manufacturer that has a problem has to notify the FDA. The FDA says it has avoided 99 shortages in the past year when it had that information. When there are multiple sources, the FDA can reach out to other manufacturers and urge them to ramp up production.”

David J. Tenenbaum

Japan, a world leader in earthquake engineering, has been paralyzed by a series of giant waves that followed one of the most violent earthquakes in a century.

Although the magnitude 9.0 quake on Mar. 11, 2011, apparently did not collapse high-rise buildings, the ensuing tsunamis flattened vast areas along the northeast coast. The death toll is swelling steadily as bodies wash in on the surf, and citizens and Japan’s Self Defense Forces scour a landscape turned upside down by inconceivably powerful waves.

The news recalls the estimated 250,000 people who perished, mainly on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, in the 2004 “Christmas tsunami” that followed a huge, offshore quake. (Both Japan and Indonesia are volcanic lands in the Ring of Fire, which partly surrounds the Pacific Ocean in a giant series of subduction zones and volcanoes.)

Shortly after Japan stopped shaking at 2:46 pm local time on Friday, March 11, we began hearing about troubles at a series of nuclear plants. After the reactors automatically shut down during the quake, emergency systems for removing heat still being generated in the reactors were routinely switched on.

But because the electric grid was down and the standby generators were damaged — perhaps by seawater — the emergency cooling failed. By Tuesday, March 15, three reactors had exploded, a fourth was burning, radioactive material was airborne, reactor workers were being evacuated, electricity was growing short in Tokyo, and the crucial containment vessels were under severe threat if not already breached.

With the first nuclear meltdowns since Chernobyl, in 1986, under way, global stock markets were crashing.

What causes tsunamis?

As Japan licks its wounds, The Why Files wants to know what causes tsunamis. How do they travel across the ocean? How they have impacted coastal people through history? Can we reduce our vulnerability to nature at its most cataclysmic?

Graphic: Anthony Liekens

Movement of the sea floor translates into waves at the surface.

Tsunamis — once slangily called tidal waves — are extremely powerful waves caused by large undersea disturbances. (“Tsunami” derives from Japanese for “harbor wave,” reflecting the fact that harbors can concentrate their energy. True tidal waves are the slow oscillations that drive ocean tides in response to solar and lunar gravity.)

Although landslides and volcanoes cause some tsunamis, probably 95 percent result from underwater earthquakes that contain a strong vertical motion. Such quakes often occur where one of Earth’s tectonic plates dives, or “subducts,” beneath another.

Like the Sunda trench near Sumatra, the subduction zone in the Japan trench is notorious for large earthquakes, says Timothy Masterlark, an associate professor of geological science at the University of Alabama. Although the timing is always uncertain, he says, “The history was known, big earthquakes were known, and even though the people and government went to great lengths to prepare, at some level … there is simply nothing they can do.”

Lessons from Sumatra

Masterlark, who has studied the giant, 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Sumatra, says the magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Japan likely broke a fault stretching at a shallow angle from the sea floor roughly 150 kilometers beneath Japan, along a trench several hundred kilometers in length.

We asked Masterlark how, if the slip was mainly horizontal, the rocks had enough vertical movement to cause a tsunami. “In Sumatra, we found a shallow slip created some vertical movement because the rock at the surface was softer, so the fault became more vertical, which changed the slip from mostly horizontal to mostly vertical.”

To imagine how vertical movement of the seafloor causes a tsunami, imagine making waves by throwing a stone in a pond. Even though earthquakes disturb the bottom of the water, the analogy works: just as a larger stone, thrown faster, makes a larger wave, the size of the tsunami depends on extent and speed of the ocean-floor movement.

The tsunami is usually most intense close to the earthquake: as waves spread from the epicenter in a typical arc-shaped pattern, their energy also spreads out.

Spread out, but still powerful

One factor that distinguishes tsunamis from more familiar waves is their extreme wavelength. On the open ocean, the peaks of waves may be 300 kilometers apart, and they may travel at 500 to 600 miles per hour. Even though they can keep pace with a jetliner, you wouldn’t see a tsunami from the cockpit of a jet. A killer tsunami may be only 2 feet tall in mid-ocean — far too small to be noticed from an airplane or even a ship, yet it can carry huge amounts of energy across the Pacific.

All that kinetic energy can hide in waves we can barely see because long-wavelength waves are extremely deep, and the massive amount of water moving beneath the surface contains enormous energy.

In deep water, boats can ride the worst tsunamis without noticing them; but when they reach shallow water and “run aground,” these waves become dangerous.

Like all waves, tsunamis slow when the lower part of the wave encounters the upward-sloping ocean floor. But while the front of the wave slows, the wave behind is still moving faster, causing a giant pile-up at the front, and the kinetic energy that was spread through the ocean depth concentrates in a towering wave at the surface.

Wild waves

It is these surface waves — which can be 10 meters high or taller as they cross the beach — that cause the utter destruction of tsunamis. Like all waves, tsunamis have both a rising and a falling motion, says Masterlark. “Depending on where you are with respect to the earthquake, you may first see a wall of water, or the opposite, the sea retreating.” In 2005, during a research cruise to Sumatra, “We were told that the tourists had heard that the ocean was retreating, and saw this as a great holiday, ‘Let’s walk on the seashore,” and this wall of water came in and killed them. This was a great warning, when they saw the water retreat, they should have headed away from the shore.”

Tsunamis have other quirks. They can be spaced as much as one hour apart, so subsequent waves can kill those who return to help victims of earlier waves.

In 1998, Harry Yeh, a civil engineering professor now at the University of Oregon, told us that tsunamis can have decidedly unconventional behavior. In one case, he said, a tsunami destroyed houses in a cove without damaging a house on an unprotected headland: “It’s the exact opposite of what a storm wave would do.”

A warning

Modified from original image by NASA

Location of foreshocks, aftershocks and the March 11 Japan earthquake (M 9.0). Circle size represents quake magnitude. Dotted lines = foreshocks; solid lines = aftershocks

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, established in Hawaii in the wake of the deadly 1946 tsunami, is a nexus in the global warning network. Since almost all tsunamis originate in earthquakes, the warning centers rely on data from seismographs, many of them located on the unstable ring of fire.

Tsunami warnings are now triggered automatically, says Masterlark, based on measurements of earth movement. “Seismographs are excellent because in seconds they can tell that a quake of some magnitude, big enough to trigger a tsunami, has occurred. This information can automatically trigger a warning in seconds.”

In tsunamis, seconds saved can translate into lives saved.

Researchers are working to use global positioning system (GPS) data to refine size estimates, Masterlark adds, to give “a more refined view of the potential risk, but this takes a little longer and is still in a research mode.”

Further confirmation of the size of the wave may come from special purpose ocean buoys, if they are in the right place, Masterlark says. “But they only work once the tsunami has already arrived, so they can only confirm or help refine the warning.”

Tricks of the tsunami trade

In terms of generating tsunamis, not all underwater earthquakes are created equal, says Andrew Newman, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech. “A few times a decade, we have what we call ‘tsunami earthquakes’ that create a tsunami that’s much larger than would be expected for the magnitude of the earthquake,” largely due to a shallow rupture. “Usually a magnitude 7.8 earthquake would create a tsunami that might rise only 20 centimeters to 1 meter [when it reaches land], but one in Sumatra last year created a 17-meter tsunami.”

These large tsunamis come from a smaller break in the ocean floor, and so contain relatively little energy and do not travel well across the ocean, Newman says. But they also offer less warning because local people do not feel the massive shaking associated with a major tsunami.

Newman and colleagues have developed software to detect the peculiar signature of the tsunami earthquake, and are now running it on a research basis. “We get an earthquake or tsunami warning within four or five minutes, our algorithm starts processing, and a few minutes after that, the system sends email to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and the U.S.G.S. [Geological Survey],” Newman says.

Although the Japanese had little time between the earthquake and the tsunami, Newman says the national warning system did work. “In some ways, you have to look at real success in Japan. They have developed a substantial tsunami warning system, and it worked in as quickly as three minutes. People did evacuate, for the large part. Much of the video you see is from helicopters, or people watching from two or three stories up in buildings. There is only so much you can do with these events; this is a massive force.”

But the rising casualty counts highlights the deadly role of proximity to the quake, says Masterlark. “The very sad part is that because the quake was so close to the coast, they had very little warning; the time between the earthquake and the tsunami was minutes.”

More distant regions had adequate warning, Masterlark adds. “We had several hours before the wave reached Hawaii, and so were prepared. But Japan, unfortunately, even if you knew it was coming, you had only minutes, and that’s not enough time for many people to get to higher ground.”

Photo: Sarah Ruth

Basic tsunami safety

Public education and quick personal action remain the only ways to reduce the tsunami death toll:

1. Be on guard for strong earthquakes, which can spark a tsunami. If you feel one near the water, run inland.

2. Heed the warnings, and stay tuned to emergency radio stations.

3. Never go down to the beach to watch for tsunamis — they move much faster than you can run. People die doing this.

4. Most structures in the danger zone provide no protection. However, the upper stories of tall, reinforced concrete hotels can provide refuge if you have no time to move inland or to higher ground.

5. A tsunami is a series of waves. Don’t go near the water until you hear the all-clear from emergency authorities.

Following fatal footsteps?

Seismologists are loathe to predict earthquakes, but in the past decade or two, they have recognized that earthquakes occur in series along major faults in Turkey and Sumatra, as big quakes place extra stress on the adjacent fault. In Sumatra, a violent series of quakes began in 2004 with a magnitude 9.1, a magnitude 8.7 in 2005, a magnitude 7.6 in 2009, and a magnitude 7.7 in 2010.

The large quake in 2005 did not cause a major tsunami, but its timing, just three months after the Dec. 26 monster, suggests a compelling reason to focus intensively on the earthquake zone in the Japan trench, says Masterlark. “I am not trying to be alarmist, but I’m trying to look at where earthquakes have occurred along nearby faults to identify faults at risk. We’ll bring in numerical modeling and try to predict this as fast as possible. Time is of the essence, as we saw in Sumatra.”

Photo: Black Friday, 2010

Is this mob about to enter retail hell or retail heaven?

Christmas is pending, and it’s time for spending! Even if you flunked Black Friday and missed Cyber Monday, we expect you’ll be watching cashiers ring up stuff you want. Stuff you believe others want.

And stuff nobody in their right mind would want.

Marketing is focused on getting us to spend money. So how do marketers find new ways to poke holes in your wallet?

Courtesy Peter Kleppin

Feeling overwhelmed by marketing? So is the cynic lurking in the background.

One standby mechanism is simply the level of overall hype that attends the Christmas season, and if you’ve noticed an outsize share of retail hype this year, that may reflect our parlous times, says Lars Perner, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Southern California. “This may be an extreme year. A lot of retailers probably banked on greater economic recovery than we had, so they brought in more goods than they did last year, when they anticipated the weak economy.”

Stocked with merchandise that will quickly de-value after Christmas, “They basically have become more aggressive,” says Perner. “We are even seeing pre-Thanksgiving sales, and many retailers have joined the trend of being open Thanksgiving day.”

The shopping compulsion

We asked Perner about Black Friday fever, and he agreed that compulsive bargain hunters do exist. “Some people get a psychological benefit from getting something on sale, quite aside from the product. They can end up buying things they do not need, that will end up in storage, just to get the good deal.”

1st photo: Cracker and Cheese. Rollover image: Just_[von]Bernard.

Attention Black Friday shoppers! We have deals to satisfy all your senses. Roll over to see store employees (in dark blue) guarding video games against desperate Black Friday shoppers.

That urge may be ancient, Perner added. “Some people get their arousal, enjoyment from sports. Some compete based on the best bargain, on getting something that is in short supply.” In the distant past, he says, “life was more difficult, we had to compete to get food. Now, when we live in a society where things are more affluent, they have retained much of the same instinct.”

Aggressive shopping, he says, “is a way to compete with other people, to get the satisfaction of getting these great deals, independent of any actual use you may have for the product.”

A touching moment

The Why Files

This manufacturer wants to show off the soft strap material; but touching also increases sales by creating a sense of ownership.

In their quest to stimulate the shopping imperative, scientists are turning to the five senses. Joann Peck, an associate professor of business at University of Wisconsin-Madison, noticed that little research had been devoted to the sense of touch in marketing, and she made that her specialty.

Obviously, touching conveys information about function, Peck acknowledges. “With a sweater, you get information on weight and texture.”

But touch does much more, Peck avers. In lab experiments, Peck asked student subjects to either play with a Slinky or simply touch its box, and then decide how much to pay for it. We figured playing with this classic toy would increase its value, but were surprised to learn that touching the box did likewise. Playing produced the biggest effect, says Peck, “but even if they just touched the box, that did more than not touching.”

Touching, Peck says, creates “psychological ownership, even if there are no product attributes related to touch. So you have to be careful what you touch.” The touch does not even need to occur, Peck says. “If you close your eyes and imagine touching a product, that can be as good as actually touching.”

Cultural differences affect the retail touchy-feelies, Peck adds. “In England, people are used to touching sheets, but here we use the thread count to measure softness. People who come over from England may rip open the package; they can’t believe they can’t touch the sheets.”

Package designers are busy putting tactile treats on razors, pens, pencils, even backpacks.

Touch can even operate through the mail, Peck says, noting that when a children’s museum solicited memberships using two versions of the same flier, the ones that carried a swatch of soft material elicited a better response.

The Why Files

Mail-order giant L.L. Bean had enough faith in the power of touch to paste a disk of touchy-feely material on a catalog last fall.

Because touching a soft object can improve mood, some stores place goods like sweaters near the entrance, with a placard encouraging customers to “Feel the softness.” But our touching tendency can result in finger smudges on fine clothes, so some stores have altered traffic patterns to fight unconscious product fondling en route to the kitchen or shoe departments.

The song of Christmas

You’re wandering, dazed but dogged, through retaildom, and the familiar holiday music hounds you through the aisles: Jingle Bells, Silent Night, O Come All Ye Faithful. The question of exactly how this music affects you fascinates Lisa Cavanaugh, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Southern California. “We often hear music but don’t know much about how it influence behavior,” she says.

Admittedly, minor-key music makes people sad and major-key music makes them happy. Because a rapid tempo causes us to move faster, Cavanaugh says fast-food restaurants like it, “because they need your chair for the next customer.”

Music can even be a defensive measure, Cavanaugh adds, describing a 24-hour convenience store that was worried that loitering teenagers would offend customers. “They started playing classical music in the parking lot, and the kids were annoyed: ‘This is not our music; this is not us.’ And they left.”

But Cavanaugh wanted to go deeper. For example, does in-store holiday music affect us differently if it’s religious (Joy to the World) or secular (Frosty the Snowman)? “Retailers often don’t distinguish religious from non-religious music, they just put it on,” she says. “I was interested in what type of music is playing, and how that may shape what people buy.”

Courtesy Lisa Cavanaugh.

Honey, would you snag a bottle of mouthwash and some soap — er, body wash — on your way home? Cavanaugh used this mock store to study consumer choices in the presence of different holiday music.

Cavanaugh found that secular music shifted people, particularly non-Christians, toward pricier brands: “They would buy Advil, or Dixie paper plates, over the store brand.” Why? Perhaps non-Christians are responding to holiday music because “even if you are not Christian and don’t celebrate the holiday, it’s as if knowing the script is enough, you know what you are supposed to do.”

When Cavanaugh allowed the subjects to donate money to a charity after the experiment, religious music increased donations by both Christians and non-Christians.

Sweet scent of spending success

We’ve known for years that the scent of fresh bread will boost home sales, but odor can also affect retail spending:

* A 1995 study in Las Vegas found a 45 percent boost in slot-machine take when odors were piped into the one-armed bandit section of a casino.

* A study from 2000 showed that a pleasant geranium scent made it easier to remember unfamiliar brands.

* A restaurant study from 2006¹ associated the odor of lavender, but not lemon, with a longer stay and a higher bill. The authors speculated that lavender works through relaxation.

Many studies show that pleasant scents improve attention, relaxation and generosity. But scents can also increase the all-important buying behavior.

Speaking of restaurants, a 2010 study² in France showed that waitresses got tips from a higher percentage of male customers if they wore makeup. Although women’s tipping behavior did not change significantly, the average men’s tip rose from 1.1 euros to 1.4 euros. With appropriate academic caution, the authors speculated that “perhaps” the explanation lay in the “greater physical or sexual attractiveness of waitresses when they wore makeup.”

How grand is my brand?

In marketing, brands are the shots heard around the world. Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Apple. The brand — and its representation in a logo — may be a firm’s most cherished possessions. A brand “gives an image of a product or company,” and it creates a relationship with a potential buyer, explains Ira Kalb, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Southern California.

Tania Liu

Do these ceramic shoppers have favorite brands?

Kalb says a good brand can make life easier for buyers: When you walk into a store with a strong brand, he says, “You trust it, so you don’t have to think so hard about what you are going to buy.”

Product brands can be equally effective at stimulating the buying decision, Kalb says, because it “creates a shortcut for the buyer and inoculates the product against the competition.” iPhone buyers, he says, “Are very loyal, and most would not look at an Android phone.”

If used incautiously, a strong brand can backfire, Kalb says. The Clorox Company, for example, produces salad dressing, “but it would be totally insane to brand the salad dressing as Clorox. The company has identified itself with a product line [chlorinated cleansers] that is so far from salad dressing. This is a clear case where separate is better.”

A strong brand can also confuse, Kalb says. IBM, the computer company, went into the copier business, and Xerox, the copier company, sold computers, but both efforts staggered. Although IBM and Xerox both dominated their original markets, “but the brand identity prevented them from succeeding in other areas.”

Photo: Jim Robinson

On your mark, get set, shop! How do marketers put your spending in overdrive?

Thus it sometimes makes sense to abandon a good brand, Kalb says, noting that Toyota, Nissan and Honda all created luxury spin-offs as their market aged and grew more affluent. In the 1980s, Kalb says, “Japanese cars were good, but ugly. As baby boomers got wealthier, the Japanese auto manufacturer knew they could not use those corporate names, and they came up with Lexis, Infinity and Acura.”

“Brand carries both baggage and positives,” Kalb says, “and smart marketing people know when to use the corporate brand and when to use a separate one.”

Death is my brand

Brands can convey unconscious negative associations, according to research³ from Holland, which found that the brand of an insurance company “may (unintentionally) induce the fear of death under various conditions.”

Wikipedia

Vance Packard wrote about “the large-scale efforts being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences.” Although Packard argued that consumers were putty in the hands of science-enabled marketers, many now doubt that marketing’s “awesome tools” attain anything approaching absolute autonomy on our spending.

Ouch!

After seeing the insurance logo, the subjects “had more mortality-related thoughts than participants in the no-brand control condition,” the authors wrote. We would not predict this, but the participants then spent more on entertainment and food, and had a higher regard for products produced domestically.

Those intimations of mortality caused terror, the authors believe. “Individuals confronted with an insurance brand, are unconsciously reminded of their mortality and use spending as a means to regulate their experienced terror. The current research shows that brands can sometimes automatically trigger unconscious, hidden motives, desires, and fears that have a significant impact on consumer behavior.”

If that isn’t disturbing enough, the researchers added that “these findings empirically verify that reducing existential anxiety is conceivable through lavish consumption.”

Modern marketing = manipulation?

The prospect that we can be ruled by things we don’t even notice was raised in 1957 ago by journalist Vance Packard, who warned that unethical, coercive tactics based on science could turn Americans into free-spending robots. In The Hidden Persuaders, Packard argued that the unconscious mind could seize control of behavior.

A second event in 1957, at a New Jersey drive-in theater, raised further alarms about persuasion run amok. This “experiment” supposedly proved that on-screen text, flashed faster than the conscious mind could register, increased purchases of Coca-Cola and popcorn. The study was considered proof that marketers could beam messages directly into our unconscious minds.

But many observers now consider the experiment a fraud that could never be replicated, and many doubt that it was even performed.

To those who believe the planet is being consumed by consumption, the annual X-mas spend-a-thon amounts to a Shopocalypse.

Just_[von]Bernard

Maybe we aren’t shopping automatons, but something awful persuasive seems to be going on here.

Ask a marketer, and he’ll tell you that modern marketers do not have the power to unconsciously manipulate us. “A marketer’s job is to get people to want to buy the product,” acknowledges Kalb, “in order to convince people to buy their’s versus another’s. I don’t think anything is wrong with that. If I am marketing a product, it’s because I think it’s better than the others. If I don’t feel mine is better, I would not sell the product.”

This does leave a gray area, as Kalb admits. “You are going to have good and bad marketers. But the bad ones won’t last long, people will find out about anything. The market is a harsh critic, and you may deceive others for a little while, but not for very long.”