How GE Branded My
Unborn Baby
Mark Wilson
A TINY LOGO HIDDEN ON ULTRASOUNDS COULD BE COAXING NEW PARENTS TO BUY
GE’S FLEET OF HOME APPLIANCES.
238,900 miles from Earth, I see my unborn child for the
first time. My view is a grainy black-and-white image on a
10-inch screen, unremarkable and indistinguishable in every
way, save for the tiniest of bubbles. It’s the great unknown.
It’s my moon.
I never cared about an ultrasound before my wife’s, before
that grainy black-and-white image was our crystallizing
future, before the radioscopic pulse of the diagnostic sound
waves transitioned seamlessly into a heartbeat. The cadence
was impossibly confident for an entity so small and distant. It
was the sound of life itself.
It wasn’t until hours later, staring at a snapshot in a trance,
that I realized how intensely we’d been manipulated by a
higher power. Because right beside the fetus were two letters
that glowed like a star against the black background: GE.
My child was but a bundle of organized cells just a few weeks
in development, yet he or she had already been enlisted as
a soldier in the $4.6 billion ultrasound market war. My baby
had been branded before birth, and I’d never look at GE’s
microwaves, light bulbs, and wind turbines the same way
again.
THE POWER OF UNCONSCIOUS
BRANDING
A few weeks later, I hop on the phone with Douglas Van
Praet, Fast Company contributor and author of the book
Unconscious Branding, which explores how advertisers use
powerful psychology to pull a consumer’s strings at the limbic
level. And I ask Van Praet what he thinks about corporate
logos finding their way on ultrasounds beside developing
children.
“It’s primal branding at its best,” Van Praet concedes as he
flips through a folder of ultrasound shots I’d sent him, one
after another, brand after brand, that each mark embryos
with a GE, Philips, or Siemens logo. “You’ll never, ever feel a
connection more deeply to anyone than your child.”
On my end, I experience a sort of Pavlovian association, he
explains. In a moment of awe, GE peeks its face into the
frame. And as I look at this image more, every time rekindling
a moment of joyous discovery, GE can gently associate itself
with positivity.
Now that’s not just a bunch of Freudian philosophy about
the nature of consciousness. This powerful brand association
has actually been proven in labs. Researchers at University
of Toronto have shown test subjects fictional brands, each
associated with positive and negative imagery. By the end
of the test, subjects couldn’t consciously remember any of
the good/bad associations, but when asked how they felt
about those fictional brands, the imagery had left a strongly
correlative aftertaste in their mouths--an “I like it, but I don’t
know why’ effect” and the exact opposite.
We call this aftertaste “intuition.”
“It’s certainly conceivable that you’d pick up the GE brand
on the unconscious level because it’s so subtle,” Van Praet
explains. And in GE’s case, the brand is leveraging a
particularly powerful trigger--my child--whose importance
sinks all the way down to the deepest parts of my brain
and my basest instinct to reproduce. (It’s the same reason
Michelin ads feature babies sitting in tires.) It’s an all-around
branding coup. But there are still rules of engagement when
deploying these sly branding maneuvers.
IT’S PRIMAL
BRANDING AT ITS
BEST.