In my 21-year career as a TV watcher, I can only vividly recall one commercial: the one where Sarah McLachlan’s saintly “Angel” hymn pervades the room, and my glowing screen is filled with a scrunch of brown fuzz, complete with round eyes, a soft button snout and a floppy pink tongue. I love puppy.
But something’s wrong: It seems he’s lying on a vet’s icy examination table, looking sick and vulnerable as all hell. I wonder if he’s OK. He stares back helplessly as my heartstrings tighten. Just when they’ve wound so devastatingly tense that I’m beginning to emote out loud, the helpless McKitty FurFace takes the stage and the cycle starts all over again. It follows McLachlan’s somber piano until she asks me to donate to the British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
I jump to find my phone and debit card — eager to rescue as many doe-eyed fur folk as my paycheck permits — but I abandon the mission when “America’s Next Top Model” returns from a commercial break, pushing the sad, snuggable stares out of my mind.
Almost gets me every time. BCSPCA sure knows how to make a tearjerker. But the organization’s key to my heart is neither its B-list celebrity rep nor its reminder that my helpless domestic companions are suffering everywhere. More than anything else, I am moved by cuteness.
It might just be the most powerful marketing tool since sex. The scientific side of our reaction to cute is that — as a species that births some of the most incapable, drooly infants on Earth — we are programmed to tend to anything that exemplifies even the most remote trace of babyish need. In fact, our Darwinian instinct runs so deep that some studies suggest cute things stimulate the same feelings of pleasure in the brain aroused by a delicious meal, sex or cocaine.
The ad-market translation: Consumers go crazy for adorable things. Like babies, we love to bring them home, hug and squeeze them and show them to all our friends.
I’m not talking about blatant-sucker buys like those of my stuffed animal-obsessed housemate, who returns with a new bright-pink, floppy-limbed friend each time she visits CVS for some toothpaste. I’m talking subtle qualities, things as unnoticeable as a shoe’s rounded toe or a car’s wide-eyed headlights.
If you want a corporate example, take the iPhone — a product many millions pine for. Its body is smooth, its corners rounded and its face covered in colorful, bouncy icons. It makes cute noises. You want it to have and to hold, to touch and to stroke — and that attraction has nothing to do with what it can actually do. If it did, then HTC’s very capable (but hopelessly banal) Droid might actually have an advantage over Apple’s iconic gadget.
Maybe we should all keep an eye out for this marketing ploy, avoiding the endearing gaze of the cuter candidate when we’re picking products. But then everyone would only own ugly things. And I don’t care how predictable my desire for the darling may be — sometimes it’s the superfluous pretty stuff that counts.