by Naomi Klein
Benetton and Calvin Klein, meanwhile, were also upping their spending on lifestyle marketing, using ads to associate their lines with risqué art and progressive politics. Clothes barely appeared in these high-concept advertisements, let alone prices. Even more abstract was Absolut Vodka, which for some years now had been developing a marketing strategy in which its product disappeared and its brand was nothing but a blank bottle-shaped space that could be filled with whatever content a particular audience most wanted from its brands: intellectual in Harper’s, futuristic in Wired, alternative in Spin, loud and proud in Out and “Absolut Centerfold” in Playboy. The brand reinvented itself as a cultural sponge, soaking up and morphing to its surroundings. (See Table 1.3, Appendix, and Absolut image.)
Saturn, too, came out of nowhere in October 1990 when GM launched a car built not out of steel and rubber but out of New Age spirituality and seventies feminism. After the car had been on the market a few years, the company held a “homecoming” weekend for Saturn owners, during which they could visit the auto plant and have a cookout with the people who made their cars. As the Saturn ads boasted at the time, “44,000 people spent their vacations with us, at a car plant.” It was as if Aunt Jemima had come to life and invited you over to her house for dinner.
In 1993, the year the Marlboro Man was temporarily hobbled by “brand-blind” consumers, Microsoft made its striking debut on Advertising Age’s list of the top 200 ad spenders —the very same year that Apple computer increased its marketing budget by 30 percent after already making branding history with its Orwellian takeoff ad launch during the 1984 Super Bowl (see image). Like Saturn, both companies were selling a hip new relationship to the machine that left Big Blue IBM looking as clunky and menacing as the now-dead Cold War.
And then there were the companies that had always understood that they were selling brands before product. Coke, Pepsi, McDonald’s, Burger King and Disney weren’t fazed by the brand crisis, opting instead to escalate the brand war, especially since they had their eyes firmly fixed on global expansion. (See Table 1.4, Appendix.) They were joined in this project by a wave of sophisticated producer/retailers who hit full stride in the late eighties and early nineties. The Gap, Ikea and the Body Shop were spreading like wildfire during this period, masterfully transforming the generic into the brand-specific, largely through bold, carefully branded packaging and the promotion of an “experiential” shopping environment. The Body Shop had been a presence in Britain since the seventies, but it wasn’t until 1988 that it began sprouting like a green weed on every street corner in the U.S. Even during the darkest years of the recession, the company opened between forty and fifty American stores a year. Most baffling of all to Wall Street, it pulled off the expansion without spending a dime on advertising. Who needed billboards and magazine ads when retail outlets were three-dimensional advertisements for an ethical and ecological approach to cosmetics? The Body Shop was all brand.
Table 1.2
Nike and Reebok Ad Spending, 1985–97
The Starbucks coffee chain, meanwhile, was also expanding during this period without laying out much in advertising; instead, it was spinning off its name into a wide range of branded projects: Starbucks airline coffee, office coffee, coffee ice cream, coffee beer. Starbucks seemed to understand brand names at a level even deeper than Madison Avenue, incorporating marketing into every fiber of its corporate concept — from the chain’s strategic association with books, blues and jazz to its Euro-latte lingo. What the success of both the Body Shop and Starbucks showed was how far the branding project had come in moving beyond splashing one’s logo on a billboard. Here were two companies that had fostered powerful identities by making their brand concept into a virus and sending it out into the culture via a variety of channels: cultural sponsorship, political controversy, the consumer experience and brand extensions. Direct advertising, in this context, was viewed as a rather clumsy intrusion into a much more organic approach to image building.
Scott Bedbury, Starbucks’ vice president of marketing, openly recognized that “consumers don’t truly believe there’s a huge difference between products,” which is why brands must “establish emotional ties” with their customers through “the Starbucks Experience.”16 The people who line up for Starbucks, writes CEO Howard Shultz, aren’t just there for the coffee. “It’s the romance of the coffee experience, the feeling of warmth and community people get in Starbucks stores.”17
Interestingly, before moving to Starbucks, Bedbury was head of marketing at Nike, where he oversaw the launch of the “Just Do It!” slogan, among other watershed branding moments. In the following passage, he explains the common techniques used to infuse the two very different brands with meaning:
Nike, for example, is leveraging the deep emotional connection that people have with sports and fitness. With Starbucks, we see how coffee has woven itself into the fabric of people’s lives, and that’s our opportunity for emotional leverage…. A great brand raises the bar —it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience, whether it’s the challenge to do your best in sports and fitness or the affirmation that the cup of coffee you’re drinking really matters.18
This was the secret, it seemed, of all the success stories of the late eighties and early nineties. The lesson of Marlboro Friday was that there never really was a brand crisis —only brands that had crises of confidence. The brands would be okay, Wall Street concluded, so long as they believed fervently in the principles of branding and never, ever blinked. Overnight, “Brands, not products!” became the rallying cry for a marketing renaissance led by a new breed of companies that saw themselves as “meaning brokers” instead of product producers. What was changing was the idea of what —in both advertising and branding —was being sold. The old paradigm had it that all marketing was selling a product. In the new model, however, the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the brand, and the selling of the brand acquired an extra component that can only be described as spiritual. Advertising is about hawking product. Branding, in its truest and most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence.
It may sound flaky, but that’s precisely the point. On Marlboro Friday, a line was drawn in the sand between the lowly price slashers and the high-concept brand builders. The brand builders conquered and a new consensus was born: the products that will flourish in the future will be the ones presented not as “commodities” but as concepts: the brand as experience, as lifestyle.
Ever since, a select group of corporations has been attempting to free itself from the corporeal world of commodities, manufacturing and products to exist on another plane. Anyone can manufacture a product, they reason (and as the success of private-label brands during the recession proved, anyone did). Such menial tasks, therefore, can and should be farmed out to contractors and subcontractors whose only concern is filling the order on time and under budget (ideally in the Third World, where labor is dirt cheap, laws are lax and tax breaks come by the bushel). Headquarters, meanwhile, is free to focus on the real business at hand —creating a corporate mythology powerful enough to infuse meaning into these raw objects just by signing its name.
The corporate world has always had a deep New Age streak, fed —it has become clear —by a profound need that could not be met simply by trading widgets for cash. But when branding captured the corporate imagination, New Age vision quests took center stage. As Nike CEO Phil Knight explains, “For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.”19 This project has since been taken to an even more advanced level with the emergence of on-line corporate giants such as Amazon.com. It is on-line that the purest brands are being built: liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these bra
nds are free to soar, less as the disseminators of goods or services than as collective hallucinations.
Tom Peters, who has long coddled the inner flake in many a hard-nosed CEO, latched on to the branding craze as the secret to financial success, separating the transcendental logos and the earthbound products into two distinct categories of companies. “The top half —Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Disney, and so on —are pure ‘players’ in brainware. The bottom half [Ford and GM] are still lumpy-object purveyors, though automobiles are much ‘smarter’ than they used to be,” Peters writes in The Circle of Innovation (1997), an ode to the power of marketing over production.20
When Levi’s began to lose market share in the late nineties, the trend was widely attributed to the company’s failure —despite lavish ad spending —to transcend its products and become a free-standing meaning. “Maybe one of Levi’s problems is that it has no Cola,” speculated Jennifer Steinhauer in The New York Times. “It has no denim-toned house paint. Levi makes what is essentially a commodity: blue jeans. Its ads may evoke rugged out-doorsmanship, but Levi hasn’t promoted any particular life style to sell other products.”21
In this high-stakes new context, the cutting-edge ad agencies no longer sold companies on individual campaigns but on their ability to act as “brand stewards”: identifying, articulating and protecting the corporate soul. Not surprisingly, this spelled good news for the U.S. advertising industry, which in 1994 saw a spending increase of 8.6 percent over the previous year. In one year, the ad industry went from a near crisis to another “best year yet.”22 And that was only the beginning of triumphs to come. By 1997, corporate advertising, defined as “ads that position a corporation, its values, its personality and character” were up 18 percent from the year before.23
With this wave of brand mania has come a new breed of businessman, one who will proudly inform you that Brand X is not a product but a way of life, an attitude, a set of values, a look, an idea. And it sounds really great —way better than that Brand X is a screwdriver, or a hamburger chain, or a pair of jeans, or even a very successful line of running shoes. Nike, Phil Knight announced in the late eighties, is “a sports company;” its mission is not to sell shoes but to “enhance people’s lives through sports and fitness” and to keep “the magic of sports alive.”24 Company president-cum-sneaker-shaman Tom Clark explains that “the inspiration of sports allows us to rebirth ourselves constantly.”25
Reports of such “brand vision” epiphanies began surfacing from all corners. “Polaroid’s problem,” diagnosed the chairman of its advertising agency, John Hegarty, “was that they kept thinking of themselves as a camera. But the ‘[brand] vision’ process taught us something: Polaroid is not a camera —it’s a social lubricant.”26 IBM isn’t selling computers, it’s selling business “solutions.” Swatch is not about watches, it is about the idea of time. At Diesel Jeans, owner Renzo Rosso told Paper magazine, “We don’t sell a product, we sell a style of life. I think we have created a movement…. The Diesel concept is everything. It’s the way to live, it’s the way to wear, it’s the way to do something.” And as Body Shop founder Anita Roddick explained to me, her stores aren’t about what they sell, they are the conveyers of a grand idea —a political philosophy about women, the environment and ethical business. “I just use the company that I surprisingly created as a success —it shouldn’t have been like this, it wasn’t meant to be like this — to stand on the products to shout out on these issues,” Roddick says.
The famous late graphic designer Tibor Kalman summed up the shifting role of the brand this way: “The original notion of the brand was quality, but now brand is a stylistic badge of courage.”27
The idea of selling the courageous message of a brand, as opposed to a product, intoxicated these CEOs, providing as it did an opportunity for seemingly limitless expansion. After all, if a brand was not a product, it could be anything! And nobody embraced branding theory with more evangelical zeal than Richard Branson, whose Virgin Group has branded joint ventures in everything from music to bridal gowns to airlines to cola to financial services. Branson refers derisively to the “stilted Anglo-Saxon view of consumers,” which holds that a name should be associated with a product like sneakers or soft drinks, and opts instead for “the Asian ‘trick’” of the keiretsus (a Japanese term meaning a network of linked corporations). The idea, he explains, is to “build brands not around products but around reputation. The great Asian names imply quality, price and innovation rather than a specific item. I call these ‘attribute’ brands: They do not relate directly to one product —such as a Mars bar or a Coca-Cola —but instead to a set of values.”28
Tommy Hilfiger, meanwhile, is less in the business of manufacturing clothes than he is in the business of signing his name. The company is run entirely through licensing agreements, with Hilfiger commissioning all its products from a group of other companies: Jockey International makes Hilfiger underwear, Pepe Jeans London makes Hilfiger jeans, Oxford Industries make Tommy shirts, the Stride Rite Corporation makes its footwear. What does Tommy Hilfiger manufacture? Nothing at all.
So passé had products become in the age of lifestyle branding that by the late nineties, newer companies like Lush cosmetics and Old Navy clothing began playing with the idea of old-style commodities as a source of retro marketing imagery. The Lush chain serves up its face masks and moisturizers out of refrigerated stainless-steel bowls, spooned into plastic containers with grocery-store labels. Old Navy showcases its shrink-wrapped T-shirts and sweatshirts in deli-style chrome refrigerators, as if they were meat or cheese. When you are a pure, concept-driven brand, the aesthetics of raw product can prove as “authentic” as loft living.
And lest the branding business be dismissed as the playground of trendy consumer items such as sneakers, jeans and New Age beverages, think again. Caterpillar, best known for building tractors and busting unions, has barreled into the branding business, launching the Cat accessories line: boots, backpacks, hats and anything else calling out for a postindustrial je ne sais quoi. Intel Corp., which makes computer parts no one sees and few understand, transformed its processors into a fetish brand with TV ads featuring line workers in funky metallic space suits dancing to “Shake Your Groove Thing.” The Intel mascots proved so popular that the company has sold hundreds of thousands of bean-filled dolls modeled on the shimmery dancing technicians. Little wonder, then, that when asked about the company’s decision to diversify its products, the senior vice president for sales and marketing, Paul S. Otellini, replied that Intel is “like Coke. One brand, many different products.”29
And if Caterpillar and Intel can brand, surely anyone can.
There is, in fact, a new strain in marketing theory that holds that even the lowliest natural resources, barely processed, can develop brand identities, thus giving way to hefty premium-price markups. In an essay appropriately titled “How to Brand Sand,” advertising executives Sam I. Hill, Jack McGrath and Sandeep Dayal team up to tell the corporate world that with the right marketing plan, nobody has to stay stuck in the stuff business. “Based on extensive research, we would argue that you can indeed brand not only sand, but also wheat, beef, brick, metals, concrete, chemicals, corn grits and an endless variety of commodities traditionally considered immune to the process.”30
Over the past six years, spooked by the near-death experience of Marlboro Friday, global corporations have leaped on the brand-wagon with what can only be described as a religious fervor. Never again would the corporate world stoop to praying at the altar of the commodity market. From now on they would worship only graven media images. Or to quote Tom Peters, the brand man himself: “Brand! Brand!! Brand!!! That’s the message … for the late ’90s and beyond.”31
CHAPTER TWO
THE BRAND EXPANDS
How the Logo Grabbed Center Stage
Since the crocodile is the symbol of Lacoste, we thought they might be interested in sponsoring our crocodiles.
—Silvino Gomes, commer
cial director of the Lisbon Zoo,
on the institution’s creative corporate
sponsorship program, March 1998
I was in Grade 4 when skintight designer jeans were the be-all and end-all, and my friends and I spent a lot of time checking out each other’s butt for logos. “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,” Brooke Shields assured us, and as we lay back on our beds Ophelia-style and yanked up the zippers on our Jordache jeans with wire hangers, we knew she was telling no word of a lie. At around the same time, Romi, our school’s own pint-sized Farrah Fawcett, used to make her rounds up and down the rows of desks turning back the collars on our sweaters and polo shirts. It wasn’t enough for her to see an alligator or a leaping horseman —it could have been a knockoff. She wanted to see the label behind the logo. We were only eight years old but the reign of logo terror had begun.
About nine years later, I had a job folding sweaters at an Esprit clothing store in Montreal. Mothers would come in with their six-year-old daughters and ask to see only the shirts that said “Esprit” in the company’s trademark bold block lettering. “She won’t wear anything without a name,” the moms would confide apologetically as we chatted by the change rooms. It’s no secret that branding has become far more ubiquitous and intrusive by now. Labels like Baby Gap and Gap Newborn imprint brand awareness on toddlers and turn babies into mini-billboards. My friend Monica tells me that her seven-year-old son marks his homework not with check marks but with little red Nike swooshes.
