SOCA3666 Consumption & Everyday Life

1. SOCA3666 Consumption & Everyday Life Lecture Nine The Poetics and Politics of Branding Dr Steve Threadgold Lecture Notes are not to be cited in Assessment

2. Part 1

3. Poetics and Politics: ‘Values’ This week we dissect brands, their images and logos. We are shifting away from the ‘things’ and ‘spaces’ of consumption to look at ‘value’. There’s a shift from tangible commodities to intangible values. We can think about ‘value’ here in an number of different ways: The values promoted and used to sell us stuff The values used to critique consumer culture The widening gaps between use value and symbolic value And in future weeks, critical analysis of hidden values embedded in our system that focus upon waste, inequality and environmental issues.

4. Poetics and Politics 1. Poetics: understand the symbolic economy of advertising and consumer culture, where we are sold lifestyles, not things. Brands. 2. Politics: highlights the interface between first and third worlds, masking exploitative labour relations. 3. The 1990s journalistic work of Naomi Klein in No Logo is particularly relevant to both these topics.

5. 1. Poetics The concept of the ‘brand’ dominates consumer culture, and, increasingly, culture itself… to the point where individuals invoke the concept to talk about themselves. Think about when some individual footballer gets caught doing something stupid: he apologises for damaging the brand of his club or the code, and often for damaging his own ‘brand’. Brands are created as the ‘heart and soul’ or ‘personality’ of the company: an assemblage of what the company wants to ‘represent’… the shiny face of consumer culture. Back to semiotics: strategy and tactics of brands: in the end we ‘decode’, but much is done to manage the ‘encoding’.

6. History of branding Brands and logos were originally designed to mark quality, price, function etc. Advertisers argued that people couldn’t tell things apart anyway, so they needed help (advertisers think like Adorno!). Brands come to the fore as conspicuous consumption (Veblen) and as modes of distinction (Bourdieu). Behavioural sciences are used to study people’s behaviour in an effort to ‘connect’ with them emotionally (not to make them happy, but to exploit!). Ads actually seem designed to make us unhappy See this sketch of a nice parody: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=85HT4Om6JT4 Ads become increasingly fictitious, symbolic, metaphorical, absurd etc. Demographics to psychographics. This becomes further complex as media becomes multi-dimensional: political economy of the sign and simulation (Baudrillard). Brands become something that represent who we are in our processes of presentation of self: self-identity and social identity.

7. Poetics of the Logo Designed to engender emotion, an affective reaction. Need for immediate speed of perception in a saturated public space. Need to draw the connotations the company wants. Association with real people: the ‘halo effect’. Logophilia: ‘I’m a Nike person’, Apple vs PC Logos mask materiality: they are about lifestyle, not actual things. Logos and Brands become embedded in culture. See examples of this in this special episode of Media Watch: http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s3527875.htm

8. PART 2

9. 2. Politics Where do you even start with this stuff? Sweatshops? Chemicals and cancer? Air miles? Labour exploitation to the point of slavery? Temporary export zones? Peak Oil? Climate Change? GM food? Exploitation of the Third/Developing world by the First/Developed… the minority world exploits the majority. In the late 90s, Michael Jordan was paid more in one year than the whole cost of producing the shoes in SE Asia, illustrative of symbolism over materiality/ethics etc. Will look at this more in next section that discusses No Logo.

10. Commodity Racism From commodity fetishism to commodity racism… white fetishisation of blackness and black fetishisation of white wealth and taste (remember Bourdieu here). Racial political issues discuss the exploitation of black culture to be used to sell ‘cool’ to white people. Here, there is a juxtaposed ‘buying in’ process between whiteness (taste, wealth, purity) and blackness (edgy, cool, hip, style). Eg. Jazz, hip hop, Grand Theft Auto, brandings’ connotations with slavery Connected to this is the co-optation of the notion of ‘cool’: see Thomas Frank’s early work on this. These are forms of affective and immaterial labour

11. Hipster Racism This also reminds me of a relatively new phenomenon called ‘hipster racism’. See: http://jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism https://web.archive.org/web/20130302044555/http://www.racialicious.com/2007/01/15/the-10-biggest-race-and-pop-culture-trends-of-2006-part-1-of-3/ http://meloukhia.net/2009/07/hipster_racism/ https://www.popmatters.com/148313-5-ways-to-kill-a-hipster-a-critique-of-anti-hipsterism-2495956013.html

12. Part 3

13. Naomi Klein & No Logo • Klein’s analyses multinational corporations employment practices in both the North and South; • their influence, to the point of saturation, on all forms of culture; • the corporate infiltration into education, censorship and public space; • the impact of mergers and synergy on society; the co-optation of “cool”, subversive and oppositional culture, especially of the young and black; • and how some (mostly young) people are fighting back against the commodification and commercialization of identity, public, cultural, societal and mental space. • She effectively illustrates the huge efforts that MNCs go through to create the poetics of their brand, then charts the subversive political reaction. • Klein talking about her book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI0itS3gQFU

14. Klein: Citizen or Consumer? Klein’s main point is that capitalism in the age of globalisation is the age of the brand; we live in a branded world where taste, culture and values are increasingly defined by mega-brands. This produces a new relationship between product and consumer. Where brand names were once meant to assure the quality of a product, today the brand has detached itself from the actual products to become the selling point. A brand or logo now defines a meaning, a lifestyle, an attitude, an identity. Brands are now culture – think Golden Arches, Nike swooshes, Starbucks coffee and Disney movies. Klein does not reject globalisation as a whole; she takes the position that there should be at least some unbranded non-corporatised space – physical, mental and cultural - and that the cynical, inhuman and profit driven practices of multinational corporations must be controlled. Leads to consumer politics: brand boycotting, culture jamming etc. Most importantly, she poses a question that all people must ask themselves in the current climate of postmodern neo-liberal global consumer capitalism – Am I a consumer or a citizen? Should I be defined by what I buy or how I think?

15. Four Aspects of No Logo No Space No Choice No Jobs No Logo

16. No Space Klein sites a vast array of examples showing that virtually nothing is sacred from marketing, co-optation and corporate influence – public space, music, films, schools, universities, research, sports, community events, art, oppositional culture – the list is endless. Pepsi’s proposal to beam its logo onto the moon (p9) is a telling example of corporations’ ambition for logo dominance. While cultural phenomena like rock music and sport have always been easily co-opted, the corporate intrusion into education and institutions is most controversial. The dominance of neo-liberalism has seen funding of education continually decrease leading to a rise in allegiances between schools and companies. US colleges now have positions named the “Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of Hotel and Restaurant Management”, the “Yahoo! Chair of Information-Systems Technology” and the “Lego Professorship of Learning Research” (p101). Soft-drinks and fast food chains “sponsor” schools with requirements that non-branded items of the same type as the retailer not be available from the school kitchen for free (p91). Compliant schools provide their students for market research, test marketing, and advertising and promotion development (Fahy, 2000, 115). Almost all sponsorships contain a “gagging clause” to prevent any criticism of the corporate benefactor.

17. No Space The kid expelled for wearing a Pepsi shirt to his college on official Coke Day is amusing (p95). Yet, a corporate sponsorship and its apparent requirements for censorship reveal a striking number of potentially fatal side effects. When scientific and medical researches have attempted to publish their findings in journals, with information detrimental to the sponsor company’s product, the universities were threatened with the termination of their multi-million dollar sponsorships and the researches were sacked. This is done regardless of the cover-up of the potential damaging and fatal effects of the drugs or products being researched (p98-101). The co-optation of culture is central to Klein’s analysis. By sponsoring cultural events (sports, concerts etc.), advanced branding techniques attempt to “nudge the host into the background and make the brand the star” (p30). As companies seek to attach their brands to the crucial youth market, they invest heavily in gaining a critical understanding of youth subcultures. They do this via “cool hunters” (p72) who use ethnographic techniques to report back to the brands with what is cool (see chapter entitled “Alt.Everything”). Similarly, identity politics, which was so prevalent in the early 90s, has been co-opted in terms of diversifying marketing images and strategies. Klein proposes that many young activists (herself included), who protested for fair representation for blacks, homosexuals and women in advertising and popular culture, focussed too much on image rather than action. By devoting their energy to issues of representation, issues about ownership and economics were ignored, partly lubricating the super-brands co-optation process (see chapter entitled “Patriarchy Gets Funky”).

18. No Choice “No Choice” traces the rise and rise of global retailers and the impact of mega-mergers, synergy, and corporate censorship. Klein traces the incredible rise of the monopolistic Wal-Mart, who buys cheap land on the outskirts of towns, slowly covering all regions until competition is decimated by the low prices it can offer due to its massive market share. Klein calls this the “big box” method (p133-135). Similarly, Starbucks opens stores so close together that not only does it force its independent competition to close, but its own sales per store decreases. But the companies overall profits increase, killing off independent retailers and destroying consumer choice. Klein calls this “clustering” (p135-139). Large-scale mergers, especially in media companies, are designed to dominate through cross-promotional activities. Here, in the race for scale, the idea of synergy (p 145-149) is central. You have the movie, now here is the book, the fast food meal, the CD, the theme park, the action figure, the comic and the clothing on the idea that “if you are not everywhere, you are nowhere” (p147).

19. No Choice The immense scale of the monopolistic mega-corporations leads to issues of corporate censorship. For instance, Disney buys ABC for which it uses to advertise its products. Yet, at the same time an ABC documentary, which reported bad security at Disney theme parks, is yanked off the air (p168-171). Huge retailers such as Wal-Mart have become moral guardians, banning products from their shelves that do not fit their conservative “family” image. Here, magazine and album covers are changed, Eminem and Marilyn Manson are not stocked and Nirvana’s “Rape Me” on In Utero is inexplicably changed to “Waif Me”, while some major film companies have stopped making films with a NC-17 rating because chains like Blockbuster refuse to stock them (p165-168). The main point here is that as corporations get bigger and bigger, the levels of non-branded cultural, societal, mental and physical space gets smaller and smaller. See bonus lecture for discussion of censorship.

20. No Jobs “No Jobs” argues that dubious production and labour practices are funding the multinational’s huge marketing budgets. Klein describes how companies have continually downsized production in the First World in favour of relocating to the low-cost Third World. Mega-brands now contract out their production to nameless subcontractors. Then, when confronted with accusations of labour exploitation, the brands (Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Disney et al) deny responsibility, claiming that it is a matter between the workers and the subcontractor. Klein adds her personal account of her experiences in the Export Processing Zone (EPZ) of Cavite in the Philippines.

21. No Jobs Less well documented is the multinational’s growing preference for contract and temporary employment in the First World. Employees are paid the minimum legal wage possible and are given just less than the amount of hours that constitutes full-time which in turn denies the employee the associated rights and benefits. Case in point is Microsoft, where one third of the staff are temporary yet some have been there so long they refer to themselves as “permatempts” (p249). Starbucks and the Gap force workers to do numerous small shifts a day or to be on-call permanently while claiming its part time roster allows its workers more freedom (p253). Here is a central paradox of contemporary capitalism - multinationals aggressively chase people (particularly youths) as consumers but have almost completely dropped them as workers (p284). This phenomenon, along with an increasing awareness of multinational’s shoddy production practices has led to a rapid increase in the anti-corporate sentiment Klein describes in “No Logo”. These are examples of McJobs. All this stuff has pretty much become the norm since Klein was writing No Logo.

22. No Logo Klein points to culture jamming, Reclaim the Streets parties, anti-corporate activism and brand based campaigns. Culture jamming (see chapter of the same name), subvertising or adbusting is the practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards to drastically alter their images – “a semiotic Robin Hoodism” (p280). This can range from scrawling “feed me” on the picture of a model on a bus shelter; guerilla style attacks on billboards to change the message (for instance, changing a Miller’s ad with the image of two freezing bottles and the message “Too Cold” to a message of “Too Cold: Miller canned 88 St Louis workers”); to the work of artist Robert de Gerada, who alters the complete image of billboards. This sounds like Situationism, but the subversive messages of the 60s – “Never Work”, “It’s Forbidden to Forbid”, “Take Your Desires for Reality” – now sound more like Nike or Sprite slogans (p283). The power of culture jamming lies in the very power and legitimacy of advertising itself (p285). Culture jamming aims more to just make a particular pop song or sneaker look absurd, it “homes in on the flipside of those branded emotions, and refocuses them, so they aren’t replaced with a craving for the next fashion or pop sensation but turn, slowly, on the process of branding itself” (p287-288). Adbusters think in terms of a jujitsu metaphor, subverting the logos, ads and slogans the superbrands spend millions on spreading and legitimizing – “In one simple deft move you slap a giant on its back” (p281).

23. No Logo The Reclaim the Streets movement (see chapter of the same name) is a mixture of anticorporate activists, ecologists, New Age artists, rave culture and Car Free activists. They secretly arrange and stage massive parties that block major intersections and thoroughfares for hours. “The events take culture jamming’s philosophy of reclaiming public space to another level. Rather than filling the space left by commerce with advertising parodies, the RTSers attempt to fill it with an alternative vision of what society might look like in the absence of commercial control” (p313). Klein highlights the recent and sustained attack on the practices of Nike, Shell and McDonalds. Nike’s sweatshop scandals have resulted in over 1500 news articles and opinion columns with its stock falling heavily. Nike has attempted it improve its labour practices as a result of this scrutiny. Shell has been in controversies over its links to the Nigerian military. Shell has since pulled out of the country. The “McLibel” case in Britain saw issues such as nutrition, food poisoning and bogus recycling publicly discussed in a trial that gained much media attention (see chapter entitled “ A Tale of Three Logos”). Klein also shows how local boycotts of certain products can create a chain reaction that greatly effects corporations where it hurts them the most – the bottom line. Here specific brands are targeted for a vast array of issues (see chapter entitled “Local Foreign Policy”).

25. Shell and Internet Culture Jams This is a nice recent example of internet culture jamming gone viral: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/shell-social-media-oil-spill-a-coordinated-online-assassination-20120719-22bpe.html

26. Limits of No Logo Yet, Klein is quick to point out the limits of brand-based activism and some of their more perverse results. Reebok, in the wake of the Nike controversy markets itself as the ethical shoe manufacturer despite maintaining its sweatshop labour practices. As Shell fled Nigeria due to lost business after the assassination of activist Ken Saro-Wira and the subsequent activism, Chevron stepped in using company helicopters to fly in the same soldiers to gun down local protesters. As Klein states, “it is sadly ironic that Chevron has undoubtedly benefited from the fact that activists have made a strategic decision to focus their criticism on Shell, rather than on the Nigerian oil industry as a whole, it points to one of the significant, at times maddening, limitations of brand-based politics” (p418-419). We cannot boycott everything.