Fill it to the Rim, With Branding

I've ranted more than a few times here about marketing: essentially, I think the level of effort put into hyper-aggressive advertising is replacing our culture, at the deep level of sense of social and cultural identity. I will continue to rant because this is a gut argument - the fragile little shrines of hard truth, insight, or whimsy artists and creative people of all kinds and from all American cultures build are instantaneously bulldozed and stripped-mined for the little bits of remaining emotive association and attached to irrelevant products. And again, it is not the fact of advertising, or even it's ordinary practice. I'm not against publicizing your business well and cleverly. Rather it is marketing's growing and overwhelming ubiquity, it's elevation to "Branding," its spreading dominance as the chief cultural export of the United States, its insertion into our increasingly electronically-governed social relations.

Demonstrated amply in one of these stories where the tone of the article regards marketing as a fruitful area of epistomology - complete with professors- with an elevation of bullshit-making to become academic departments. This NYT article turns quickly from what might be a cute story about someone buying the rights to defunct Brim coffee or Quisp cereal into a celebration of the sociopathic relationship of marketing to what truth, meaning and human experience, identity and memory is.

From the article:

The relationship between brands and memory (faulty or no) is a specialty of Kathy LaTour, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In one of her most interesting studies, she worked with Elizabeth Loftus, a memory specialist and now a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a third researcher, Rhiannon Ellis, to take the issue to its logical extreme: What if, for example, an advertising campaign “implanted memories into consumers of things that never happened?”

The researchers found that subjects presented with a fake Disney World ad inviting them to “remember the characters of your youth: Mickey, Goofy . . . ” were significantly more likely to say they recalled that as children they had met “a favorite TV character at a theme resort” than those who didn’t see the ad. The fascinating thing was what happened when they repeated the experiment, tweaking the ads to include Bugs Bunny, who, of course, is not a Disney character at all. About 16 percent of subjects subsequently claimed that, as children, they shook hands with Bugs Bunny at a Disney theme park. Repeated fake-ad exposure apparently led to higher false-memory rates. In a separate study, Loftus asked subjects with Bugs in their memories what, exactly, they recalled about this incident; of these, 62 percent recounted shaking Bugs’s hand, and more than a quarter specifically recalled him saying, “What’s up, Doc?”

Earle says that this imperfection of memory can be used to enhance whatever new Brim he comes up with. This is “a benefit of dormancy,” he says. The brand equity has value on its own, but it can be grafted onto something newer and, perhaps, more innovative. “Consumers remember the kind of high-level essence of the brand,” he says. “They tend to forget the product specifics.” This, he figures, creates an opening: it gives the reintroduced version “permission” to forget that decaf-only limitation as well and morph into a full line of coffee varieties. “ ‘Fill it to the rim with Brim’ stands for full-flavored coffee,” Earle says, with a chuckle. “Fill it to the rim — it’s great stuff!”

Isn't that innovative? We can dissociate your real experience from who you think you are, and have you pay us! Delightful! I did take some comfort from the news that display advertising is going downhill fast compared to search advertising (display advertising is the precisely this kind of advertising- brands, images, colors, faces and voices, and I am actually grateful in some ways for the development of search advertising, which relies on precision rather than blunt force trauma to our socially directed representations of love, community and friendship).

There is an extra danger, that dread the above study lends to Sunday's Frank Rich Column:'

The McCain campaign is hoping that such showy, if tardy, departures from Bush-Cheney doctrine will constitute a galaxy of Sister Souljah moments, each with headlines reading “McCain Breaks With Bush on...” and the usual knee-jerk press references to Mr. McCain as a “maverick.” Enough of these, you see, and those much-needed independent voters might be flimflammed into believing that the G.O.P. candidate bears no responsibility for the administration’s toxically unpopular policies...

But are independents suckers? They’d have to be to fall for the pitch that Mr. McCain is an apostate in his own party in 2008. He has been an outspoken Bush defender since helping him sell the Iraq war in 2002 and barnstorming for him in 2004. Despite Mr. McCain’s campaign claims to the contrary, he never publicly called for the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. He is still one of the president’s most stalwart supporters in Congress, even signing on to the president’s wildly unpopular veto of an expansion of children’s health insurance.

Well, scientific marketing apparently says we can make people think McCain is a whacky- anti- Bush maverick, and we'll all remember it ourselves - and we can certainly trust ourselves.

And this is it: how Americans' sense of identity, self, place and community are getting pushed around and out by people with sundries to sell and a new, offensive desire to present their own moral turpitude as innovation and intellectual accomplishment. This isn't a little thing: American social communities really are breaking down, partly under the media onslaught. The connections between people increasingly cut, the sense of self and place lost - worse, I've seen it in my students, smart kids who seem increasingly dispirited and disconnected. (Their hunger for social relevance is, I think, a big part of Obama's appeal.)

I connect the blizzard of marketing and this partial social dissolution. 1/7 of the economy goes into this effort because it has a profound effect on consumer behavior, in other words, on who we are and what we do.

A single piece of media seems small, but as the daily multi-hour deluge of all media - an electric dominance over direct human relationships- becomes the primary source of voices, faces and expression in our lives, we face only greater social and cultural losses.

The counter argument, and there is evidence for this of course, is that the electronic semiotic displacement of traditional social relations has allowed greater freedom and democracy in social relations. That is partly true, but it also makes them far more manipulable, as marketing and monitoring weaves itself ever more tightly into these relations.

What is Facebook but "Friend - Ad- Friend- Ad -Friend - Ad -Ad Friend?" We are in many ways the intersection of our relationships, and at that intersection are now these wonderful, sophisticated branding mechanisms. And this thought that fills me with such dread and hollowness is the also the best argument for their effectiveness. Which means more are coming.

I believe that economic interests monitoring and negotiating social relations are likely to become destructively influential. The early promise that the Internet would be open and democratic is feeling more and more like the promise that cds wouldn't skip, or Cable TV wouldn't have ads. And with evidence that you can displace people's memory of themselves, fresh electronic tools for monitoring all their social relations, and powerful market incentives to do so, I fear for America's ability to progress socially and culturally and in it's own humanism.

It is a technological distortion of love, of course: people of our generation sign up for myspace or twitter or facebook, mostly looking for old friends, and create an alternate, interesting sign-based simulation of interaction. Younger Americans are going straight to these networks to find friends in the first place.

Another of my fears (let's talk about robots) is that the pop-science studies I read suggest that human societies demand a massive dedication of a person's intellectual resources to the development of highly subtle and sophisticated social skills - what makes us think that as we go more and more to the computer for social experiences, a time and mental effort-expensive technology to say the least, we will still have plenty of time and mental space to master the genuinely difficult art of dealing with people, understanding them, valuing them?

I am beginning to think we will not. For my students, my feeling -and before you go off I admit I can't possibly back this up with science- is that there is a new thing wrong with American students: a broken social sense. My classes get quieter and quieter over the last few years, students not only not chatting in class, which is useful but suspect, but not talking much or at all in the 15 minutes before or after. When have American teachers had to encourage American students to yak to each other?

And I do ascribe some of this to the ubiquity and reach of brand marketing: it is intended to define masculinity, femininity, coolness, down-homeness, what youth is and what age is, what the American-ness means. And succeeds. And the purpose of that is so that we feel like we're falling short, so that we need to buy to make up the difference. It works wonders. 1/7 of the economy is a small price to pay for that kind of economic and social power.

So don't look to Facebook to save us, or Cisco systems. Instead, throw a dinner party. And if you see Brim back on the shelves, run like hell.