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by James Harkin
Monday 18th June 2001
The culture jammers tried to subvert the big brand names.
But the smart advertisers now use guerrilla tactics themselves, writes
James Harkin
In a recent newspaper interview, Kalle Lasn was interrogated about
Adbusters, the Canadian anti-advertising magazine that he founded. The
dialogue went like this:
Do you think that Adbusters isn't a brand?
KL Well, I think that you can see it as a brand, but that's not the
dominant thing about it from my perspective or the perspective of the 15
people that, at the moment, work at Adbusters.
But you did buy time on CNN . . .
KL Yes, we did.
If you tell me about it in the context of an interview that will be printed
in a newspaper, that is about you as the editor of Adbusters, what you're
doing is building your brand, you're building equity in your brand.
KL No I'm not.
You are.
KL I know that is one of the things that is happening, too, but I
personally, right now, am not building my brand.
Maybe not consciously.
KL Yes, not consciously. I'm basically trying to be a spontaneous,
authentic human being who is talking to another human being.
The exchange highlights one of the dilemmas facing the movement against
brands. If the raison d'etre of Adbusters is to combat the white noise of
the messaging industry, how does Lasn justify a special claim on our senses
for its anti-advertising propaganda? Or, to put it another way: what
exactly is it that distinguishes an anti-brand from a mainstream commercial
brand?
The argument is revealing, because the boundaries between mainstream brands
and the anti-branding activists are becoming increasingly blurred. Kalle
Lasn's Adbusters is a magazine produced by radical advertisers for an
audience of media workers jaded with what they see as the "ethical
neutrality" of the advertising industry; its artwork is designed to flip
the meaning of advertising campaigns so that those campaigns end up
carrying an unintended message.
The magazine, beautifully produced, has created its own distinctive
aesthetic and boasts a global circulation of 100,000: the highlights
include a vodka bottle embossed with "Absolut Nonsense", and a spoof on a
Tommy Hilfiger campaign featuring a herd of sheep and the tag line "Tommy
follow the Herd". While the Adbusters are busy flipping meanings and
subverting messages, their colleagues in the Culture Jammers Network - the
paramilitary wing of the movement - are hard at work using guerrilla
tactics to play companies at their own marketing game. Derived in part from
the situationist pranksterism of Guy Debord - and the idea that images
lifted out of their immediate context can help shock people awake from
their consumerist slumber - the practice of culture jamming involves the
street-level subversion of brand messages, the parodying of advertisements,
the altering of billboards and the publishing of satirical ads. Culture
jammers' initiatives have included organising a competition to plant a tree
or a flower in the most unlikely urban space, descending on malls to throw
money at bemused shoppers and sponsoring an annual "TV Turnoff Week" - an
event that its organisers claim attracts the attention of six million
people around the world.
But the anti-advertisers have a problem: increasingly, mainstream
advertising reaches into their creative armoury and helps itself. The
online bank Egg has recently flaunted its anti-advertising credentials by
paying Stephen Hawking to parody his previous ads and explain why he's back
doing another endorsement. Sprite has been using anti-advertising
techniques for several years: its "image is nothing, thirst is everything"
and "don't believe the hype" tag lines are designed to reassure its savvy
teenage consumers that drinking Sprite will do nothing other than quench
your thirst. The ads work because of their sneering rejection of the
importance of advertising; they appeal to advertisers who are desperate to
reach out to a generation of cynical and hostile young consumers.
As with anti-advertising, so with the guerrilla tactics of the culture
jammers. Baulking at the huge expense and phenomenal clutter of the
mainstream media, advertisers increasingly supplement their mass-marketing
campaigns with leaner and more focused interventions in a host of
subcultures and informal social networks - and they find that "guerrilla
marketing" strategies borrowed from the antis are ideal for the job.
Guerrilla marketing involves direct, apparently spontaneous and frequently
risque interventions in daily life in order to raise consciousness about a
product and to manufacture a "buzz". In this country, it is the business of
the London agency Cake, whose street-level stunts target the instinctively
rebellious youth market: for example, Cake has painted a whole street red
to celebrate Barbie's 40th birthday. Some guerrilla activists, such as the
graffiti gang the TATS Crew, have migrated en masse to the other side and
now create street advertising for companies such as Coca-Cola.
Anti-corporate activism is on the increase in most advanced industrialised
countries, as witnessed by the consumer boycott of Exxon and the
demonstrations in Seattle and Prague. The most articulate voice of the
anti-brand movement, Naomi Klein, the author of No Logo, argues that the
multinationals' superbrands eat up our culture and our lifestyles. Brands
that used to tell us something about their products are now, according to
Klein, free-floating entities waiting to hijack ideas and innovations as
they arise within popular culture. The end result of all this colonisation
of our mental space, predicts Klein, will be a popular backlash against the
ubiquitous brands.
Brand managers have taken the view that popular resistance to their
messages will remain isolated and specific. But those isolated protests
have stoked a more general suspicion of multinationals and their influence
over our lives. Anxiety about the harmful effects of corporate activities -
pollution or low third-world wages, for example - has put marketers and
public relations experts on a permanent war footing in which "crisis
management" is becoming the watchword.
But if branding is part of the problem, it is also sure to be a central
ingredient of the solution. Variously defined as a "promise", an
"identity", a "commitment" or a "belief", the concept of a brand is so
elastic and so intangible that it can be manipulated to mean whatever
marketers want it to mean. While there is nothing in a simple logo that can
grow an economy or add any value to the products that a company sells,
astute branding can shore up and augment a company's share of the existing
market. Increasingly unwilling to gain competitive advantage by investing
in expensive new plant and machinery, and finding themselves unable to
compete on price alone, companies instead put their money into brands. They
want "share of mind" and "share of heart".
But branding will undergo subtle changes in its form. On 27 March, for
example, the Independent banished all advertising for one day and printed
only news and features. This was merely an exercise in "silent" and
non-intrusive branding, sponsored by Bradford & Bingley. We can also expect
to see more cryptic branding, where the brand is built less around a
company logo than around combinations of colours and gestures that are
properly recognised only by those in their target audiences - think of the
impenetrable collages that tobacco advertisers have been forced to
introduce, or the trademark wink that greets readers of the monthly style
mag i-D.
The most promising way for companies to adapt is to reinvent themselves as
ethical brands - concerned spokespersons within civil society, rather than
companies that exist simply to maximise profit. Faced with setbacks in its
European operation and the perception of "cultural imperialism" in its
brand identity, Coca-Cola has already decided to reinvent itself as a
corporate citizen. Last year, its chief executive, Douglas Daft, told the
Financial Times that Coke's new pitch will be to "lead as model citizens".
"In every community where we sell our brand," he explained, "we must
remember we do not do business in markets; we do business in society." Many
brands, according to Brand Strategy magazine, "are now openly talking about
a second bottom line: the social one. Many more will need to talk about it
in the future. If they do, then maybe buying a brand won't be about being
seduced but will be asking to having a passionate affair with your wife -
pleasure without guilt."
In a recent interview, Martin Sorrell of the leading global advertising and
communications group WPP argued that marketers ignored such movements at
their peril. He warned that "the [anti-branding] movement is a serious and
important one, not a passing fad, and one that our clients have to take
notice of". Sorrell admitted that he had not read Naomi Klein's book but,
if you are wondering why it is a heavy seller, and why such a long and
serious (though readable) book is so well known among young people, the
answer is that a high proportion of its buyers work in the advertising
industry.
At the forefront of moves toward ethical branding are those companies that
have been forced to react to consumer discontent about the harmful effects
of their activities: big tobacco, for example, and the oil companies. But
other multinationals have been quick to follow suit: Starbucks has
associated its brand with support for "fair trade" and eco-friendly coffee
cups; Citibank with giving credit to lower-income clients; Nokia with
learning disability; and McDonald's with community football. In his new
book, Citizen Brands: putting society at the heart of your business,
Michael Willmott, the co-director of the independent think-tank the Future
Foundation, forecasts that ethical branding will soon become one of the
most crucial determinants of business success. The new wave of citizen
branding, according to Willmott, will not be about corporate benefaction,
but about "a company showing that it understands societal issues and cares
about them". The result, he concludes, "is likely to be more a
roller-coaster ride for companies with more brand volatility as consumer
cynicism increases and loyalty decreases . . . It will not be so much 'no
brands' as an ever-changing pastiche of brand as people switch in and out
on the basis of ethical or other concerns."
Marian Salzman, a highly regarded American trend-spotter and the global
director of strategy and planning for the ad agency Euro RSCG, is in broad
agreement with that. Today, Salzman argues, "a brand is only as powerful as
its total package. Consumers judge brands more holistically, that is,
totally - and expect a company to be a good citizen, a good employer, a
fair and not excessive marketer. Our research shows that consumers will go
out of their way to support brands which are completely on their page in
terms of ethics, causes, considerations." Finding the right ethical
connection, however, is going to be a competitive business. "Highlight the
right cause and you're still in the game," Salzman warns. "Highlight the
wrong cause and you lose."
Talk like this is usually the cue for a discussion about the infinitely
supple nature of consumer capitalism and its ability to accommodate
anything that it can turn to its advantage. But there is also a peculiarly
contemporary inversion at work here. As politics has become the stuff of
focus groups, PR spin and endless rebranding of institutions (such as
schools), personalities and parties, marketing itself takes on the
techniques and values of politics. Traditional modes of solidarity, through
trade unions, churches and political parties, are in steep decline. So
people search for new forms of politics and new sources of belief. At the
same time, the modern corporation, uncertain about the future direction of
its business and determined to hold on to its consumers, is finding that
ethical branding is an ideal strategy with which to promote customer
loyalty. In the hands of the brand managers, a political vacuum becomes a
gap in the market.
What this suggests is that the war against brands has already been won,
that the brand activists have been kicking against an open door. Naomi
Klein told me that she has been approached by about half a dozen ad
agencies to come and present to their executives. Her policy is always to
decline. But how long before companies that now use the techniques and
ideas of activists start to hire those same anti-brand campaigners to help
reposition their brand identity? Some of the more astute anti-brand
activists are aware that they have been overplaying their hand, that the
war against brands is a mirage and that the presence of a Nike swoosh on a
pair of trainers does not, on its own, turn us into walking automatons. No
matter: the business of branding will continue to be pervasive, but the
next big thing is going to be an unseemly tussle for a share of our
conscience.
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James Harkin is a trend forecaster for the Social Issues research Centre in
Oxford and a consultant to global
intelligence projects at HeadlightVision |
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