On Nuance and Intellectual Honesty
the importance of thinking in complex terms about subjects that are often denied it
Posted 2009-11-10 14:35 in consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, research, unanswered questions
In a world of soundbites, it’s hard to be nuanced these days. Every time you make an assertion that—wait— maybe Wal-Mart isn’t working hand in hand with Satan, or that materialism might not cause the downfall of civilization, you get dirty looks from people. It’s not that I believe that Wal-Mart is the greatest company ever or that I believe we should all be more materialistic. It’s that these are nuanced points of view that attempt to not be reductivist. By this I don’t mean to imply some wishy-washy sense of moral relativism that sidesteps taking hardlined stances on topics of public interest. It’s about being complete in an assessment before passing judgment. But in the modern world, we not only expect reductivist views that are partially based on political ideology, but we view non-reductivist views suspiciously, as if they are coming from someone with an ulterior and opposing motive.
Case in point: last night, I was engaged in conversation with some fellow graduate students, faculty, and area intellectuals. We were talking about Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, in preparation for his visit to this campus. The topic of conversation weaved a path around a number of subjects, but I found myself interjecting numerous times to offer a little bit of push-back towards certain culturally-driven assertions. I realize that doing this can make someone appear argumentative and contrarian, particularly in settings where they don’t know the people they’re talking to, but my goal is to elicit some level of thought in people who have strong, but largely unquestioned, points of view.
Unfortunately, pushing nuance means that people will interpret a political argument even where there isn’t one. Some topics are simply so ideologically loaded that you can’t talk about them in a complex and thoughtful way without people instinctively taking the side that most conforms to the talking points of their political ideology, and getting defensive when a statement impinges on it. Viewpoints that I often come in conflict with, and for which my rebuttals ruffle feathers, almost certainly cause people to form negative judgments about me (“obviously, this is a marketer talking” or “he’s clearly a member of such-and-such political party”); these impromptu acts of belief-formation on their parts are able to account for what otherwise may seem like— but aren’t!— needless and attention-seeking subversions of expectations on my part. The problem is that on hot-button issues, people assume that their conversation partners have political agendas that they want to push.
But in order to have a real dialogue, we have to abandon that way of thinking. We can no longer afford to have conversations that consist entirely of liberal/conservative/capitalist/socialist/pro-business/anti-corporation talking points. These talking points mean nothing because they are contextually bereft, and are selective ways of interpreting large amounts of complex information. But the real world is complicated. In my view, extreme points of view are common from people who haven’t done research on opposing views, and have not considered the aggregated knowledge in a meaningful way.
Perhaps you are wondering about the types of complex thoughts I’m talking about. Here are some points that I brought up last night, and which probably didn’t go over too well:
- I argued that Wal-Mart has done more than any other company of its size or any where near its size to go “green.” No, I’m not a fervent Wal-Mart advocate, corporate apologist, or capitalist zealot. I am neutral about Wal-Mart as a force on this planet because they do some things that I perceive as good, and some things that I perceive as bad. I do understand that some people have a strong dislike for Wal-Mart; but regardless of your feelings about Wal-Mart, do you recognize and applaud their “green” efforts for a cause you supposedly care about, or do you reject them? Is it possible for you, an anti-Wal-Marter to acknowledge any positives that come out of Wal-Mart? If not, can you justify shopping at Target or any other corporation, especially those that have not made any particularly meaningful movements towards “green”? Why is Wal-Mart singled out when there are plenty of other companies who espouse similar managerial philosophies?
- I also argued that “materialism” has brought some good things with it. Naturally, there was a stunned silence as people tried to fathom why I would say such a perverse thing. The common thought is that materialism creates greed and unhappiness; it’s about shallow and empty pleasures like getting a bigger house and a nicer car. Plus all our religious institutions and cultural conditioning tells us we should reject materialism. I do not argue with any of this. But we can also see how materialism might have created the conditions necessary for things such as indoor plumbing and modern medicine. No one would have created that stuff in the first place if they felt like what they had was enough. For many inventors and companies, the desire for wealth is what drove them to push the boundaries of technology. Our patent laws, which offer inventors exclusive rights to profit from their inventions, support this point of view. My assertion doesn’t mean that I think we should all buy a Mercedes S-Class and hoard money in a silo like Scrooge McDuck; far from it. It’s about looking at the world in a nuanced way, and questioning the reductivist mode in which we engage in thinking about topics of broad impact. Questioning common assumptions does not equate with making value judgments or political statements.
- And once again, my favorite topic: consumers, not corporations, are responsible for consumerism. It is rattling to see how many people reject this argument. Fact: marketers cannot “create” demand for anything simply by virtue of their access to large amounts of money. Companies simply cannot shove products down consumers’ throats. I do not know what causes this belief to persist, but it is a myth, and one that can be empirically proven false. Remember the marketing blitz surrounding Crystal Pepsi? There’s your proof. Consumers do have the power to resist, and they often do. Perhaps it is comforting in a world where so many people feel personally powerless to believe that corporations run their lives with the kind of caprice we expect from cartoon villains; it allows us to blame someone other than ourselves for our deficiencies. But anyone who has read any history of advertising and media should dismiss the “cultural authority of corporations” argument very quickly. Curiously, this has not happened, even among those who should know better; I fear it’s because no one bothered to read up on it. But again, it’s not about making a political point; it’s about getting the basic facts right and having a nuanced view of the world. Are corporations powerful? Yes, some corporations are very powerful. Do they run the world and enslave mankind with their products and advertising? No, they do not. Do some corporations carry undue influence, and use that power to do terrible and often unethical things? Certainly. Are there companies who use their power to do positive things? Absolutely.
So, to the few of you who actually read this blog, I have one desperate plea: Question your own belief system rigorously, and be willing to think in complex terms, even if that means you arrive at conclusions that are unpopular among those in your peer set and social networks. It’s the only way to have honest dialogues these days.
Corporate Social Responsibility Can't Happen By Itself
emphasis on short-term profitability stunts CSR’s ability to thrive in the market
Posted 2009-10-01 22:40 in business, business models, culture, economics, ethics, finance, improvements, marketing, sustainability, unfinished thoughts
Regulation is a pretty hot topic. And when I say “hot,” I mean that it has an uncanny ability to divide a crowd. Progressives seem to generally favor regulations as a means of limiting the damage caused by corporate recklessness, and they have been quite vocal in pushing for greater government oversight in what companies can do, and how much they can do it before incurring serious penalties. Meanwhile, proponents of the free market maintain that the only fair and effective way to handle regulation is to allow the market to do the work; they believe in an efficient economic system that automatically controls problems that really matter (i.e. the problems most people care about). I personally can sympathize to some degree with both sides of this debate, but am not convinced that either can be implemented as solutions to the problems we currently face. What follows is my logic.
Before we can go on though, we have to face facts: it’s been obvious to those paying attention that market forces have not been effective in curbing devastating environmental damage caused by companies who have ignored the social costs of their operations. It’s not limited to environmental damages, either. The recent financial meltdown almost certainly would have been prevented with more oversight.
The traditional progressive (read: “liberal”) line about all this is that these corporations are just greedy and soulless, and don’t care about anything but profit. But this views corporate activity within a vacuum, and denies the economic realities underlying their behavior. In the absence of proper incentives, no company will behave in a manner consistent with diffuse, idealized social goals. Companies by their very nature act in ways that are most beneficial to themselves in the marketplace; even companies that try to do social good still have financial and publicity incentives underlying their behavior. Why? Because if they don’t, they effectively get punished by Wall Street and the market; remember that when we’re talking about the stock market, the bottom line is that public companies (i.e. the biggest organizations on the planet, who control the most money) pretty much need to post higher-than-expected profits consistently— or else. On Wall Street, nobody gives a hoot about how socially responsible you are— unless you’re making money from it. And tragically, our system is structured in such a way that companies really cannot afford to piss off Wall Street, for a number of reasons that go beyond the scope of this commentary.
Nevertheless, that is an economic reality; to condemn a company for being socially irresponsible overlooks the conditions that encourage the sort of reckless behavior that we hear so much about. In my opinion, it’s more of an indictment of our social and financial structure than it is of a company to say that they act irresponsibly. Like I’ve said before, we should think of corporations like organisms. They do what it takes to survive now. They typically can’t afford to think too far in the future, because Wall Street does not reward thinking far into the future; Wall Street rewards thinking about next quarter. Whose fault is that? I’d argue that it’s all of our faults. In an environment of high competition and high risk of market punishment, it’s unfair to blame companies for playing the game by the rules we ourselves constructed. Of course, it doesn’t make what they do ethically right, but like in any evolutionary context, the concept of justice doesn’t play a large role in behavioral decision-making; surviving does.
So yes, public companies do operate by almost strictly by financial motives, just like many progressives indignantly charge. But I would argue that this financial motivation should not at all detract from the actions of, say, Wal-Mart, who has done more than almost any other company in the world to enact serious green initiatives. True, they’ve done it for themselves, their own bottom line, and Wall Street— but still, they’ve done it. And if that’s the motivation they need to do it, then perhaps we should encourage that. Besides, if they were supposed to adopt a sudden conscience about their activities and rectify them, whose social goals are they supposed to strive for, anyway? Lots of different social factions have lots of different goals, and many of them have incompatible or actively contradictory goals.
For this reason, it seems fair to place the decision-making process in the hands of the public, through market forces. That allows a sort of collective decision-making process that is free from being regulated by “some guys on a board,” and allows for us to ostensibly have a shared voice in determining the direction that we take as a planet. Unfortunately, however, there are some problems that such market forces don’t resolve. For example, the economically well-endowed have a disproportionately large voice and thus the ability to unilaterally have a strong negative impact with their choices. And there’s still no guarantee that the aforementioned group will pay attention to social well-being if they’re still being held hostage by Wall Street demands. Free market economics as a means of regulation is dependent on not only market efficiency, but ethical, rational, and well-informed decision-making on the part of consumers— many of which are corporate entities.
But as consumers we are neither rational nor omniscient. We are sometimes ethical. But we can’t know everything about all the downstream effects of all our purchases at the time of purchase. This makes it pretty hard to argue the point that the market will be able to curb environmentally damaging business practices through selective consumption.
That may seem like a slam dunk for regulation, and many on the political left would love to see this happen. But it’s not that easy. The problem of regulation is complex, and it is difficult to enact regulation in a way that appears fair to everyone. Here’s the main problem: if there are regulations, who gets to call the shots?
Some might argue that we should use science to guide our regulatory policy, at least with regards to environmental concerns. But what science? Even science can have an agenda. The more you look into scientific research, the more you see how there is a chain of funding. Funding is a political process. People conducting research are subject to biases. No matter what the science says, or the preponderance of evidence suggesting one thing or another, when it comes down to drafting law, there will almost always be some arbitrary component about implementation (e.g. exactly how many tons of CO2 a company can release per year; exactly what chemicals a company can and can’t produce). And those people whose economic interests are being impinged will no more welcome the validity of the science or the arbitrary lines being drawn than a liberal would welcome Sarah Palin’s views if she was placed in charge of preserving endangered wildlife. Ultimately, any laws will be seen as political tools with embedded agendas.
Though it is debatable how much this might change corporate attitudes towards CSR, I think part of the fix is to change the nature of Wall Street. It does not serve companies or society to have such a heavy focus on short-term profitability. This structure denies companies the opportunity to act in ways that favor their own long-term efficiency, the public’s best interest, and the well-being of the planet. If companies didn’t have to keep impressing Wall Street, they could better take actions that could, over the long term, make their operations more efficient, streamlined, and less wasteful. That would be good for their bottom line and for environmental concerns. But that takes time, and it might require a few consecutive quarters of what may appear to be subpar financial performance. Right now, this is a highly risky strategy that most companies wouldn’t consider because they will not be rewarded for it.
Weirdly, even amidst all the talk about reform in the financial industry, I have not heard any talk about this. Admittedly, I’m not sure if anyone has worked out the details about how a “new and improved” stock market system would work, or if anyone has suggested a better set of economic incentives for waste reduction, but perhaps it’s time we started a national dialogue about it. It seems rather important.
Comment [12]
The Trader Joe's Paradox Revisited
how the most progressive grocery store came in last for sustainability
Posted 2009-09-22 21:18 in consumerism, environment, experiences, marketing, sustainability
Trader Joe’s, the much celebrated “progressive” grocery store is a favorite of those consumers who favor such adjectives as “green” and “eco-friendly.” Unfortunately, as I described in a previous article, the reality is that Trader Joe’s is nothing of the sort. Amazingly, they manage to maintain that undeserved image without promoting it or even living up to the standards that these values would suggest. Case in point: this article in the New York Times places Trader Joe’s dead last in a national survey of grocery store seafood sustainability. It really takes some doing to lose out to guys like Safeway and Kroger. But then, Trader Joe’s never claimed to be eco-friendly and green in the first place, so maybe it’s not that surprising.
As I mentioned in my previous article about TJ’s (see the update at bottom), I talked to a Trader Joe’s manager about this very issue about their fish last November when I noticed that almost all the fish they sell there were on the “AVOID” column of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish). The manager told me that Trader Joe’s is a “democracy” and they stock things that people buy, and well, the people like unsustainable fish. I suppose he seemed somewhat apologetic about it, but at the same time he was able to take umbrage under this lofty ideology of populism.
Of course, by the same token we can view this democracy as a means by which we are able to use our buying power to promote our ideals through selective purchasing; that is, if we don’t believe a company is representing our values, we can avoid buying there. Being concerned about the state of our collapsing oceans, I did exactly that and stopped buying fish there. I also tried to share this information with friends, colleagues, and anyone who would listen. What I discovered about this is that it’s quite hard to gain credence with others regarding something when your statements directly contradict what others think they know; nearly everyone I told this to seemed to doubt my claims because of Trader Joe’s pervasive “progressive” reputation.
Earlier this year, I decided to write to Trader Joe’s headquarters about it. In my letter, I expressed that while I appreciated their apparent democratic ideals, Trader Joe’s could implement a “high road” approach on this, given the scientifically-validated reality that overfishing is destroying the world’s oceans. I attached a copy of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish. Much to my surprise, soon after I sent it, they updated their website to add something about how they are now sourcing their fish based on the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide. I’m not sure if it was my letter that elicited this, but the timing was pretty remarkable, and I was pleased that maybe one customer’s opinion did matter!
Well, it’s been several months or so since that update on their website. Since then, I’ve gone back numerous times and have not seen any change in their inventory of fish. I’m disappointed, especially since so many people are convinced that they are a company with “principles” and “ideals” relating to environmentalism, and thus do all their shopping there with the implicit understanding that their shopping list has already been filtered for eco-friendliness. Of course, to be fair, TJ’s never claimed that they serve this function.
But boy, they’ve shown that they can really cash in on this misconception.
Spectator Culture Goes Online
I was there, man, and I took a bunch of photos
Posted 2009-09-09 20:57 in
The other day I was biking down John Nolan Drive, a very nice lakefront path here in Madison, WI. As I approached an intersection, I saw a small crowd of people staring off into the water. As I got closer, I saw that there was a fellow sitting in a pickup truck, which isn’t that unusual. What was unusual was that the pickup truck was on a small but steep incline, and the back half of the truck (and then some) was completely underwater. A large SUV was trying without luck to pull the poor guy out of the water, but the rope kept breaking before he could do it. I observed this dramatic scene for a moment, and realized shortly that the crowd had gotten considerably bigger than when I first arrived. It was 5-6 people initially, but after a few moments, it turned to something more like 20.
To his credit, the driver of the underwater truck was in a remarkably chipper mood considering that his vehicle was quite likely going to be reeking of pondscum and fish for the remainder of the life of the truck, not to mention the fact that there was going to be a lot of water damage to the interior. And he seemed to ignore the fact that more than half of these bystanders appeared rather gleeful, and were taking out their digital cameras and cell phones, and snapping away. These amateur paparazzi made quite a show of it; they maneuvered around, taking shots from different angles and distances, apparently oblivious of the fact that this could be construed as rather rude and insensitive, not to mention somewhat embarrassing to the man.
From my perspective, all these people were apparently experiencing if not some form of schadenfreude at his expense, then some joy about the prospect of posting the resulting photos on the internet, sharing them with friends, or tossing them in a heap of digital files on their hard drives.
The simultaneous advent of digital photography and the rise of the internet as the primary means of sharing complex information has led to this interesting social-psych phenomena that I’ve observed in numerous contexts: concerts, natural disasters, accidents, when someone famous is nearby, etc. People have this strange compulsion to constantly capture such things. But I’ve noticed that it’s not necessarily meaningful events that people seem to want to capture; just as often, it’s events that can potentially offer some sort of social capital later.
I suspect that in the recesses of these paparazzis’ minds, these photos are like visual equivalents of secrets; they potentially give their owners status because they might be valuable or interesting to others later. They are proof that I was there, and that I am an interesting person. I can get a bunch of attention and rack up a bunch of hits on YouTube. This photo is going to make it to the top of Digg!
So important is this status conferral that some people are willing to endanger their lives to get these photos and videos. Head on over to your favorite video site and you’ll see people— clearly not professionals— who are just standing around filming with their cell phone cameras as devastating tornadoes come up right next to them. Why in the world would anyone risk their life for this? Maybe desperation to be the genius behind the next piece of viral media or to be the progenitor of the next big cultural meme is more valuable than being alive. After all, if you die without uploading a photo of you standing in the eye of an F5 tornado, you’re just dead; upload that bad boy onto the internet, and you’re immortal.
I’ve noticed that tourists do this obsessive picture-taking thing a lot too. It’s more understandable to me in their context, but the odd part is that I’ve seen many tourists spending a lot more effort and energy in taking photos than in being in the moment and enjoying the change of scenery and culture. I once met a middle-aged woman who spent her entire trip to Thailand fiddling with a camera to take photos to show to her relatives (who she even admitted later probably wouldn’t care about them). But still her compulsion to polish off dozens of rolls of film (this was the old days) was impossible to repress, so much so that I fear she didn’t even get the chance to appreciate the trip.
But the internet has amplified our worst spectatorial tendencies because it has made transmission easier and has broadened the potential audience. Which means that anyone with a camera is now looking for their 15 minutes of fame— and might get it. For better or for worse.
Comment [4]
When Things Go Wrong
Posted 2009-09-02 00:33 in experiences, operations management
The several-hour GMail outage a couple of days ago left a lot of people (particularly those who use it as a proxy for their work email) incommunicado at a time when they really needed to be in touch with others. It was a gentle reminder to us of what happens when we become too dependent on one thing for an outcome. The more reliant on it we are, the more difficult it is to deal with when something goes wrong, which it inevitably does.
Just Follow the Script!
why we do what we don’t want to because we’re supposed to
Posted 2009-08-05 16:04 in culture, hyperreality, postmodernism, semiotics
I’ve taken a recent interest in how we’re driven by life scripts to behave in certain ways that we normally wouldn’t, simply because we’re “supposed to.” Take for example this story that my friend Liz was telling me (some details have been changed because to protect identities):
Liz had some friends who were getting married. As is the ritual in the United States, the groom attended a bachelor party held in his honor. Often these take place in seedy topless joints or private rooms where a stripper titillates the bachelor and his friends. The part that was odd is that none of the participants of this bachelor party had ever been to a strip joint, and none was particularly comfortable with the idea of doing this. But they did it anyway because that’s what you’re supposed to do. It was a bachelor party, after all.
Perhaps here, this bachelor party script, even taken as a semi-comical trope that has been the subject of many bad (but highly profitable) “buddy” movies, is rather revealing about our latent attitudes as a society. Viewed on an symbolic level, this would suggest that Americans— particularly men— perceive marriage vows (perhaps humorously, perhaps not) as a set of shackles and chains that essentially prevent them from engaging in philandering, sex romps, and various other fun sexual indiscretions. This is while simultaneously enjoining and celebrating the view of marriage as a sacrosanct state that we should all cherish and take enormous comfort in.
But I found the behavior of these bachelor party participants exceedingly curious. Why would a large leaderless group of individuals engage in behavior that none of them really wanted to (apparently not even the groom, who the party was being held for)? Why would they not just design an event that would be more meaningful and entertaining to them on the level they thought more appropriate given their values and states of mind?
Perhaps it is because this situational life script (more charitably described as a “custom”) told them that if they didn’t do this strip joint thing, they weren’t having a “real” bachelor party. This script promised an authentic bachelor party experience (the kind seen in the movies!)— an experience that apparently none of them particularly wanted or felt comfortable with, but also didn’t want to feel like they were robbed of later, perhaps because saying they’d been to one could offer some social currency or sensation of a life well-lived in the future.
I’ve noticed these recurring scripts as well:
- At the end of a rock concert, the band members put their instruments down, thank everyone for coming out, and walk offstage. Normally, this would be a pretty strong signal that the show is over, and you should go home. But that’s not what happens. What happens instead is that people in the audience cheer and scream and clap for several minutes until the band comes back onstage to do another song.
Moral: You, as an audience member, came to a rock show put on by this well-known band and thus are supposed to play the role of the adoring fan. The band came a long way to be in… wait, what city are they in again? Anyway, they came a ways to play their songs, and you know, they’re really tired… but they really want to show the fans how much their love and adoration means to them, so even though the show was supposed to end, they’re gonna deviate from their normal routine just this once, and play another song for the true-blue fans out there. Yeah, yeah, they do it at every show, but don’t question the encore. Just follow the script.
- If you watch people as they pose for photos, you see that often they begin doing something they weren’t doing before, because it conforms to the expectations of a social gathering, and the photograph is a form of proof that the gathering occurred. For example, last week, I happened to witness a wedding party down at a local landmark. At a certain point in time, the groomsmen and bridesmaids all jumped in the air simultaneously and the photographer shot a photo of this. Apparently, it didn’t come out right, so they did it again. Would these people have done the jumping without the camera? Most likely not.
Script: You’re supposed to have fun at parties. We must be able to provide proof that we were there and we did have fun. Synthesize the fun into a ball of symbolic activity and capture it on film. Follow the script.
- You’re watching a sitcom on television. After every third sentence, canned laughter occurs. You laugh along with it, or at least understand that there is supposed to be humor value in this program, an understanding that may not have been conveyed without the canned laughter.
Script: You are being given a signal that this show contains jokes. You may not have noticed this on your own, so just laugh when everyone else does, or you won’t be able to enjoy the program. Just follow the script.
- Someone who doesn’t listen to much hip-hop music throws a party where he does not know a lot of the attendees very well. Instead of playing the rock’n‘roll music he normally listens to, he plays all hip-hop music at a volume he would normally be uncomfortable with.
Script: You’re supposed to play loud hip-hop at parties. If you don’t, it isn’t a good party. Follow the script.
Scripts seem to be part of the social contract we sign when we join this earth, or more accurately, join certain groups. We are supposed to act a certain way and do certain things that conform to certain expectations at certain times. Even if you don’t want to do it, even if no one wants to do it. Don’t rock the boat. Just follow the script.
Comment [3]
The Symbolic Value of a Beer
how much meaning is embedded in a single beverage?
Posted 2009-07-31 11:03 in branding, culture, marketing, politics, postmodernism
The so-called “Beer Summit” occurred today. The premise of this meeting between Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, and James Crowley— a Cambridge police officer— was the culmination of a lot of recent speculation about latent racist attitudes, profiling, and the state of race relations in America. The event hinged on an incident in which Gates was trying to get back into his house after apparently being locked out, and being challenged by a white police officer for appearing to be breaking-and-entering. Allegations about police making assumptions about black men committing crimes were made and it soon turned into the subject of a national debate.
But Obama, ever the diplomat, invited the parties over to the White House garden for some beers (one each) and a bit of mano-a-mano discussion. A lot could be said about the political nature of this event, but what I’m interested in is what apparently the media made a big fuss about: the beer that each individual was going to choose to drink at this event.
It’s fascinating that a single beer could be so embedded with symbolic meaning. This is the nature of the post-modern world, in which many brands are reservoirs of symbolism and fit so prominently into the public’s schemas about social groups. As I mentioned in a previous post, David Foster Wallace once commented that he’d read books in which a character’s personality could be succinctly conveyed simply by naming the brand of T-shirt the character wore. That’s how much meaning we associate with certain brands. Thus, it was a matter of apparent great symbolic import what beer these gentlemen were having on this momentous occasion.
Gates, a Harvard professor, chose a Samuel Adams Light, while Crowley chose a Blue Moon (with an orange slice). Obama, ever the epicurean (what with his much-ridiculed taste for arugula), chose Bud Light. This invites the question of why, if you were the ostensible leader of the free world, you would ever choose a Bud Light. Maybe I’m more of a beer snob than I realize, but of all the world’s beers I could choose, Bud Light would be somewhat at the bottom of my list. Perhaps I am being a bit presumptuous here, but it seems highly unlikely that a man of Obama’s stature and taste would voluntarily choose a Bud Light if given unrestricted choice.
But of course, we have to think about the symbolic value of his choice. Bud Light is the best-selling beer in America, and has been since 2001; apparently it accounts for a massive 22% of case sales in the United States! It carries with it so many symbolic, populist overtones. It’s what any blue collar American would drink. Not like that elitist, hoity-toity microbrew stuff, and especially not one of those foreign beers that wasn’t brewed on our shores.
According to a Republican strategist quoted in an article from Bloomberg, Obama is “trying to send a message that he’s an average American… [He could] complicate that by making an exotic choice, or an import, or too expensive.” Indeed, imagine what the news sources would say if he drank, say, a Heineken, a Sapporo, or a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. He was already skewered by Fox News’ Sean Hannity for asking for Grey Poupon at a diner several months ago.
There is a rather unexpected complication to Obama’s choice, however. Budweiser was sold to the Belgian company InBev back in July 2008, making Bud Light not quite an American beer. Sure it’s brewed here and it’s a traditionally American brand, but it’s no longer owned by an American company, so perhaps it can’t be viewed as wholly American as say, Coors.* Nevertheless, I think most Americans probably still view Budweiser as a culturally American beer and don’t really know much or care much about the location of the headquarters of the huge international beverage conglomerate that owns it.
Bud Light, viewed strictly on symbolic terms and with the intent of being an uncontroversial choice for a nation who, during the 2004 presidential election was inexplicably obsessed with choosing the candidate who one would most like to have a beer with, was a good selection. It’s a best-seller, has no particular subculture attached to it, and is sold pretty much everywhere. It’s hard to beat that. As Al Ries, an Atlanta-based marketer told Bloomberg, “Leading brands tend to be a very safe choice for a politician because, in a sense, they’re saying to the public, ‘You picked it, not me. I’m just reflecting your choice.’”
Interestingly, little commentary has been made on Crowley’s choice. The police officer was easily the most blue-collar fellow at the table, and chose what is probably the most “elitist” beer (if such a concept can be meaningfully applied) in terms of popular conception. Most people likely have not even heard of Blue Moon as it is the type of beer that is typically served in “uppity” and yuppy-type hangouts, not roadside dive bars. In reality, however, Blue Moon is rather surreptitiously brewed by Coors, though they do not advertise this and do not have the Coors name listed anywhere on any Blue Moon products. The company (rightly) assumes that the Coors name will reduce the brand equity of this macrobrew masquerading as a microbrew.
Gates’ choice was a sensible one; he lives in Cambridge, just outside of Boston, and he chose a beer that is brewed in Boston, perhaps a symbolic nod to his affection for the area despite his recent conflicts.
All in all, somewhat interesting choices made by all three gentlemen. I would, however, have loved to hear what kind of public commentary would have been made had Obama chosen the ultimate in a confounding beer with multiplex meanings: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Is he kowtowing to rednecks? Bikers? Hipsters? Cheapskates? In a perfect world, he would have chosen it, and it would have been a wonderful and puzzling mystery to unravel.
* You could tell that around the time of the sale of Anheuser-Busch to InBev that the company got kind of nervous about how its customers might perceive this traitorous act of selling out a quintessentially American brand to Europeans; they responded by creating and heavily advertising something called Budweiser American Ale, repeating the world “American” many times in the ads to reinforce the idea that this was a American drink.
Further reading:
1. The Bloomberg Article
2. “How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding” by Douglas Holt
The Youthful Search for Authenticity
in which we borrow images to ‘forge’ ourselves
Posted 2009-07-16 11:57 in consumerism, culture, experiences, human nature, postmodernism, semiotics, unfinished thoughts
People of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it.” – Chuck Klosterman, “Killing Yourself to Live”
The above passage is from a chapter of a book called “Killing Yourself to Live” in which music writer Chuck Klosterman discusses the Great White nightclub fire in Rhode Island a couple years ago, in which 100 people died due to a pyrotechnic mishap. Being that this was in a small, lower-middle-class town, the crowd was made up of blue-collar types who were actually (perhaps unbelievably) fans of the band. Klosterman was contrasting this audience profile with those of the many big city shows he’d been to where washed-up bands like Great White would play long after their primes to crowds half full of hipsters who were just there “ironically” so they could mock the music and scoff at those who were genuinely into it. Klosterman suggests that these hipsters scoff at these true-blue fans because they want to express being above liking things, because they can’t stand to be genuine.
The sentiment expressed in the quote is an interesting one, but I’d make a slight, but significant alteration; the word “despise” should really be “crave.” This, of course, renders the phrase a considerably more obvious one. Yet, for the most part, Klosterman’s observations resonate with me; I’ve noticed that people of our generation often have weirdly amorphous personalities and images, shifting wildly based on social circumstances and how those circumstances can be manipulated for social capital. Our generation seems fixated on self-awareness as its own virtue, and is highly obsessed with carefully controlling and crafting our images in the eyes of others through symbols whose meanings likely did not carry so much symbolic weight in identity construction just a few generations ago (clothes, vehicles, online personalities, musical taste, etc.).
Anyway, as I see it through Klosterman’s lens, the reason the indie kids of this generation can’t stand to be genuine is because they grew up entitled, in sheltered environments in which they never had to endure hardships. Their entire personas were cobbled together by borrowing images they liked, never borne organically from their own experiences. These images they adopt are never their own; they are fashion objects, constantly subject to the winds of change and shifting public opinion.
Because of the postmodern focus on image and its central import in identity, choosing images and consumer goods to be associated with are critically important decisions; no one wants to be associated with images that may turn out unfashionable or appear to suggest that a person is, in fact, a loser. Therefore, it’s easier to just reject them all (at least publicly), or to simply adopt them “ironically.” But clearly, we can’t be free of symbols entirely. The ubiquity of symbolism in nearly all consumer goods is an unavoidable byproduct of a post-modern era; everything we see forces us to think about “what kind of person would own that” and form schemas about these individuals.
Therefore, such individuals bitterly resent those whose life experiences are more “authentic” (read: difficult and uncomfortable) than their own, because such trying experiences are never unfashionable, and those who have endured them are never subjected to the plaguing self-aware scrutiny that everyone else has to deal with. Living through hardship engenders respect, never mockery. Thus, these entitled kids want nothing more than to have had some hardships— “grit” as Klosterman puts it— to confer them authenticity. There is nothing authentic, as these people see it, in their comfortable upbringings. Their lack of unmolded identity is a source of inner conflict because it forces them to constantly question their symbolic choices.
The ubiquity of multiplicities of divergent images, tropes, and cultures has given us license to treat our personalities like clothing that can be switched at will. On one hand, this allows a sense of psychological freedom to be whatever we want to be; but on the other hand, I think many people born into this postmodern world feel like they don’t have a “baseline” self that is grounded in anything that wasn’t calculatingly copied from something else they perceived as authentic or identity-conferring in a categorical sense (e.g. “punk”, “skater”, etc.).
There are some people who lead the way in cultural transformation, but they account only for a small fraction of individuals. Most of the rest are what academic and sociologist Doug Holt describes as “feeders”— basically, people who crave brushes with authenticity, and who just copy what the innovators are doing, often without the understanding of where those ideas came from. Since they can’t lay claim to the authenticity, having been deprived of the experiences that created them, they settle for the next best thing: adopting the symbols of it. And since the symbols are the easiest way for outsiders to categorize people (e.g. torn jeans and a mohawk means ‘punk’), that works out just fine for feeders.
This generation’s youth craves authenticity, but rarely one that they can have (that is, one they are genuinely entitled to through experience); it’s always someone else’s authenticity that they wish they could have.
But perhaps it’s not limited to youth; we engage in such activities largely as a means of arriving at a manufactured authenticity that constitutes our ‘image’ at any given point in time; the bevy of images we’ve been presented with for all our lives through media have, ironically, taught us not to want the real authentic with respect to ourselves, but instead to want something we can’t have, but which we can fake well enough to convince others. Our true self, it seems, can be manufactured through symbols.
Comment [10]
The New Wave of Advocacy of Financial Recklessness in Advertising
in which desperation about the economy starts to set in
Posted 2009-06-24 01:17 in business, business models, consumerism, economics, ethics, human nature
The poor economy has hit a lot of people very hard. As such, there’s been a glut of commercials on daytime television extolling the virtues of various cost-saving products. But one in particular that I’ve seen lately has been striking in its unbridled pomposity. This commercial features a nicely-dressed, middle-aged, middle-class couple talking tough about their finances. The wife reveals, in a rather distressed manner, that their monthly paycheck is “spent before we even get it.” Her husband adds that they decided that they needed to make serious cuts to their monthly expenses. “That’s why,” the woman says shortly before her husband sits in a nice leather chair opposite a a rather large, late-model flat panel television, “we switched from [a certain brand of satellite television network] to [another brand of satellite television network].” Huh?
Commercials like this trouble me. Obviously, the goal of some marketers is to get people to fork over money for things they don’t necessarily need. However, the mechanism employed by this commercial is to encourage financial recklessness by actively reinforcing the idea that certain luxuries are actually necessities. This demarcation of necessity/luxury is being increasingly blurred by advertisers, many of whom are now attempting to leverage latent consumer concerns about financial security to get them to actually spend more! By buying this [unnecessary] product, you’re actually demonstrating good financial judgment. Objectively, this assertion is not true; yet commercials like this one create an illusory social consensus about the wisdom of certain ill-advised consumer behaviors. After all, why would that nice couple on TV lie to us?
This trend is not limited to premium television channels. Many cell phone commercials seem to suggest something similar about “saving” money through consumption, as do many home internet services. No doubt, these services are extremely convenient, but for most people they are far from necessary, particularly if you are concerned about losing your house or climbing out from under a mountain of debt, both of which are probably much bigger concerns. The auto company Hyundai began running ads encouraging consumers to buy their cars, stating that they would allow a consumer to return the vehicle if their income stream was interrupted in any way. Ford and other car companies soon followed suit with similar programs. The question remains as to whether it is a wise idea for anyone who is concerned about the future of their income stream to purchase a car in the first place; after all, shouldn’t such people be trying to save money for future financial straits for when they potentially lose their jobs?
This brings us to rather salient questions about marketing ethics. Marketers are already considered pretty low on the food chain in terms of ethics, but in the midst of a global financial crisis, advocacy by companies of personal financial indiscretion is still a very ugly sight to behold. We should recall that lifestyles of excess were at the root of the sub-prime crisis, and we might be concerned by the idea of consumers being egged on by industry to continue doing it. We can’t legislate morality, but as consumers we can certainly question the ethical standards of companies whose competitive business model rely heavily on their customers’ bad judgment. But to be fair, we also can’t discount the role of the consumer either; surely consumers must take some responsibility for their own financial well-being.*
Troubling as it may be, I see this as simply a continuation of what has always been going on in marketing communications: companies try to promote certain beliefs, consumers hear it and form a dialogue with it. The ideas that consumers find convenient and/or believable stick; those that do not, fall by the wayside. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s somewhat democratic. But like democracies, sometimes it’s the stupid ideas that win out in the end.
* We tend to think of the U.S. economic system as being largely modeled on free market economics, which is in many ways built on the idea of consumers making informed choices, companies responding to market needs, and companies competing with each other to provide needed goods and services. Shift all the responsibility on any one party, and the equation starts to break down.
Comment [1]
Marketing Privacy
amidst consumer fears and self-consciousness, retailers should offer something that’s hard to get
Posted 2009-06-15 13:06 in business, consumerism, culture, human nature, improvements, marketing
It’s not infrequent that you hear people lamenting about the loss of privacy in modern society. Grocery stores want us to get loyalty cards so they can monitor what we’re buying and change their marketing mixes to capitalize on it. Facebook wants to sell our user information so marketers can post up banner ads about things they think we might buy. Data mining software on our computers watch what we’re doing and send that information to various companies that sign us up for junk mail and email spam lists.
Some of us actively combat this trend by being secretive when companies try to get information from us, while many of us are just resigned to it; but it remains true that privacy is a highly-valued commodity in our society. Some people value privacy because they don’t want to deal with the irritation and annoyance of people constantly trying to sell them things. But there are also real concerns about things like identity theft and corporations mining information for purposes that many people don’t feel comfortable about. Then there’s the fear of humiliation; sometimes people simply don’t want others— friends, acquaintances, and even strangers— to know certain things about them. There are, for example, fears of looking pathetic or comical in the eyes of others, or fears that potentially embarrassing information might circulate.
This morning, I happened to be in the pharmacy buying some calamine lotion for a poison ivy problem, but I noticed that in the same aisle there were numerous products for problems of a more embarrassing nature, like the slew of products for jock itch. Some people would rather live with the jock itch (or buy a $5 product online and have it shipped out for $7) rather than take that to the counter and face the cashier, knowing that they’re probably snickering under their stoic fascade and laughing about it with co-workers later.
Two aisles away were the condoms, prophylactics, and lubricants. I bet that only a quarter of people looking to buy “male enhancement drugs” in a pharmacy actually have the nerve to take the product to the counter.
In bookstores, I wonder how much potential revenue from the sales of self-help books, health and medical literature, and erotica (or pornography) is lost due to the inability of consumers to work up the gall to look another human in the eye while the price scanner brings up the book title on the computerized cash register.
I mention all these things not because they are humorous and we may see the universal human emotions involved in them, but because there’s a real marketing problem involved here. Consumers want to purchase things but are thwarted by their inhibitions, insecurities, and retailers’ apparent inability to acknowledge these feelings. Retailers are damaged not only because of the lost revenue from salable products that people are actually willing to fork over money for (but won’t), but because these products are taking up shelf and warehouse space and aren’t getting the turnaround that they could. There are high inventory costs to products that don’t shift units.
Some grocery stores, to save on labor costs, have implemented self-checkout lines in which customers ring up their own sales and pay for them through a machine. A system such as this would be incredibly valuable at stores like a bookstore or pharmacy. It offers customers an outlet to pay for an item and retain their privacy. They don’t need to talk to anyone, they don’t need to feel embarrassed, and they don’t need to feel like they are being judged. Retailers benefit because it keeps customers focused on getting the things they need, rather than feeling uneasy about making the transactions. These machines are a little clumsy in the grocery stores, but they would work much better in these venues than they do in grocery stores because you’d typically have a lot fewer items, and all the items have UPC codes (unlike vegetables in the grocery store, which are a pain to ring up).
There’s no doubt that persons in positions of power at retail organizations have recognized this issue. Yet, short of grocery stores (which have ostensibly implemented them for different reasons), I have yet to see one brick-and-mortar store do anything to remedy this misalignment. There may be a number of reasons for this, including concerns about theft, space, bucking convention, and good ol’ status quo; but in my view, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks by a significant margin— and for consumers, it would be a welcome change from feeling like their every move is being watched. For bookstores, it has the added bonus of keeping them as anonymous as Amazon.com, who they’ve been claiming has a competitive advantage over them.
Comment [2]
