Martin Bishop very kindly left a comment on my blog yesterday. Here's a portion:
It's interesting that you select the Axe and Dove teams at Unilever as
good programs. They've been innovative, for sure, but the fact that
they've operated so independently has created a brand/corporate
reputation issue for Unilever.
When Dove launched its campaign against beauty ads, critics pointed out
that this message was absolutely incompatible with Axe's misogynistic
ads. To quote from an op-ed: "A Company's Ugly Contradiction" in The
Boston Globe:
"Viewers are struggling to make sense of how Dove can promise to
educate girls on a wider definition of beauty while other Unilever ads
exhort boys to make 'nice girls naughty.' ... Unilever is in the
business of selling products, not values, and that means we, the
consumers, are being manipulated, no matter how socially responsible an
ad seems."
I think this is a cautionary tale suggesting that renegade activity
should have limits and that some corporate oversight is essential.
I am grateful for Martin's comment and I love the imagination and intelligence in evidence on his blog. But this
sort of thing makes me deeply uncomfortable. From an anthropological
point of view, I believe that brands are obliged to be responsive. This
is what makes them vital and interesting from a cultural point of view,
and, we hope, from a competitive one. Brands and corporations should be multiple.
There are two points to make here.
First, I think, it's not for us to say what Unilever can and can say
when it makes an ad for Axe. To be sure, there is nothing quite so obnoxious and
in the wrong circumstances dangerous as a teen age boy. But it is the
job of the marketer to find out what animates the consumer, the
meanings at work in his life, to discover his "mattering map." And Axe
campaign does this very well. We don't like it. Too bad. We are not
the arbiters of teen boys or American corporations.
Second, we cannot demand consistency from Unilever in its marketing and
branding efforts. It is going to speak in several languages. It is
after all operating in an increasingly diverse society and several
markets. Consistency would blunt its marketing efforts. More to our
point, consistency would blunt its responsiveness.
Here's what I think. We can't refuse Unilever the right to make an Axe
campaign without giving someone the right to refuse Unilever the right to make the Dove campaign.
If we can say "no" to a sexist campaign, someone can say "no" to
a feminist one.
Nothing should be foreign to brand. As I was trying to argue a couple
of days ago in the Kleenex post, we are seeing brands get more
adventuresome in the meanings they are prepared to cultivate and
embrace. This means that brands are becoming more like other cultural
producers, movie makers, poets, writers. There are some standards
here, and perhaps stricter ones that those that constrain the movie
maker or the poet, but we are nowhere near these standards in the case
of the Axe ad. To use the language of the Elizabethan court, the Axe ad may be treated as a "thing indifferent."
This is precisely what is wrong with the authenticity argument now
being promoted by Gilmore and Pine. In fact, brands have no native
voice. They may have a brand heritage. Some brand meanings may come
more easily than others. But there is nothing a brand must say, and
nothing, within limits, it mustn't say. Brands are designed to be exemplars of responsiveness. This means we may not insist on what they "really" mean, or what they "must" say. The very point of the exercise, as this is carried forward by branding, marketing, capitalism, and a dynamic society, hangs in the balance.
For some reason, we feel free to let fly when talking to a brand. We
say things we would never dream of saying to a movie maker or a
novelist. (And this is interesting.) But I thought the thing we liked
about capitalism is that it is responsive. In some sense it does not
care what received convention says. It is quite prepared to trumpet
new body types if there is an audience for this argument. It is this
aspect of capitalism that so serves the cause of liberty. It is this
aspect of capitalism that has helped it produce the plenitude, the
blooming diversity of our contemporary world. The brand must be multiple because increasingly that's what the world is.
References
See Martin's blog "Brand Mix" here.
Gilmore, James and Joseph Pine. 2007. Authenticity: what consumers really want. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. At Amazon.com here.
Postrel, Virginia. 1999. The Future and its Enemies: the growing conflict over creativity, enterprise and progress. New York: The Free Press. At Amazon.com here.
Explanations
Got the image shooting my iPhone outside the window of Amtrak on the way to Cambridge. I call it "brand migrating." No, not really.