Archive for March, 2006
Branding, the Birkin bag and damage control
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I managed to make it to mid life without ever hearing about the Birkin bag, but then some kinds of knowledge, perhaps the most important things, are withheld from the anthropologist.
I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know enough. This was insider knowledge I would have to earn.
Naturally, just about everyone else knew, including a dear friend, Joan Kron, who owns a Birkin, and my wife, who would dearly love to. Birkins are made by Hermes and they cost between $6000 to $75,000. They were named for an English singer, Jane Birkin (pictured), who took French popular music by storm in 1968 with ‘Je t’aime moi non plus," a song that drew the censure from the Vatican. Jane Birkin won still more notoriety by appearing naked in bed with Bridget Bardot. This plus her "I’ve been idea-free for a decade" beauty endeared her mightily to the French (who have been idea-free for much longer) and prepared her to leave her mark not just on music but on handbags.
According to the origin myth, as reported to the New York Times by Andrew Litvak, here’s what happened.
[Jane] was on an airplane one day, and the guy next to her was the president of Hermès. He looked at the bag that she was carrying, which was a form of the Birkin bag but was in canvas or something, and he said to her, ‘Hey, how would you like it if we designed a bag like yours?’ It would be the first bag since Grace Kelly that we’ve given an actress’s name to. And Jane said, ‘Sure, that would be great.’ So she drew up a sketch."
All brands should be born this way, from contact, between a mortal and a goddess, as they pass in the heavens. The mortal pleads for inspiration from his muse and in her majestic way, she consents ("Sure, that would be great.") And the rest, as they say, is fashion history. The Birkin went on to become perhaps the single most coveted item in women’s fashion.
But now the bad news, and here’s where it gets interesting for marketers. According to the Scotsman, my first source for fashion news, Jane Birkin recently repudiated the Birkin and now carries a sporran she bought for £10 in Edinburgh. Disavowed, dissed and dumped. Dommage!
Now, if we were the Birkin brand manager, we might say, "Je m’en fiche." What do we care if we are abandoned by a celebrity endorser? Most women who covet the Birkin have never heard of Jane Birkin. The brand has moved on. Jane and the sporran are well matched. We wish them well.
But there is another way of thinking about this. When Hermes reached out to Jane Birkin, she was still a creature of great exoticism, and certainly the only Hermes partner who had been photographed naked with Bridget Bardo. (There are photos of certain senior managers, but that’s another story.) We can assume that Hermes was displaced, as many great brands were, by the cultural shift of the 1960s and 1970s. Connecting with a young bohemian beauty was a very good idea, and an opportunity to renew currency and altitude.
Now to lose Ms. Birkin, this might well put the brand in jeopardy. Now the brand is simply about the upper reaches, the glory, that is the fashion world. It has lost that connection to the great counter culture that arose at mid-20th century.
We were noting yesterday that the winner of American Idol will combine contradictory elements. So it is, perhaps, with fashion brands. A little grist, type working against type, all of this is sometimes the essential ingredient in meanng manufacture and the very secret of brand meaning managment.
Marketers are like any culture bearers. They are sometimes lucky enough to have brands of such standing and power that they obliterate the very idea of their diminishment. But this can happen. And to lose an essential piece of the brand portfolio, this is the way it happens.
References
Smith, Aidan. 2006. Jane Birkin ditches Hermes bag for sporra. The Scotsman. March 19, 2006. here.
Wadler, Joyce with Paula Schwartz. 2004. Can You Even Left It? New York Times. September 7, 2004. here.
Acknowledgments
To The Agenda, with a hat tip for the head’s up here.
American Idol: minerva taking wing at dusk
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Mark Berman of Mediaweek notes that American Idol helped Fox beat all the other networks combined, last night
Mr. Berman has a prediction to make:
Chris Daughtry is the definite favorite, while talent-less Bucky Covington is the most likely to bid adieu tonight. Potentially joining Bucky in the bottom three: Lisa Tucker and, unfortunately, energetic Taylor Hicks in place of oddball teen Kevin Covais. Did you ever, meanwhile, see a contestant more in love with himself than Ace Young?
I am surprised to see how easy it is to make predictions. Everyone seems to know exactly who will win. And there is surprising agreement. Clearly, Kevin Covais will have to go just as surely (and for the opposite reason) that Santino Rice had to leave Project Runway. Kevin was too nice and Santino not nearly nice enough. (We want our icons, in music as in design, a combination of the two.)
But if we are truly a post modernist society, buzzing with variety and novelty, surely the American Idol confidence and consensus should be impossible. Surely, the whole thing should be playing itself out as a great mystery, with, say, performances of emo that shock and puzzle.
That there is confidence and consensus tells us a) we are mostly wrong when we talk about the new structural properties of contemporary culture, or b) there is something about American Idol that smooths the way for our confidence and our consensus. I am prepared to be talking into "A" but I have a feeling that the answer is "B."
After all, there are moments when watching AI where I find myself wondering what decade this is. No one has chosen a song penned in the 21st century. Indeed, as Randy, Paula, and Simon are often moved to observe, clothing and makeup choices often seem to harken back to another time. This is my way of saying that American Idol is a lie and perhaps even a conspiracy. It appears to be crafted to give the impression that American culture remains a mass culture, that happy time when every thing was known to everyone (see Monday’s post on the "death of destination television").
This is the "big brand" approach to contemporary music. Covington is an Eagles imitator. Daughtry is a road house rocker. Ace does Motown. My favorite, Elliott Yamin, a guy who looks endearingly like George C. Scott, covers Stevie. The girls, generally, are anyone anyone wants them to be as long as it obliges them to dress in clothing that no one has worn for several decades.
As we have noted here before, the great fluorescence of cultural invention that is taking place at the moment has certain structural effects, some of them predictable, some not. Predictably, it drives a plenitude of musical production, a fragmentation of consumer taste, and profusion of long tail markets. Unpredictably, it creates a flight to the higher ground of broader choice.
So much for the notion that the center will not hold. The fluorescence of our culture at one end is forcing a new coherence at the other. There are several benefits of this development. One of these is that we are left with an impression that really this a mass society, that nothing has changed. And it’s a very veritable impression. Forty million viewers. God in heaven.
I can think of several institutions that will buy the lie. The business schools will say, "listen, American Idol is proof that we do not have to let contemporary culture into the curriculum.It is business (school) as usual." Several brands, famous for the cluelessness, will also insist that American Idol is a license for complacency.
Too bad. For this appearance of cohesion is, I think, being driven by its opposite.
References
Berman, Marc. Programming Inside. Mediaweek. March 22, 2006. By subscription. Sorry, I don’t have an url. I get the Programming Insider by email.
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the death of destination television
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My anthro & econ "dream team" of "must read" journalists continues to grow.
James Poniewoznik is now our man in TVland, joining Lisa Schwartzbaum of Entertainment Weekly (movies), Barbara Lippert of Adweek (advertising), and Joan Kron (plastic surgery). (Please feel free to nominate people.)
Poniewozik recently noted several TV shows he thinks we might have missed. And I have to say this sent a chill through me. TV I might have missed? It seems like only yesterday, I could take for granted that by this time of the year I would have seen all the new shows. But sure enough, Poniewozik names several shows I have not seen.
His list: Sons and Daughters (ABC), The Loop (FOX), Free Ride (FOX), Wonder Shozen (MTV2), Nighty Night (Oxygen), and Slings and Arrows (Sundance).
TV was for a long time our hearth, the focal point around which families and the nation could bathe together "in the glow." One measure of how customary (and obligatory) was this participation: everyone knew pretty much knew all the shows, even if they didn’t watch them. It was rare to speak of a show in conversation and discover that someone had no clue what it was about. This was a common ground.
Now there are several good shows in their second season, I don’t know. This is no doubt a measure of my addled condition and one of the many costs of living in Connecticut, but it is also a reflection of changes taking place in the TV producer and the TV consumer.
There are now many, many good channels carrying many good shows. I am astonished how high the standard of the comedic writing is. I was watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother recently, and there was a particular jewel about an American boyfriend driving off a French girlfriend that was fiendishly clever. It’s amazing how many people can write well for TV. The art of sit com acting is all about dropping the line in at exactly the right moment, delivery it with perfect economy and emphasis, and then giving way to the next joke. It’s amazing how many people can do this flawlessly. This tells us that as channels grow, so will the shows capable of supplying them. There is, apparently, no shortage of talent. The profusion of "must see" TV that I fail to see will continue to grow.
On the consumer end, there is an explosion of options. Lots of channels carried on lots of TVs in the home. There are DVDs (via purchase or Netflix) and pay per view movies. There is place shifting (Slingbox) and timeshifting (Tivo). At any given time, a family has thousands of options. The chances of them all sitting down to a single moment of "destination television" (aka "appointment television") are increasingly slender.
It’s almost as if TV is going to go the way of the family meal. A shared meal (sometimes, Sunday night, sometimes Friday) was once the center piece of American family life. It was the moment when people came together to remember, reenact and otherwise reassert that they were a family, and what it was to be a family. This institution has been under extraordinary pressure in recent years. Someone told me recently that Americans now eat something like 10% of their meals while driving in the car! ("Dashboard dining" they called it.) "Grazing" and individual preparation is also on the rise. The family meal is now longer a staple of family ritual, but increasingly an occasional and ad hoc accomplishment.
This wasn’t so bad because families were still sitting down to destination television. (In a perfect world, some academic would have worked out the precise differences between shared meals and shared television, but until our scholarly cousins awaken from their postmodernist slumber, this topic will remain unexamined.) But if destination TV is now for the high jump (as the English say), what can this mean for family life?
Now if this were 1972, we could rely on an academic to write a book about how TV is killing our culture. Happily, it is now 21st century and we are more inclined to wonder how this will change culture, not kill it. To some extent, the family has been a balwark against plenitude. Culture fragmented outside the family, and to be sure, some of this leaked in. But the family was still largely a world onto itself. What we are looking at with the end of destination TV might be the death of the family’s last ceremonial center. In this event, plenitude will have come home in earnest and not even a great room will be big enough to contain the explosion.
References
Poniewozik, James. 2006. 6 Totally Funny TV Series. Time Magazine. March 20, 2006, p. 118.
Precarity
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Today, I learned a new word. It might represent a new trend. Call it precarity.
It comes to us swirling up from the student protests taking place in France. (The PM of France, Dominique de Villepin, has introduced legislation that would make it easier for companies to fire young workers. Students are unhappy and now voluble:)
As students and workers continue to occupy the Sorbonne and march through the streets of France, we will join them with our virtual bodies from around the world. SOLIDARITY WITH THE STUDENTS OF FRANCE! SOLIDARITÉ!
The reference to "virtual bodies" aside, this is pretty much "politics as usual" for the French. What caught my attention is one the ideas at work here.
[P]eople around the world are suffering from the system that the French students are protesting against. The neoliberal, corporate model of society increases the precarity of life for everyone through employment instability, war and environmental destruction. It must be stopped. Youth all over the world face bleak prospects under the current models. New economic and social models must be developed.
Precarity, huh? Notice how elegantly it brings together three disparate topics (employment, war and environment) and bundles them so to recruit a larger body of protest. (The fragmentation that makes life interesting for all of us is especially intense in youth cultures, and this makes it hard to establish consensus and mobilize action.)
But what a strange little idea this is! That life should not be precarious. Wow. If one idea has passed from currency, it’s the notion that liberal democracies can make life predictable and orderly. The sheer force of dynamism in every aspect of contemporary life makes this unthinkable.
But who knows, this might be the little idea that could. Perhaps it will sew together acts of umbrage and outrage. Perhaps it will mobilize students around the world. In an odd way, it gets at the symptom of our contemporary condition most precisely. Naturally, I can’t help feeling that when it moves French students to shut down parts of Paris, the notion of precarity is itself an agent of precarity. But what do I know? You can’t make a souffle without breaking a few eggs.
For more on the protest in France, and the source of materials quoted in this post, go here
Revolutionary
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This is Tom Messner. He writes a column for Adweek. In January, Tom decided to review traditional texts in the field of advertising. The essay is called Old Testament.
This is brilliant in the way that the best of advertising discourse is often brilliant. Just when the world has decided that advertising (of a conventional kind) is over, Messner steps forward, puts this anxiety aside with not so much as a parenthetical acknowledgment, and patiently begins the work of recovery. What are the key texts?
The review is filled with wonderful moments, as when Messner stops to come part first sentence translations of Proust’s Swan’s Way.
Reviewing From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, by Jerry Della Femina, Messner says,
It is dated and contemporary; shrewd and unwise; avuncular and juvenile. For those who grew up in New York, going to work in advertising was not unlike going to work for steel in Pittsburgh, coal in West Virginia or tires in Akron. I always thought Della Femina had too much fun being Jerry B. Jerry to write the great American ad, but he did write the great American ad book.
Reviewing My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising, by Claude Hopkins, Messner says,
Every syllable says 19th century: He puts a period in "ads." as an abbreviation and is the embodiment of the Puritan work ethic in its best sense. David Ogilvy read his books seven times and said they changed his life; I read them once and remain untouched to that extent but moved by the spare sincerity.
If I may presume to say, this is what happens in moments of crisis. When all the world runs shouting into the night, some people say, "Ok, let’s review. What is it we say we do? What do we do?" in the process extracting the most powerful propositions and processes of the industry before the naysayers succeed in burning it down.
It’s a little like Minerva taking flight at dusk, but in this case, I think it represents a recovery of memory, a return to self, for an industry that systematically refused an idea of what it was.
In this vacuum, post war intellectuals scathingly set up shop. And advertising became whatever they said it was. Speaking now anthropologically, this was a very bad thing. It encouraged the creation of a culture’s self loathing and self mystification. The intellectuals were pleased to call the advertising community our myth makers, but in fact they are more properly called our meaning makers. Myth makers, that’s a title we should reserve for the Stuart Ewen and the John Kenneth Galbraith.
References
Messner, Tom. 2006. The Old Testament. Adweek. January 16, 2006. here.
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On the radio
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Ok, I just finished an interview with Christopher Lydon for Open Source, the WGBH radio program out of Boston. The topic was clutter and spring cleaning. Most participants were singing that anti-consumer-society hymn we all know and love so well. You know, the one that asks why can’t we all be more like Thoreau and live the simple life.
I find this sort of thing hard to listen to. It seems to be to neglect the powers and subtleties of the person-object relationship in our culture. Oh, sure, some stuff gets into our houses under false pretenses. We just "have" to have it at the moment of purchase. Several weeks later it is one more regretable piece of plastic, one that richly deserves the old heave ho.
But most of the things that "clutter" our homes are pretty important to us. Strip them from us, by an act of God or man, hurricane or robbery, and the effects can be devastating. We like to think that personhood is contained within the boundaries of the skin and that everything "out there" is so much clutter or at least utterly external.
But 25 years of doing the anthropology of North America tells me that the self is actually located across these boundaries, so that part of us is resident within, and part of us is resident in the things we call our own. Anyhow, this is not everyone’s favorite point of view, and I try to make myself useful on the show without being a "Mr. Know it all, Professor smarty pants, but I have a PhD, damnit, I’ve done the research, don’t you see."
And this is where it gets interesting. Christopher Lydon (pictured) has this way of presiding with a very quiet impatience. You could hear him willing we three guests to say something interesting, to step up to the intellectual and conversational opportunity, to make this topic live. Naturally, he is keen on this because he runs a radio show, but it don’t think that was the motive.
No, I think he wants some place for his intelligence to engage, and when the conversation gets glassy, as it did on a couple of occasions, he hovers over the stray remark, beating his wings, seeing if he can’t scare even the tinyest field mouse out from under cover. Who knows, but this might be a tasty morsel. Who know, but that we might actually feast on this. It was as vivid a demonstration of a roving, summoning intellect as I have seen in a long time.
This is going to sound like sycophancy, and so I am now obliged to say that I find the guy in studio a little chilly, even by Boston standards. Clearly, he is one of those guys who lives in the voice. And on the radio he sounds passionate, all emotion in the service of idea. In person, well in person, the warmth is not so clear. There, now I have overcorrected and almost certainly offended him.
