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Consuming culture

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by Dr Rachel Pillai, Research Fellow, Migration, Equalities, and Citizenship Team
Catalyst Magazine - 20 November 2006

Rachel Pillai analyses how advertising shapes our world.

Cultural diversity as a marketing concept has never been more powerful. Magazines, billboards and TV ads are awash with images of exotic faces, places and objects, selling everything from holidays abroad to sweaters. Some of the biggest and most profitable ad campaigns in history, including those that built the colossal brands of Benetton, Gap and Hilfiger, have brought images of cultural difference into the heart of everyday, public spaces.

The ‘coolie has become cool’, in Sanjay Sharma’s ironic words, and cultural difference has become a powerful currency in our global economy.

In this way, the global power and reach of modern advertising has reflected the way the world has changed over the last few decades through celebratory narratives on cultural pluralism and multiculturalism. However, these narratives are unhelpful in a world that is devoid of any substantive public discourse of solidarity and community. Despite this, marketing is increasingly being used to manage and explain rapid social change beyond the boundaries of the billboard to the political realm of branding states and regions. In the light of these developments, it is important to question the commercial interventions of advertising at a time when society desperately needs meaningful and responsible public narratives on important social issues. Gordon Brown has recently highlighted the importance of this in relation to the marketing of junk food to children.

What’s in an ad?

The relationship of advertising to wider society is unique over other forms of popular culture because of its extensive penetration into public space. It remains one of the most effective means of reaching large, dispersed audiences through TV, radio, billboards, magazines, newspapers and the internet. As advertising images have gained currency and even legitimacy in recent years through dissemination and repetition, huge budgets and sophisticated technologies have driven up the cost of advertising in transnational media space.

Advertising’s role is also unique because of its forms and structure, which are underpinned by wider cultural values and meanings. A key element of how advertising conveys meaning to viewers is through familiar forms (or genres) of popular culture that are packaged in broadly recognisable audiovisuals and narratives. Because viewers engage with such forms through what cognitive scientists refer to as ‘top-down’ processing, advertisers can rely on viewers to ‘fill in the blanks’ consistent with the form, and in ways that tap deep persuasive emotion. More than any other form of popular culture, therefore, ads are constructed on a shared pool of cultural meanings and values because advertisers know they will only be seen for a few seconds, either on the side of a bus or while passing a billboard. Consumers must, therefore, ‘get’ the ad, and ‘get’ it quickly. Advertisers have to be good communicators of social meaning if their product is to come alive and if they are to establish ‘emotional ties’ with their audience.

An important part of this is the compelling notion that ‘culture’ is the invisible glue that holds together the unexplainable behaviour of consumers: that it taps into underlying motivations and needs, and can even, at times, stand for the value of the brand. To this end, many advertising images are designed to communicate a social narrative on cultural diversity in order to establish an emotional tie with the audience, and advertising agencies, which used to show a marked preference for psychologists, now routinely advertise for anthropologists to fill vacancies with ambitiously devised titles like ‘future planners’.

As many brands fill their ads with rainbow visions of racial mixing, it is clear that the contemporary buzzword in global advertising is less Marlboro Man, more Ricky Martin: a bilingual mix of north and south, some latin, some R&B, and a little bit of everything in between. This ethnic food-court approach creates a one world placenessness, a global mall in which corporations don’t have to create different advertising campaigns for different markets, but can sell diversity itself to all markets at once.

In this way, advertising professionals operate a powerful lever of public cultural intervention, often telling stories (albeit quick ones) of rapid social and political change in an increasingly globalised world. The problem is that these stories do not necessarily say anything useful or progressive about diversity because they are contained within, and constrained by, the commercial logic of the ad.

The commodification of culture in this way cannot be dismissed as ‘just entertainment’ or mere trivia. Advertising is, at heart, a public cultural intervention at least as much as it is a business venture. In fact, it is a business venture because it is a public cultural intervention. Appropriating cultural difference within a stylised world of consumption reduces public narratives on culture, identity and community to little more than domestic tourism, and promotes ‘race’ as an unhelpful fiction best kept out of respectable politics and social arrangements. This commercial smorgasbord of culture has little to offer societies desperately in need of meaningful, substantive public narratives to explain the way the world is changing.

It is somewhat ironic, then, that the same techniques are being used to help states and regions reposition themselves in a global world. The use of marketing principles in public diplomacy and attempts to win over ‘hearts and minds’ is now one of the fastest growing areas in the advertising industry.

In today’s world of information overload, modern states recognise that the ‘soft’ power of strong brands is important in attracting foreign direct investment, recruiting the best and the brightest, and wielding political influence. Many cities, ministries and government agencies now boast their own adverts, logos and mission statements in an effort to reposition themselves in a fluid, globalising world and restore a new sense of purpose and direction (who can forget ‘Cool Britannia’?). The way marketing has come to dominate modern politics was graphically underlined in 2000 with the publication of a memo to Tony Blair from chief strategist Philip Gould, in which the latter wrote about New Labour being a ‘contaminated brand’. Advertising strategies were also central to the US State Department’s Shared Values Initiative (SVI) post 9/11, which attempted to re-brand America to the Muslim world.

Superficially, this marriage of advertising and politics makes sense. Policy-makers, under the constraints of time and/or space, increasingly rely on ‘spin’ and PR to communicate their political messages.

But when it comes to actually responding to the challenges of globalisation and increasing diversity, advertising offers few solutions. To the extent that both advertising and modern states draw upon a symbolic account, as it were, that prioritises style over substance, they become entangled in a kind of ethical debt. Ostensibly, the repayment resides in the form of the functional satisfaction that the advertised product or policy promises. But the equivalence is misleading because in addition to the exchange of cash for product, or vote for policy, a symbolic investment is taking place in an imaginary domain that far exceeds the unique selling propositions of the product or policy. At its most general, this is an investment in happiness, stability and a belief in the ‘good life’.

Yet while the US government in the light of the events of 9/11 sees its main challenge as one of communication – how to get its branding across to its audience – it is actually the opposite. Many of those in the Middle East, for example, can recite America’s claims to democracy, liberty and equal opportunity as readily as they can associate McDonald’s with family fun and Nike with athletic prowess. If they are angry, it is because they have seen these promises betrayed by US policy, and this anger comes not only from the facts of policy but from a clear perception of false advertising.

There is also a more fundamental characteristic of marketing that should not be applied to the political realm: brand consistency. In the corporate world, once a brand identity is fixed, it is enforced with military precision throughout a company’s operations. This brand identity may be tailored to accommodate local language and cultural preferences (such as McDonald’s ‘McAlloo Tikki’ in India), but its core features, such as aesthetic message and logo, remain unchanged. This consistency is what many brand managers like to call ‘the promise’ of a brand: a pledge that wherever you go in the world, your experience at a Holiday Inn, for example, will be comfortable and familiar. Anything that threatens this consistency dilutes the company’s overall strength. When brand managers transfer their skills from the corporate to the political world, they invariably bring along this fascination with homogeneity.

But this is the dangerous side of politicians and states appropriating marketing concepts for their own ends, because democracy has other ideas. Unlike strong brands, which are largely predictable and disciplined, democracy is messy and fractious, if not outright rebellious. So while SVI may have convinced Colin Powell about the value of consistency and homogeneity, domestic society and the larger international community is not made up of Gap khakis or Benetton sweaters.

More than ever, our cultural and political landscape is punctuated by the commercial intervention of marketing. Despite their non-governmental role, advertising professionals intervene in areas far beyond the boundaries of their commercial expertise and are engaged in shaping public cultural policies to an unprecedented degree. Their (increasingly public) images, texts and strategies ambitiously attempt to decode and make sense of complex social phenomena and rapid global changes that cannot be responsibly communicated or contained within corporate narratives.

This is important because throughout many societies, people are caught up in, and excluded by, the powerful currents of capitalist markets, religious movements and nationalism. Embracing and resisting these forces, individuals and groups struggle to position themselves, to establish bases and sites of collective support and action. In so far as they look to thepolitical establishment (currently preoccupied in the UK with Muslim women wearing the veil) to make sense of such forces and changes, they encounter a lack of imagination and a focus on unhelpful dichotomies and sterile debates. And if they then try to position themselves through ethnic, religious, regional or class identification, this is something we do not have the luxury to ignore. Instead, our policy-makers need to think critically, rather than commercially, about how to communicate and respond to the challenges posed by the fast pace of global change.

Rachel Pillai is a Research Fellow in ippr's Migration, Equalities, & Citizenship Team.