Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
As somebody once observed, the heart of man is a wonderful thing, especially when it is carried in his wallet.
Same goes for the heart of a woman, of course.
To, wit, the latest issue of Advertising Age conveys the fabulous wisdom and morality of attorney Randi W. Singer, “litigation partner in the New York office of Weil, Gotshal & Manges,” whose “practice focuses on copyright and Lanham Act false advertising and trademark litigation, as well as media, music licensing, First Amendment and other intellectual property issues” on behalf of “the world’s most sophisticated clients.”
In a column titled “Going Green the Smart (and Legal) Way,” Ms. Singer writes:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock in a remote part of the ever-dwindling rain forest, you know that a sure-fire way to get consumers to pay more for your products even in these difficult times is to make some “green” claims. And if you can time your ads to coincide with events such as Earth Day or convince the federal government to expedite the review for your green technology patent all the better. Bonus points for naming an actual shopping day “Green Monday” or changing the color of your logo to green.
Of course, Ms. Singer knows “going green” doesn’t mean going green, even in narrow terms:
But before jumping on the green bandwagon, it’s important to do your homework. Last summer, the Federal Trade Commission issued complaints against Kmart, Tender Corp. and Dyna-E International for making false and unsubstantiated claims of “biodegradability.” On the heels of those complaints, the FTC went after a number of companies that claimed their products were green because they were made of bamboo when, in fact, they were made of rayon — a man-made fiber that is technically created from the cellulose found in plants and trees, but only after it is chemically dissolved through a process that releases various pollutants. (After settling with the manufacturers, the FTC followed up with warning letters to 78 retailers, including Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Target). S.C. Johnson & Son faces a class action suit alleging that placing a proprietary “Greenlist” seal on its Windex window cleaning products misled consumers into believing that the products were independently certified by a third party (the Greenlist was actually an S.C. Johnson-conceived program). And following review by the National Advertising Division, the advertising industry’s self-regulatory forum, Clorox Co. decided to voluntarily discontinue claims that its Green Works Natural Cleaning Wipes were biodegradable, and MasterNet was advised to stop making claims that its plastic netting packaging products “saved countless trees from destruction.”
So, “What’s a would-be green marketer to do?”
Keep making those “green” (in quotation marks) claims, but be careful, and know your corporate lawyer’s number!
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
The excellent blog Climate and Capitalism recently reprinted a 1989 essay from the late Murray Bookchin.
I’m sorry I missed this piece back in 1989. Seeing it would have saved me a fair amount of mental labor in trying to come up with a careful yet powerful way to penetrate the veil of “consumer” talk that prevails to this day not just in mainstream commercial communications, but also in purportedly social-scientific and radical analyses.
In any event, if you change the word “market” to “capitalist” and change “advertising” to “marketing” (and realize that that the latter is not just a matter of spin doctors in post-production agencies but of thoroughgoing corporate management), then Bookchin, contrary to flubby, obscurantist, privatizing flatulence like the Worldwatch Institute’s latest “State of the World,” hits this nail squarely on the head:
In this hidden world of cause-and-effect, the environmental movement and the public stand at a crossroads. Is growth a product of “consumerism” — the most socially acceptable and socially neutral explanation that we usually encounter in discussions of environmental deterioration? Or does growth occur because of the nature of production for a market economy? To a certain extent, we can say: both. But the overall reality of a market economy is that consumer demand for a new product rarely occurs spontaneously, nor is its consumption guided purely by personal considerations.
Today, demand is created not by consumers but by producers — specifically, by enterprises called advertising agencies that use a host of techniques to manipulate public taste. American washing and drying machines, for example, are all but constructed to be used communally-and they are communally used in many apartment buildings. Their privatization in homes, where they stand idle most of the time[*], is a result of advertising ingenuity.
To take growth out of its proper social context is to distort and privatize the problem. It is inaccurate and unfair to coerce people into believing that they are personally responsible for present-day ecological dangers because they consume too much or proliferate too readily.
This privatization of the environmental crisis, like New Age cults that focus on personal problems rather than on social dislocations, has reduced many environmental movements to utter ineffectiveness and threatens to diminish their credibility with the public. If “simple living” and militant recycling are the main solutions to the environmental casts, the crisis will certainly continue and intensify.
Ironically, many ordinary people and their families cannot afford to live “simply.” It is a demanding enterprise when one considers the costliness of “simple” hand-crafted artifacts and the exorbitant price of organic and “recycled” goods. Moreover, what the “production end” of the environmental crisis cannot sell to the “consumption end,” it will certainly sell to the military. General Electric enjoys considerable eminence not only for its refrigerators but also for its Gatling guns. This shadowy side of the environmental problem — military production — can only be ignored by attaining an ecological airheadedness so vacuous as to defy description.
Public concern for the environment cannot be addressed by placing the blame on growth without spelling out the causes of growth. Nor can an explanation be exhausted by citing “consumerism” while ignoring the sinister role played by rival producers in shaping public taste and guiding public purchasing power.
The social roots of our environmental problems cannot remain hidden without trivializing the crisis itself and thwarting its resolution.
* Getting people to buy products that remain mostly unused has been a key to perpetuating corporate capitalism. In the case of the automobile, UCLA Urban Planning Professor Donald Shoup reports that, in the United States, one of the system’s two anchor commodities, the private automobile, is, on average, sitting parked and unused 95 percent of the time.
Monday, March 8th, 2010
Big business marketing is inherently totalitarian. It can’t stop. It must commercialize and commodify everything. If it didn’t, the mega-rich investors who are the primary beneficiaries of corporate capitalism would stop getting richer than they already are. And that is intolerable to them. Completely off-the-table.
As I’ve been reporting here, one of the latest trends in this advancing piranha-munch on human culture is the corporate effort to get men to buy and use as many “beauty” commodities as women (whose training in corporate cosmetics began a century ago) do.
In the marketing press, they are increasingly explicit about this push, now that it’s gathering steam and seemingly bearing behavioral and financial fruit:
[I]t’s a long battle. Ed Shirley, vice chairman of beauty and grooming for P&G has been an advocate for men’s skin care since the late 1990s, when he could see how much more developed men’s skin care was outside the U.S. “North American guys are less involved [in skin care], but it’s up to us to help them.”
What they should be doing — in the long-term marketing scheme of things — is washing their faces and using moisturizer before bed. “We know that if you had a full regimen of morning and evening care, your shaving experience would be better,” Mr. Shirley said. “And we have that right to have that conversation with guys, because the shaving experience is the anchor grooming event.”
Not that Gillette is going to bring up that moisturizer-before-bed subject just yet. But it’s moving the discussion in that direction in part through the line of shave-preparation products coming to market in June with its Gillette Fusion ProGlide razor system, which includes a heating face scrub and moisturizing aftershave with sunscreen protection.
“We’re committed to winning with men,” said Mr. Shirley.
Procter & Gamble Co. recently has reorganized its beauty-marketing ranks largely to help capture the growing potential of the men’s market, and recently got San Antonio-based supermarket chain H-E-B to try a men’s personal care section. Unilever has made men the focus of its biggest 2010 launch for its biggest personal-care brand, Dove. Unilever sees a $700 million opportunity to grow the men’s personal-care market in categories where it competes — essentially personal wash, hair care and deodorants — a market currently measured by Nielsen at $2.1 billion that the marketer expects will hit $2.8 billion by 2012.
And, as always, as they manipulate gender and sexuality to rake in dollars, the marketers can’t dare do anything but remain loyal to the lowest common denominator, for fear of losing customers and sparking right-wing flak storms (the left being not only too fragmented to act, but generally confused and ultra-tame on the actual use of ideology in advertising). Hence, this:
It all hearkens to the heady days of 2002, when personal-care marketers of all sorts were fixated on men as their new frontier, even coining the concept of the “metrosexual” grooming and fashion-obsessed male. The enthusiasm faded into what seemed like vague disappointment, as brands such as L’Oreal, Nivea, Neutrogena and Gillette tried launching skin and in some cases hair-care lines for men that had trouble keeping their space on U.S. shelves.
It’s been at least six years since any marketer could be caught uttering the M word. Marketers who had heralded the arrival of the “metrosexual” last decade found the term tended to pigeonhole their products with a relatively narrow segment of upscale, fashion-conscious men. The reality is that the segment exists and has kept growing, but marketers seeking to sell such products as shampoo and bodywash to men are appealing to a much broader audience, too.
In other words, we all know that metro-sexual is halfway to homo-sexual, right? Mum’s the word, then!
And the overall impact on gender relations, despite the rank “femininity” of using lotion and, presumably, eventually, make-up products? Probably more male media tropism and sexism:
Boon for male-centric media
The male call by marketers has also been a boon for media that cater to the demographic, like ESPN. “It’s definitely a growth area for us,” said Ed Erhardt, president of ESPN and ABC Sports, which is positioned to reap much of the uptick in competitive spending.
Such are the corporate capitalists’ plans for the 21st century. Beautiful, indeed.
[Quotes from Advertising Age, March 8, 2010]
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
They bail themselves out. Then they prepare to repeat what caused the need for a bailout in the first place. Of course. They are a late-imperial overclass that stopped listening to anything but their own cant 30+ years ago.
From the latest Business Week comes a report on how this is happening in the housing(-bubble) sector, in which the big players are now apparently buying up land thinking they’ll get back to 1995:
An additional boost came last year when Congress passed a law allowing companies to get refunds on past years’ tax payments by applying their recent losses to earnings dating back five years. Many sold land at big losses to boost their refunds. The result was a windfall of $2.3 billion for the builders as a group, including $800 million for No. 1 Pulte Homes.
The result of those balance-sheet heroics? Builders have more than $12 billion in cash they can use to replenish their land inventory. Pulte and D.R. Horton each had $1.9 billion in cash and near-term equivalents at the end of December, Toll Brothers had $1.6 billion at the end of January, Lennar had $1.3 billion, and KB Home had $1.2 billion at the end of November.
[These corporate builders'] interest in unfinished land usually comes later in the housing cycle, says Thomas E. Lucas, senior vice-president of operations for DMB in Scottsdale. “We didn’t think we’d sell raw land for three to four years,” Lucas says. That’s a striking vote of confidence considering the threats to housing from high unemployment, rising mortgage rates, and foreclosures.
Can you imagine non-capitalists ever being allowed to rewrite their income tax returns to minimize what they owe?
In any event, it’s clear that, in yet another economic sector, capital has been restored, but has no idea what to do with itself. So, despite their unwillingness or inability to lift a finger to help their own potential customers, they nonetheless presume something, somehow will return them to “normalcy.” Probably their own glorious entrepreneurial spirit, I suppose…
Thanks again, Obama, for all this “change.”
Monday, March 1st, 2010
From the top on down, the Obama Administration is as full of shameless liars as any before.
Take the case of Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director. This prep-school douche, who grew up in Massachusetts but likes country music, just said this to Business Week about medical insurance in the United States [emphasis added]:
Currently, overall health care is about 16% of GDP. It is projected to rapidly increase. In 10 years, it will increase by a few percentage points as a share of GDP. But the issue is it continues thereafter. And the thing that’s important about the bills under consideration—the single most important thing we can do—is to move the incentive system for providers, hospitals, and doctors away from paying for more stuff. The problem is that we currently do not know exactly how to design that system.
Unbelievable.
Also quite revealing about what’s going to happen after they pass “reform.”
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
Our old reliable favorite, Axe perfumes for adolescent males, is at it again, taking heavily-researched stupidity-promotion and self-delusion to still new levels. According to the latest Advertising Age:
Axe ads have traditionally been about products that instantly turn women into lust-crazed vixens bent on coupling with Axe-wearing gents as quickly as possible. But in the first ad for the new fragrance Twist, a robot makes over the guy repeatedly during the course of a date in which the woman appears acutely interested only at the end. The ad is based on a concept co-created by consumers and ad agency Ponce (in late 2008, the agency was renamed Ponce Buenos Aires after Fernando Vega Olmos left to work on Unilever at JWT).
“Women get bored easily,” notes a version of the ad for Axe sibling Lynx in the U.K., which touts a “fragrance that changes.”
The reality, said David Cousino, global director of consumer and marketing insights at Unilever, is that all fragrances change, starting with a fresh, strong, usually citrusy top note that lasts for as long as an hour and aims to help cover the smell of alcohol-based propellants as they evaporate, progressing to a generally richer, milder mid-note and a longer-lasting and often subtler-still “dry-down” note. This is all old hat to fragrance developers and marketers, he said, but it was new and fascinating to the consumers in the development group.
“The guys linked that to the mating game and how guys are feeling that they need to constantly change and evolve to keep the girls interested,” Mr. Cousino said.
“Women get bored easily”? Really? In the 21st century, big businesses are still getting away with this?
And people wonder about the cultural impact of corporate marketing?
