Andy Warhol's iconic study, Campbell's Soup Cans (1962), still resonates with us. The series depicts household brands at the pinnacle of consumer culture. But icons, like brands, come and go; the currency of Warhol's images, and conventional branding itself may not survive the greening of America.
Warhol’s Cans were preceded by former librarian of congress Daniel Boorstin's ground-breaking book The Image. Published in 1960, The Image chronicled a significant change in American culture. Boorstin saw a disturbing shift in the American psyche that coincided with the rise of the movies. It was a time, Boorstin believed, when Americans began to exercise an overall preference for commercial images over reality. Almost 50 years later, Boorstin’s observations still hold.
Daniel Boorstin is also the scholar who coined the term “pseudo event:” staged situations that serve no purpose other than to be reproduced through publicity. Movie premieres, press conferences, and the football games are examples. By absorbing these images, we receive a conditional sense of belonging, a temporary sense of pseudo-place. Today, this sense of place lies at the heart of the brand experience.
Our adoption of the pseudo experiences that Boorstin’s book describes has accelerated since when Boorstin wrote. We now do more than share celebrities and famous events. We are in direct alignment with corporate messaging as we gaze at city skylines; as we pull on our sweatshirts; as we pick out our handbags, our running shoes, our ski jackets. Now it’s normal for us to pay to advertise our favorite brand, whether it be a music artist, a pro hockey team, an apparel manufacturer, or Brand America. For a Montreal Canadiens fan, it feels good to wear the sweater to the mall; for the aspiring golfer, wearing the Nike swirl or Izod alligator can make her feel similarly good about herself. Brands add value.
Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk gave us a profound, high concept image that Boorstin’s book could not have predicted. We were given a look back from the moon, an enduring image of our fragile-planet-as-home. The following year, Earth Day was launched as a pseudo-event that contrived to embody a new planetary consciousness. Earth Day and organizations like Greenpeace and Sierra Club sprung up as flag bearers of the Environment; in the process, they became quintessential green brands. And we responded, buying T-shirts, calendars and coffee mugs that competed with or accessorized, conventional brands like Nike, Adidas, and The Gap.
In our image-conscious consumer society, "green" is presented as a conventional consumer concept. There are now green brands from companies as powerful and diverse as Whole Foods, Wal-Mart and Chevron, brands that often promise a better tomorrow for all of us.
The current onslaught of environmental issues, from the alarming decline of biodiversity to global warming, should necessarily change the way we treat the planet, and the way we market to each other as well. If Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth is to be seen and believed, a dramatic shift will extend to all aspects of private and public life, changing our habitual patterns of behavior, including the way we conduct ourselves in the marketplace.
Just as it’s unlikely that we will save the environment by mimicking conventional consumer behavior, it’s also unlikely that deep and necessary solutions will be successfully expressed through conventional branding. An entire planet isn’t threatened because of a lack of green market choices. We’ve reached this place because 10% of the world has not owned up to a fundamental disjoin with the planet, consuming it at an unsustainable rate.
Marketing guru Seth Godin, father of Permission Marketing, and author of The Purple Cow and Small is the New Big opines:
The richest and best-educated people in our economy are shifting, and pretty quickly. They're just as willing to spend money as they always were, but now it's not focused on fancy organic stuff at the Whole Foods Market or giant bulletproof cars from Germany or private jet travel. Instead, the market is trying as hard as it can to spend time and money without leaving much of a trace...I think this story has legs and is going to be around for a long time...Zero is the new black.
Environmentalists have focused their attention on the traces that products leave; culture jammers like Adbusters magazine, also assault the way that these products are sold. Green products need to be held under the same scrutiny: a low-footprint product that’s branded in the conventional way should not be considered “green” at all.
I might feel good about myself as I sip on a mouthful of Green this or that, but this sanctimoniousness should be seen as more than an innocuous behavioral tic. The diversion of attention into a me-brand-good experience, the holy grail of advertising and marketing, is actually part of the problem.
Brand promises have an environmental component that goes beyond the product origin and method of manufacturing. When green brands, through packaging and advertising, manage to nurture egocentric self-cherishing among its users, a fundamental, environmental disjoin taking place. Huddled with my coffee, whether it is Starbucks house blend, or fair trade certified, I am indulged in an intimate branded moment, whose exclusivity is holding attention hostage, if only for a moment. I rise above the pedestrian concerns of the depressed, middle-aged woman as she walks past the café; later, I take a sip of my organic chai latte, place it in the drink holder and accelerate through a busy intersection. My 'green' brand consciousness is anything but that: the phenomenon of being wrapped up in a brand idea is displacing my attention and connection to the environment that surrounds me right now.
As the marketing of environmentally friendly products reaches for second gear, branding footprints and physical footprints need to be aligned. Respect for the environment is about relationship, not self-cherishing around brand moments. It follows that marketing 'green' the old way is bound to result in cynicism towards the brand.
Former New York adman Hugh McLeod, now an influential marketing blogger at gapingvoid.com, articulates a rage toward conventional branding that extends beyond the blogosphere, and is giving conventional marketers pause. From Web 2.0 does not exist:
Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the very fine London ad agency, used to pitch their clients, 'We makes brands famous'. Right. Like movie stars. Like celebs. Like the guys getting out of the limos and walking down the red carpet. Like the ones who get all the money and invites to the fancy parties. While the rest of us stand behind the velvet rope out in the cold, looking in with longing. Great. Super. Lucky us.
McLeod later points out: "People have gotten too smart...if you want to have a cool brand, you have to do cool shit.”
With the 'cool quotient' of environmentally hazardous products on a steep, downward slide, companies that want to be considered cool will have to do more than work with recycled materials. If marketing is to be consistent with the principles that green products purport to embody, a new type of branding has to be explored, where brands exist as signifiers, but don't persist as havens of false refuge. As consumers who have grown up in the shadow of Warhol's Campbell’s soup can, a brand that does this is hard to imagine.
Just as physical products necessarily leave some kind of footprint, brands will always be associated with ideas or stories. Whereas the notion of biodegradability is recognised as a desirable product attribute, mental biodegradability is yet to be applied to branding. "How do you brand zero?" is a riddle of the age, and Marketing has yet to catch up.
Photo by V Manninen
