by Naomi Klein
And what do the change agents’ bosses have to say about all this? They say bring it on, of course. Companies looking to fashion brand identities that will mesh seamlessly with the zeitgeist understand, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, “When a thing is current, it creates currency.” The change agents stroke their bosses’ middle-aged egos simply by showing up — how out of touch could the boss be with a radical like this on the same intranet system? Just look at Netscape, which no longer employs a personnel manager and instead has Margie Mader, Director of Bringing in the Cool People. When asked by Fast Company, “How do you interview for cool?” she replied, “… there are the people who just exude cool: one guy skateboarded here for his interview; another held his interview in a roller-hockey rink.”10 At MTV, a couple of twenty-five-year-old production assistants, both named Melissa, co-wrote a document known as the “Melissa Manifesto,” calling on the already insufferably bubbly channel to become even more so. (“We want a cleaner, brighter, more fun MTV,” was among their fearless demands.) Upon reading the tract, MTV president Judy McGrath told one of her colleagues, “I feel like blowing everybody out and putting these people in charge.”11 Fellow rebel Tom Freston, CEO of MTV, explains that “Judy is inherently an anti-establishment person. Anybody who comes along and says, ‘Let’s off the pig,’ has got her ear.”12
Cool Hunters: The Legal Stalkers of Youth Culture
While the change agents were getting set to cool the corporate world from the inside out, a new industry of “cool hunters” was promising to cool the companies from the outside in. The major corporate cool consultancies —Sputnik, The L. Report, Bureau de Style —were all founded between 1994 and 1996, just in time to present themselves as the brands’ personal cool shoppers. The idea was simple: they would search out pockets of cutting-edge lifestyle, capture them on videotape and return to clients like Reebok, Absolut Vodka and Levi’s with such bold pronouncements as “Monks are cool.”13 They would advise their clients to use irony in their ad campaigns, to get surreal, to use “viral communications.”
In their book Street Trends, Sputnik founders Janine Lopiano-Misdom and Joanne De Luca concede that almost anyone can interview a bunch of young people and make generalizations, “but how do you know they are the ‘right’ ones —have you been in their closets? Trailed their daily routines? Hung out with them socially?… Are they the core consumers, or the mainstream followers?”14 Unlike the market researchers who use focus groups and one-way glass to watch kids as if they were overgrown lab rats, Sputnik is “one of them” — it is in with the in-crowd.
Of course all this has to be taken with a grain of salt. Cool hunters and their corporate clients are locked in a slightly S/M, symbiotic dance: the clients are desperate to believe in a just-beyond-their-reach well of untapped cool, and the hunters, in order to make their advice more valuable, exaggerate the crisis of credibility the brands face. On the off chance of Brand X becoming the next Nike, however, many corporations have been more than willing to pay up. And so, armed with their change agents and their cool hunters, the superbrands became the perennial teenage followers, trailing the scent of cool wherever it led.
In 1974, Norman Mailer described the paint sprayed by urban graffiti artists as artillery fired in a war between the street and the establishment. “You hit your name and maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle. For now your name is over their name … your presence is on their Presence, your alias hangs over their scene.”15 Twenty-five years later, a complete inversion of this relationship has taken place. Gathering tips from the graffiti artists of old, the superbrands have tagged everyone —including the graffiti writers themselves. No space has been left unbranded.
Hip-Hop Blows Up the Brands
As we have seen, in the eighties you had to be relatively rich to get noticed by marketers. In the nineties, you have only to be cool. As designer Christian Lacroix remarked in Vogue, “It’s terrible to say, very often the most exciting outfits are from the poorest people.”16
Over the past decade, young black men in American inner cities have been the market most aggressively mined by the brandmasters as a source of borrowed “meaning” and identity. This was the key to the success of Nike and Tommy Hilfiger, both of which were catapulted to brand superstardom in no small part by poor kids who incorporated Nike and Hilfiger into hip-hop style at the very moment when rap was being thrust into the expanding youth-culture limelight by MTV and Vibe (the first mass-market hip-hop magazine, founded in 1992). “The hip-hop nation,” write Lopiano-Misdom and De Luca in Street Trends, is “the first to embrace a designer or a major label, they make that label ‘big concept’ fashion. Or, in their words, they ‘blow it up.’”17
Designers like Stussy, Hilfiger, Polo, DKNY and Nike have refused to crack down on the pirating of their logos for T-shirts and baseball hats in the inner cities and several of them have clearly backed away from serious attempts to curb rampant shoplifting. By now the big brands know that profits from logowear do not just flow from the purchase of the garment but also from people seeing your logo on “the right people,” as Pepe Jeans’ Phil Spur judiciously puts it. The truth is that the “got to be cool” rhetoric of the global brands is, more often than not, an indirect way of saying “got to be black.” Just as the history of cool in America is really (as many have argued) a history of African-American culture —from jazz and blues to rock and roll to rap — for many of the superbrands, cool hunting simply means black-culture hunting. Which is why the cool hunters’ first stop was the basketball courts of America’s poorest neighborhoods.
The latest chapter in mainstream America’s gold rush to poverty began in 1986, when rappers Run-DMC breathed new life into Adidas products with their hit single “My Adidas,” a homage to their favorite brand. Already, the wildly popular rap trio had hordes of fans copying their signature style of gold medallions, black-and-white Adidas tracksuits and low-cut Adidas sneakers, worn without laces. “We’ve been wearing them all our lives,” Darryl McDaniels (a k a DMC) said of his Adidas shoes at the time.18 That was fine for a time, but after a while it occurred to Russell Simmons, the president of Run-DMC’s label Def Jam Records, that the boys should be getting paid for the promotion they were giving to Adidas. He approached the German shoe company about kicking in some money for the act’s 1987 Together Forever tour. Adidas executives were skeptical about being associated with rap music, which at that time was alternately dismissed as a passing fad or vilified as an incitement to riot. To help change their minds, Simmons took a couple of Adidas bigwigs to a Run-DMC show. Christopher Vaughn describes the event in Black Enterprise: “At a crucial mo ment, while the rap group was performing the song [“My Adidas”], one of the members yelled out, ‘Okay, everybody in the house, rock your Adidas!’ —and three thousand pairs of sneakers shot in the air. The Adidas executives couldn’t reach for their check books fast enough.”19 By the time of the annual Atlanta sports-shoe Super Show that year, Adidas had unveiled its new line of Run-DMC shoes: the Super Star and the Ultra Star —“designed to be worn without laces.”20
Since “My Adidas,” nothing in inner-city branding has been left up to chance. Major record labels like BMG now hire “street crews” of urban black youth to talk up hip-hop albums in their communities and to go out on guerrilla-style postering and sticker missions. The L.A.-based Steven Rifkind Company bills itself as a marketing firm “specializing in building word-of-mouth in urban areas and inner cities.”21 Rifkind is CEO of the rap label Loud Records, and companies like Nike pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars to find out how to make their brands cool with trend-setting black youth.
So focused is Nike on borrowing style, attitude and imagery from black urban youth that the company has its own word for the practice: bro-ing. That’s when Nike marketers and designers bring their prototypes to inner-city neighborhoods in New York, Philadelphia or Chicago and say, “Hey, bro, check out the shoes,” to gauge the reaction to new styles and to build up
a buzz. In an interview with journalist Josh Feit, Nike designer Aaron Cooper described his bro-ing conversion in Harlem: “We go to the playground, and we dump the shoes out. It’s unbelievable. The kids go nuts. That’s when you realize the importance of Nike. Having kids tell you Nike is the number one thing in their life —number two is their girlfriend.”22 Nike has even succeeded in branding the basketball courts where it goes bro-ing through its philanthropic wing, P.L.A.Y (Participate in the Lives of Youth). P.L.A.Y sponsors inner-city sports programs in exchange for high swoosh visibility, including giant swooshes at the center of resurfaced urban basketball courts. In tonier parts of the city, that kind of thing would be called an ad and the space would come at a price, but on this side of the tracks, Nike pays nothing, and files the cost under charity.
Tommy Hilfiger: To the Ghetto and Back Again
Tommy Hilfiger, even more than Nike or Adidas, has turned the harnessing of ghetto cool into a mass-marketing science. Hilfiger forged a formula that has since been imitated by Polo, Nautica, Munsingwear (thanks to Puff Daddy’s fondness for the penguin logo) and several other clothing companies looking for a short cut to making it at the suburban mall with inner-city attitude.
Like a depoliticized, hyper-patriotic Benetton, Hilfiger ads are a tangle of Cape Cod multiculturalism: scrubbed black faces lounging with their windswept white brothers and sisters in that great country club in the sky, and always against the backdrop of a billowing American flag. “By respecting one another we can reach all cultures and communities,” the company says. “We promote … the concept of living the American dream.”23 But the hard facts of Tommy’s interracial financial success have less to do with finding common ground between cultures than with the power and mythology embedded in America’s deep racial segregation.
Tommy Hilfiger started off squarely as white-preppy wear in the tradition of Ralph Lauren and Lacoste. But the designer soon realized that his clothes also had a peculiar cachet in the inner cities, where the hip-hop philosophy of “living large” saw poor and working-class kids acquiring status in the ghetto by adopting the gear and accoutrements of prohibitively costly leisure activities, such as skiing, golfing, even boating. Perhaps to better position his brand within this urban fantasy, Hilfiger began to associate his clothes more consciously with these sports, shooting ads at yacht clubs, beaches and other nautical locales. At the same time, the clothes themselves were redesigned to appeal more directly to the hip-hop aesthetic. Cultural theorist Paul Smith describes the shift as “bolder colors, bigger and baggier styles, more hoods and cords, and more prominence for logos and the Hilfiger name.”24 He also plied rap artists like Snoop Dogg with free clothes and, walking the tightrope between the yacht and the ghetto, launched a line of Tommy Hilfiger beepers.
Once Tommy was firmly established as a ghetto thing, the real selling could begin —not just to the comparatively small market of poor inner-city youth but to the much larger market of middle-class white and Asian kids who mimic black style in everything from lingo to sports to music. Company sales reached $847 million in 1998 — up from a paltry $53 million in 1991 when Hilfiger was still, as Smith puts it, “Young Republican clothing.” Like so much of cool hunting, Hilfiger’s marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of America’s race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth.
Indie Inc.
Offering Fortune magazine readers advice on how to market to teenage girls, reporter Nina Munk writes that “you have to pretend that they’re running things…. Pretend you still have to be discovered. Pretend the girls are in charge.”25 Being a huge corporation might sell on Wall Street, but as the brands soon learned on their cool hunt, “indie” was the pitch on Cool Street. Many corporations were unfazed by this shift, coming out with faux indie brands like Politix cigarettes from Moonlight Tobacco (courtesy of Philip Morris), Dave’s Cigarettes from Dave’s Tobacco Company (Philip Morris again), Old Navy’s mock army surplus (the Gap) and OK Cola (Coke).
They sell 501s and they think it’s funny
Turning rebellion into money
—Chumbawamba, “That’s How Grateful We Are”
In an attempt to cash in on the indie marketing craze, even Coke itself, the most recognizable brand name on earth, has tried to go underground. Fearing that it was too establishment for brand-conscious teens, the company launched an ad campaign in Wisconsin that declared Coke the “Unofficial State Drink.” The campaign included radio spots that were allegedly broadcast from a pirate radio station called EKOC: Coke backward. Not to be outdone, Gap-owned Old Navy actually did launch its own pirate radio station to promote its brand —a micro-band transmitter that could only be picked up in the immediate vicinity of one of its Chicago billboards.26 And in 1999, when Levi’s decided it was high time to recoup its lost cool, it also went indie, launching Red Line jeans (no mention of Levi’s anywhere) and K-1 Khakis (no mention of Levi’s or Dockers).
Ironic Consumption: No Deconstruction Required
But Levi’s may have, once again, missed a “paradigm shift.” It hasn’t taken long for these attempts to seriously pitch the most generic of mass-produced products as punk-rock lifestyle choices to elicit sneers from those ever-elusive, trend-setting cool kids, many of whom had already moved beyond indie by the time the brands caught on. Instead, they were now finding ways to express their disdain for mass culture not by opting out of it but by abandoning themselves to it entirely —but with a sly ironic twist. They were watching Melrose Place, eating surf ‘n’ turf in revolving restaurants, singing Frank Sinatra in karaoke bars and sipping girly drinks in tikki bars, acts that were rendered hip and daring because, well, they were the ones doing them. Not only were they making a subversive statement about a culture they could not physically escape, they were rejecting the doctrinaire puritanism of seventies feminism, the earnestness of the sixties quest for authenticity and the “literal” readings of so many cultural critics. Welcome to ironic consumption. The editors of the zine Hermenaut articulated the recipe:
Following the late ethnologist Michel de Certeau, we prefer to concentrate our attention on the independent use of mass culture products, a use which, like the ruses of camouflaged fish and insects, may not “overthrow the system,” but which keeps us intact and autonomous within that system, which may be the best for which we can hope…. Going to Disney World to drop acid and goof on Mickey isn’t revolutionary; going to Disney World in full knowledge of how ridiculous and evil it all is and still having a great innocent time, in some almost unconscious, even psychotic way, is something else altogether. This is what de Certeau describes as “the art of being in-between,” and this is the only path of true freedom in today’s culture. Let us, then, be in-between. Let us revel in Baywatch, Joe Camel, Wired magazine, and even glossy books about the society of spectacle [touché], but let’s never succumb to the glamorous allure of these things.27
In this complicated context, for brands to be truly cool, they need to layer this uncool-equals-cool aesthetic of the ironic viewer onto their pitch: they need to self-mock, talk back to themselves while they are talking, be used and new simultaneously. And after the brands and their cool hunters had tagged all the available fringe culture, it seemed only natural to fill up that narrow little strip of unmarketed brain space occupied by irony with preplanned knowing smirks, someone else’s couch commentary and even a running simulation of the viewer’s thought patterns. “The New Trash brands,” remarks writer Nick Compton of kitsch lifestyle companies like Diesel, “offer inverted commas big enough to live, love and laugh within.”28
Pop Up Videos, the VH1 show that adorns music videos with snarky thought bubbles, may be the endgame of this kind of commercial irony. It grabs the punchline before anyone else can get to it, making social commentary —even idle sneering —if not redundant then barely worth the expense of energy.
Irony’s cozy, protected, self-referential niche is a
much better fit than attempts to earnestly pass off fruit drinks as underground rock bands or sneakers as gangsta rappers. In fact, for brands in search of cool new identities, irony and camp have become so all-purpose that they even work after the fact. It turns out that the so-bad-it’s-good marketing spin can be deployed to resuscitate hopelessly uncool brands and failed cultural products. Six months after the movie Showgirls flopped in the theaters, for instance, MGM got wind that the sexploitation flick was doing okay on video, and not just as a quasi-respectable porno. It seemed that groups of trendy twenty-somethings were throwing Showgirls irony parties, laughing sardonically at the implausibly poor screenplay and shrieking with horror at the aerobic sexual encounters. Not content to pocket the video returns, MGM decided to relaunch the movie in the theaters as the next Rocky Horror Picture Show. This time around, the newspaper ads made no pretense that anyone had seriously admired the film. Instead, they quoted from the abysmal reviews, and declared Showgirls an “instant camp classic” and “a rich sleazy kitsch-fest.” The studio even hired a troupe of drag queens for the New York screenings to holler at the crowd with bullhorns during particularly egregious cinematic moments.
With the tentacles of branding reaching into every crevice of youth culture, leaching brand-image content not only out of street styles like hip-hop but psychological attitudes like ironic detachment, the cool hunt has had to go further afield to find unpilfered space and that left only one frontier: the past.
What is retro, after all, but history re-consumed with a PepsiCo tie-in, and breath-mint and phone-card brand extensions? As the re-release of Lost in Space, the Star Wars trilogy, and the launch of The Phantom Menace made clear, the mantra of retro entertainment seems to be “Once more with synergy!” as Hollywood travels back in time to cash in on merchandising opportunities beyond the imagination of yesterday’s marketers.