by Naomi Klein
It seemed as if the vanguard feminist-socialist child-rearing experiment was doomed to failure. Not only was I crazy for Shell signs, but by the age of six, my older brother had developed an uncanny knack for remembering the jingles from television commercials and would tear around the house in his Incredible Hulk T-shirt declaring himself “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.” At the time, I couldn’t understand why my parents were so upset about these stupid rhymes, but now I’ve come to feel their pain: despite their very best efforts, they had somehow given birth to an advertisement for General Mills —in other words, to regular kids.
Cartoons and fast-food franchises speak to children in a voice too seductive for mere mortal parents to compete with. Every kid wants to hold a piece of the cartoon world between his or her fingers — that’s why the licensing of television and movie characters for toys, cereals and lunchboxes has spawned a $16.1 billion annual industry.2 It is also why so-called family entertainment companies have been going to greater and greater lengths to extend their television and movie fantasies into real-world experiential extravaganzas: branded museum exhibits, high-tech superstores, and, the old standard, theme parks. Back in the 1930s, Walt Disney, the grandfather of modern synergy, understood the desire to crawl inside the screen when he fantasized about building a self-enclosed Disney city and remarked that every Mickey Mouse product or toy doubled as an advertisement for his cartoons. Mattel has long grasped this as well, but if Disney’s project has been extending the fantasy of its films into toys, then Mattel’s was extending its toys into ever more elaborate fantasy worlds. This vision is perhaps best understood as the “Zen of Barbie”: Barbie is One. Barbie is all things.
Which is to say that the corporate synergy mania consuming so much of pop culture today is not all new. Barbie and Mickey Mouse are miniature branding trailblazers — those two have always wanted more extensions for their brands, more lateral monopolies to control. What has changed in the past decade is that almost everyone in the corporate world now recognizes that the urge to disappear into the cross-promotional tie-ins of cherished consumer products (be they toys, TV shows or sneakers) does not magically disappear when children outgrow sugar cereal. Plenty of Saturday-morning-cartoon kids have grown up into Saturday-night-club kids, fulfilling their longing for plastic fantasy with earnestly ironic Hello Kitty backpacks and Japanimation-inspired helmets of blue hair. You can see some of them at the Sega Playdiums, which are filled with grown-up gamers on weekend nights —no one under eighteen is even allowed to enter these roaring carnivals of virtual reality, especially on South Park theme nights.
It is this insistent desire to become one with your favorite pop-culture products that every one of the superbrands —from Nike to Viacom to the Gap to Martha Stewart —is trying to harness and expand upon, exporting Walt Disney’s synergy principles from kid culture and transplanting them into every aspect of both teen and adult mass culture. Michael J. Wolf, a management consultant to such major players as Viacom, Time Warner, MTV and Citigroup, can attest to that fact. “I can’t begin to count the number of times that people who run consumer businesses have confided to me that their goal is to create the broad-based success that Disney seems to bring to every project and every business it touches,” he writes.3
This goal didn’t materialize out of thin air. Rather, it can be traced back once again to the corporate “brands, not products” epiphany sparked by Marl boro Friday: if brands are about “meaning,” not product attributes, then the highest feat of branding comes when companies provide their consumers with opportunities not merely to shop but to fully experience the meaning of their brand. Sponsorship, as seen in Chapter 2, is a good start, but synergy and lifestyle branding are the logical conclusion. Just as companies like Molson and Nike have sought to build celebrity brands by upstaging the concerts and sports matches they sponsored, so are many of these same companies also attempting to overthrow local retailers by creating branded superstores, then, further down the road, branded hotels and miniature villages. As two sides of the same project, synergy and branding are both about creating cross-promotional brand-based experiences that combine buying with elements of media, entertainment and professional sports to create an integrated branded loop. Disney and Mattel have always known this —now everyone else is learning it too.
A true branded loop cannot be created overnight, which is why the process usually begins with the simplest form of brand extension, a giant merger: Bell Atlantic and Nynex; Digital Equipment and Compaq; WordCom Inc. and MCI; Time Warner and Turner; Disney and ABC; Cineplex and Loews; Citicorp and Travelers; Bertelsmann and Random House; Seagram and PolyGram; America Online and Netscape; Viacom and CBS … the list grows each day. Usually, the companies cite the Wal-Mart principle: everyone else in the industry is merging and only the biggest and strongest will survive. But size for its own sake is only the beginning of the story. Once the perimeter of the brand has expanded, corporate attention inevitably shifts to ways of making it more self-sufficient, through various internally coordinated cross-promotions. In a word, through synergy.
Sometime in the early nineties, writes Michael J. Wolf, the attitude of his media industry clients underwent a philosophical change. “Companies were no longer interested in merely being the biggest studio or the most successful TV network. They had to be more. Theme parks, cable networks, radio, consumer products, books, and music all became prospects for their potential empires. Media land was gripped by merger mania. If you weren’t everywhere … you were nowhere.”4
This sort of reasoning lies behind virtually all the major mergers of the mid-to late nineties. Disney buys ABC, which then broadcasts its movies and cartoons. Time Warner purchases Turner Broadcasting, which then cross-promotes its magazines and films on CNN. George Lucas buys block stocks in Hasbro and Galoob before he sells the toy companies the licensing rights for the new Star Wars films, at which point Hasbro promptly buys Galoob to consolidate its hold on the toy market. Time Warner opens a division devoted to turning its films and cartoons into Broadway musicals. Nelvana, a Canadian-based producer of kids’ cartoons, purchases Kids Can Press, a publisher of children’s books upon which such lucrative Nelvana cartoons as Franklin the Turtle are based. The merger transforms Nelvana into an “integrated company,” in which future books can get their genesis in the company’s marketable TV cartoons and lucrative lines of toys.5
In the broader book world, after purchasing Random House (this book’s primary publisher), Bertelsmann AG buys 50 percent of Barnesandnoble.com, giving the largest English-language publishing company in the world a significant stake in the exploding on-line book retail market. Barnes & Noble, meanwhile, bids to buy Ingram, a major American book distributor, which also services the chain’s competitors. If the Ingram deal had gone through (it was abandoned amid public outcry), the potential synergies among these three companies would have stretched to include the entire book publishing process, from contracting and editing to distributing, publicizing and, finally, retailing.
Perhaps the purest expression of synergy’s market goals was Viacom’s 1994 purchase of Blockbuster Video and Paramount Pictures. The deal gave Viacom the opportunity not only to profit from Paramount films when they played in its Paramount theaters but when they came out on video as well. “The combination of Viacom and Paramount, in my view, is the whole essence of the multimedia revolution,” says Sumner Redstone, the billionaire mogul behind Viacom.6 And this ability to keep cash flows inside a corporate family carries for these moguls its own kind of reward. Virgin’s Richard Branson, for instance, laughs in the face of the accusation that his far-flung branding forays are stretching the Virgin name in too many directions. “It may be right that Mars sticks to the chocolate bar and Nike keeps its feet on the ground. But if their executives cross the Atlantic on a Virgin plane, listen to Virgin records and keep their money with a Virgin bank, then at least Britain will have one new global brand for the next century.”
What the Virgin case clearly sh
ows is that in the aftermath of the synergy revolution, brand extensions are no longer adjuncts to the core product or main attraction; rather, these extensions form the foundation upon which entire corporate structures are being built. Synergy, as Branson suggests, is about much more than old-style cross-promotion; it is about using ever-expanding networks of brand extensions to spin a self-sustaining lifestyle web. Branson and others are stretching the fabric of their brands in so many directions that they are transformed into tent-like enclosures large enough to house any number of core activities, from shopping to entertainment to holidays. Starbucks, upon announcing that it would begin selling furniture over the Internet, calls this a “brand canopy.” This is the true meaning of a lifestyle brand: you can live your whole life inside it.
The concept is key to understanding not only synergy but also the related blurring of boundaries between sectors and industries. Retail is blurring with entertainment, entertainment with retail. Content companies (like film studios and book publishers) are leaping into distribution; distribution networks (like phone and Internet companies) are leaping into content production. And all the while, the people previously pigeonholed as pure content —the stars themselves —are charging into production, distribution and, of course, retail. So the “if you aren’t everywhere, you’re nowhere” sentiment described by Wolf reaches well beyond the media conglomerates. Everyone, it seems, wants to be everywhere —whether they started as home decorators, sneaker manufacturers, record companies or basketball stars, they are all ending up, as Shaquille O’Neal and his people so aptly put it, “like Mickey Mouse.”
In this fluid context, the branded tent of tents might be Disney or Viacom, but it could just as easily be Tommy Hilfiger, America Online, Martha Stewart or Microsoft. Quite simply, every company with a powerful brand is attempting to develop a relationship with consumers that resonates so completely with their sense of self that they will aspire, or at least consent, to be serfs under these feudal brandlords. This explains why marketing talk of pitch and product has been usurped so completely by the more intimate discourse of “meaning” and “relationship building” —brand-based companies are no longer interested in a consumer fling. They want to move in together.
And so the fiercest marketplace battles are taking place not between warring products but between warring branded camps that are constantly redrawing the borders around their enclaves, pushing the boundaries to include ever more complete lifestyle packages: if music, why not food, asks Puff Daddy. If clothes, why not retail, asks Tommy Hilfiger. If retail, why not music, asks the Gap. If coffee houses, why not publishing, asks Starbucks. If theme parks, why not towns, asks Disney.
Superstores: Stepping Inside the Brand
Not surprisingly, it was the Walt Disney Company, the inventor of modern branding, that created the model for the branded superstore, opening the first Disney Store in 1984. There are now close to 730 outlets worldwide. Coke followed shortly after with a store sporting all manner of branded paraphernalia, from key chains to cutting boards. But if Disney and Coke paved the way, it was Barnes & Noble that created the model that would forever change the face of retailing, introducing the first superstore to its chain of bookstores in 1990. The prototype for the new construct, according to company documents, was “old-world library ambiance and a wood and green palette” complemented by “comfortable seating, restrooms and extended hours” — and, of course, by a little co-branding in the form of in-store Starbucks coffee shops. The formula affected not only the chain’s ability to sell books but also the role it occupied in pop culture; it became a celebrity, a source of endless media controversy, and eventually the thinly veiled inspiration for a Hollywood movie, You’ve Got Mail. In less than a decade, Barnes & Noble became the first bookstore that was also a superbrand in its own right.
Little wonder, then, that virtually all the consumer and entertainment companies that have been building up their brand images through marketing, synergy and sponsorship are now intent on having their own retail temples. Nike, Diesel, Warner Brothers, Tommy Hilfiger, Sony, Virgin, Microsoft, Hustler and the Discovery Channel have all leaped into branded retail. For these companies, stores that sell multiple brands have become antithetical to the very principles of sound brand management. They want nothing to do with venues in which their products are sold side by side with their competitors’. “The multi-brand store is disappearing, and companies like us need stores that reflect our personality,” explains Maurizio Marchiori, advertising director at Diesel, which has opened twenty branded stores since 1996.7
I’m really very, very disappointed that I didn’t move into the retail business years ago, because I never realized the marketing power of the Hustler name and logo.
—Hustler owner Larry Flynt, The New York Times, March 21, 1999
The superstores constructed to reflect these corporate personalities are exploring the boundaries of what Nike refers to as “inspirational retail.” As Nike president Thomas Clarke explains, large-scale “event” outlets “give retailers the opportunity to romance products better.”8 How this seduction takes place varies from brand to brand, but the general idea is to create a venue that is part shopping center, part amusement park, part multimedia extravaganza — an advertisement more potent and evocative than a hundred billboards. Popular superstore attractions include deejays spinning live from their own in-house broadcast booths, giant screens and star-studded launch parties. A cut above are the listening booths at the Virgin Megastores, the indoor waterfalls and rock-climbing walls at Seattle’s Recreational Equipment, Inc., the interactive digital foot-measuring stations at Nike Town, the complimentary foot massages and reflexology at Rockport stores and the arcade-style computer games at the San Francisco Microsoft Store. And then, of course, there is that fixture of branded retail: the in-store coffee bar —even the Hustler superstore has one of those. Describing his vision for the 9,000-square-foot branded sex emporium in West Hollywood, Hustler owner Larry Flynt explained that he wanted to create a retail space “more comfortable for women, more like Barnes & Noble.”9
“Creating a destination” is the key buzz-phrase for the superstore builder: these are places not only to shop but also visit, places to which tourists make ritualistic pilgrimages. For this reason, the locations chosen for the stores are far more upmarket than those to which the hawkers of Disney key chains, Nike sneakers and Tommy jeans are accustomed. In fact, so many mass-market brand meccas have made their home on New York’s Fifth Avenue and L.A.’s Rodeo Drive that the neighbors —the exclusive Gucci, Cartier and Armani brands —have begun to complain about the popularizing presence of Daffy Duck and Air Jordan.
Selling mass-market consumer goods and doodads on the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world, in the most costly, high-tech, art-directed retail environments ever imagined, doesn’t always add up on paper. But to look at the superstore as a break-even business enterprise is to miss the point entirely. No expense is spared in the building of the stores because, while the Time Square Disney Store or the Fifth Avenue Warner Brothers outlet may be money losers in and of themselves, they serve a much higher purpose in the overall branding picture. As Dan Romanelli, president of Warner Brothers consumer products division, says of the company’s flagship, “Fifth and 57th is probably the best retail location in the world. It has helped immensely in building our international business and in making a statement about our brand.”10 Discovery Communication takes a similar attitude. Spinning off from its four television channels, the media company has launched thirty-five Discovery shops since 1996, hybrids of department stores, amusement parks and museums. The jewel in the crown is a $20 million flagship store in Washington, D.C., that features a full-scale model of a T. rex dinosaur skeleton and a World War II fighter plane. According to Michela English, president of Discovery Enterprises Worldwide, these outlets are not expected to make money until at least 2001. That, however, isn’t stopping the company from adding dozens more stores. “There is a bi
llboard impact to having the Discovery name on stores,” she explains.11
Generally, this “billboard impact” is favored by companies whose primary source of sales is still multibrand venues: department stores, Cineplex Theaters, HMV record stores, Foot Locker and so on. Even without being able to control their entire distribution networks, branded superstores provide these companies with a kind of spiritual homeland for their brands, one so recognizable and grand that no matter where the individual products roam they will carry that grandness with them like a halo. It is as if a homing device had been implanted in the brand, so that, for instance, stalls selling Virgin merchandise at Virgin movie theaters aren’t stalls selling merchandise at movie theaters —they are “Virgin mini-megastores,” a satellite of something much deeper and more important than what meets the eye. And when consumers go to the local Foot Locker and are confronted with pairs of Nikes unceremoniously lined up next to the Reeboks, Filas and Adidas, they will, with any luck, remember the sensory overload they experienced on their pilgrimage to Nike Town. As Michael Wolf writes, branded retail is about “imprinting an experience on you as surely as the farmer’s wife imprints good feelings in a clutch of baby geese when she feeds them a handful of grain every day.”12
Branded Villages: Moving into the Brand
The stores are only the beginning —the first phase in an evolution from experiential shopping to living the fully branded experience. In a superstore, writes Wolf, “the lights, the music, the furniture, the cast of clerks create a feeling not unlike a play in which you, the shopper, are given a leading role.”13 But in the scheme of things that play is rather short: an hour or two at the most. Which is why the next phase after retail-as-tourist-destination has been the creation of branded holidays: never mind Disney World, Disney has launched the Disney Magic cruise ship and among its destinations is Disney’s privately owned island in the Bahamas, Castaway Cay. Nike has its own sports-themed cruise ship in the works and Roots Canada, shortly after introducing a homewear line and opening a flagship store in Manhattan, launched the Roots Lodge, a branded hotel in British Columbia.