Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  For America’s largest brand-name consumer goods corporations like Coca-Cola, Marlboro, KFC, Nike, Hershey, Levi’s, Pepsi, Wrigley, or McDonald’s, selling American products means selling America: its popular culture, its putative prosperity, its ubiquitous imagery and software, and thus its very soul. Merchandising is as much about symbols as about goods and sells not life’s necessities but life’s styles—which is the modern pathway that takes us from the body to the soul. AMERICAN CULTURE (AND GOODS) THRIVE IN SOUTH AFRICA, reads the New York Times headline about new investment possibilities in a nation where, as it prepared for its first interracial free elections, black South Africans were sitting around in “a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, sipping Coca-Cola and listening to a Whitney Houston tape” and where seven of the top ten television programs were American.1 Meanwhile, Marlboro announces Marlboro Gear, merchandising the style it has invented (“Marlboro Country”) to sustain tobacco sales in an anti-smoking era.

  The style marketed is uniquely American yet potentially global since, for the corporations in a quite literal sense, we are the world. To the world, America offers an incoherent and contradictory but seductive style that is less “democratic” than physical culture: youthful, rich urban, austere cowboy, Hollywood glamorous, Garden of Eden unbounded, goodwilled to a fault, socially aware, politically correct, mall pervaded, and, ironically, often dominated by images of black ghetto life—black, however, as in hip and cool rather than in crime-ridden and squalid, “baaaad” but not bad. PepsiCo’s 1992 Annual Report features mostly black dancers from the Martha Graham Company and the School of American Ballet on its front and back covers, and the Pepsi Generation, multicolored and multicultured, is nothing if not American. The Michaels (Jordan and Jackson), the Jacksons (Michael, La Toya, and Jesse), the King (Martin Luther) and Prince too; and the Simpson (not the Simpsons): thus does white America use an indiscriminate selection of heroes from black America to capture heroically conceived global markets. Heroes fall—Michael Jackson and O. J. Simpson have tumbled—but living on the edge is part of what makes American ghetto culture thrilling to outside observers.

  In the selling of America as a means to selling American goods, advertising has itself become big business on a global scale. Of the twenty-five largest advertising companies, fifteen are American. Total world advertising revenues are estimated to be anywhere from $150 billion to $250, nearly one half of which are American.2 The largest firm, Britain’s Saatchi & Saatchi, operates in over eighty countries and, according to media expert Ben Bagdikian, buys 20 percent of all commercial time in world television; its Pepsi-Cola account developed an advertisement to be placed in forty different national markets that could be seen by one-fifth of the human race.3 Coca-Cola’s new subsidiaries include China and, in a manner of speaking, Rutgers University. In China it must share its market with PepsiCo and other companies but at Rutgers University it has outbid the competition and, for $10 million, has secured a market monopoly for its products along with the right to advertise its association with the school. Late capitalism is no longer about either products or competition. Image is everything and the “it” that Coke is, is now education—as image rather than substance. Such recent victories, including its sponsorship of recent Olympic games, are perhaps fruits of the link Coke forged a few years earlier with Creative Artists Agency, the powerful talent agency and image spinner run by Michael Ovitz, to “help mold its marketing and media strategies around the world.” Coke understands the link between its drink and American culture: according to an executive, “American culture broadly defined—music, film, fashion, and food—has become the culture worldwide.”4 The Coca-Cola company has discovered McWorld—which, without knowing it, it had actually helped invent over the previous half century.

  Meanwhile, Creative Artists has figured out that if it wants to spin McWorld for the likes of Coke it needs to increase its synergy with the information and communications sector. In the summer of 1994 Ovitz brought aboard at C.A.A. the former chief financial officer of AT&T, Robert Kavner. His job was to “seek opportunities for directors, writers and performers in the rapidly expanding arena linking personal computers to on-line services involving, at the outset, education, shopping, films and video games;” Mr. Kavner allowed as to how “we’re in the equivalent of the industrial revolution.”5

  The story of McWorld’s rise is the story of the advertising industry’s explosive growth in the same period. Global advertising expenditures have climbed a third faster than the world economy and three times faster than world population, rising sevenfold from 1950 to 1990 from a modest $39 billion to $256 billion.6 Per capita global spending has gone from $15 per person in 1950 to nearly $50 per person today. While the United States leads the pack at nearly $500 per person, countries like South Korea (whose advertising industry had an annual rate of growth of 35 to 40 percent in the late eighties) and India (where billings increased fivefold during the eighties) are racing to catch up.7 Advertising both reflects and reinforces the importance of brand over product in the global market. Brand names like Marlboro, Bud beer, Barbie doll, and Nescafé often carry their parent companies (Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, Mattel, and Nestlé), and both corporate names and product lines have brand values worth billions of dollars.8

  Brand names are ciphers for associations and images carefully cultivated by advertising and marketing because they are what generate market demand. In defending his striking and deeply nihilistic Benetton campaign that displays AIDS victims and crime scenes rather than sexy models and pastel sweaters, Luciano Benetton insists “we are forging a new art of communication … we spread no lies. We say, in this world there is sickness, war and death.”9 What exactly is a picture of a naked male torso sporting a tattoo that reads HIV POSITIVE meant to communicate to potential apparel purchasers? Social commitment? A subtle warning against stereotyping or an unsubtle example of it? A political provocation? Or just some creative director’s notion of a subliminally hot hip-hop amalgam of flesh, disease, and gay politics that makes green the dominant hue in the Colors of Benetton and turns death into one more attractive lifestyle?10

  American Express has also been running an ad campaign with selected retailers that tries to make shopping socially responsible but actually subordinates social responsibility to shopping. One ad in the series enthuses, “customers come into The Body Shop to buy a hair conditioner and find a story about the Xingu Reserve and the Kayapo Indians who collect Brazil nuts for us.” It turns out that The Body Shop is less interested in “selling soap” than in saving the rain forest. How? By paying Kayapo Indians to extract nut oil and get them out of logging so they will leave the tropical rain forest alone! Body Shop founder Anita Roddick repays American Express for the alchemy by which they turn a soap seller into a conservation society by mentioning at the end of the ad that “the travel I do is often dangerous. I am in bizarre places, remote places. What I use for that is the American Express Card.” The Xingu Reserve—certainly remote, also bizarre?—apparently takes the American Express Card.11

  In 1995, following its “triumph” over communism, few would want to risk saying that capitalism is imperialist; but markets must grow and advertising has a natural tendency to seep like rising groundwater into every cellar of a commercial culture’s multiple dwellings. Advertisers talk about the need to fill empty or “dead” space wherever they find it, by which they mean space not yet put to commercial use. Schoolrooms are now being used as video billboards by Channel One (sold by Chris Whittle to K-III in 1994). And the technology is in place to send audio ads your way while you wait for the telephone call you have dialed to go through,12 and to put electronic billboards in space that would blot out the stars with earthly logos and put an end once and for all to the epiphanal dead space of the night.13 The CEO of the company prepared to orbit ads enthused about the “tremendous opportunity for a global-oriented company to have its logo and message seen by billions of people on a history-making high-profile advertising vehicle.�
�14 “Living Without Boundaries,” which is how Ralph Lauren sells his Safari perfume for men, is also how advertising colonizes empty space—space, that is to say, empty of advertising.

  Helped along by the Reagan administration’s 1984 decision to lift limits on television advertising time, advertising bleeds across various entertainment and information formats, blurring boundaries. Advertisements simulate independent editorial judgments and become advertorials; they infest news programming and turn into infomercials where the public cannot be quite sure whether they are watching a television magazine show about a product or a soft sell for the product. They move into storytelling so that ads look more and more like soap operas, with characters and plots that carry over from one ad to the next as in MCI’s “Gramercy Press” series or the Taster’s Choice love story that follows an affair to (where else?) Paris. But then the “soaps” were always about selling soap by telling stories just as the entire MTV network, the ads quite aside, is one interminable commercial for the music industry and its products—as well as for commercial culture in general.15

  Today’s corporate synergy does not permit storytelling to stand alone. Nike offers readers of an advertisement as passion play a phone number where they can order Nike’s “Women’s Source Book,” printed on recyclable paper.16 MCI is discussing a book sale of the silly “Gramercy Press” melodrama cited above about a publishing house being hardwired for the new age; it has also made “Gramercy Press” characters accessible to fans via the Internet—as the ad agency handling the MCI account says, “anything is possible in cyberspace.”17

  Infomercials merchandise even more subtly. The National Association of Broadcasters actually told the F.C.C. that these half-hour slow-mo ads “advanced the public interest by providing consumers with more information about product choices than other types of advertising.” Stuart Elliot, who covers advertising for The New York Times and has presumably heard just about everything, was nonetheless astonished: “Who could have imagined that the motley crew of shills, hucksters and impersonators peddling spray-on hair, plastic exercise equipment and overpriced cosmetics were advancing the public interest? Not even one of Dionne Warwick’s ‘psychic friends’ could have predicted that.”18 Time magazine, no stranger to hucksterism, acknowledges frankly that what infomercials actually do is to get “messages across to audiences that don’t fully realize they are receiving them.”19

  Licensing offers advertisers another kind of colonization. Names carefully cultivated in a narrow business like high fashion can become global marketing devices when licensed for use on products that bear no relationship to the original designer and that the designer may have never even seen. Pierre Cardin pioneered the low-end licensing of a high-end fashion name when in the 1960s he licensed over eight hundred products from colognes to sunglasses.20 Perfumes are sold almost entirely via designer labels. Calvin Klein nearly went bust selling fashion apparel, but his three consecutive lines of perfume—each reflecting its time—were commercial triumphs. Obsession, mirroring the hedonistic eighties; Eternity, following the new family values; and most recently, Escape, echoing tired yuppies in search of a way out, all earned major success in a market crowded with newcomers (over 120 new perfumes each year). Here is the case where a rose is not as sweet by any other name, where it is the brand and not the scent that brings in the profits.

  Tie-ins and the licensing of spin-off merchandise from blockbuster films like Jurassic Park and The Lion King (as well as Oscar winners like Forrest Gump) not only make fortunes for the companies that own them (Disney expects a billion dollars from Lion King licensing) but blur the lines between domains once thought to be distinct. The Disney marketing program “connects its book, movie, recording and theme park units” with a synergy no other company can rival.21

  Disney is the obvious champion of synergy, but the footwear business also offers an altogether apt, if rather less explicit, example of the power of name and trademark over product and of the associational psychology that attaches the chic glamor of the woman’s movement and youth volunteerism to for-profit merchandising. Sneakers are apparel items and Nike is a novice in the shoe business (here only since 1972), so it has had to capture its $4 billion share of the market not by selling shoes but by cultivating trademark and brand loyalty that depends on lifestyle choices and the images associated with them. In search of effective wholistic marketing strategies, Nike has consulted Ovitz’s Creative Artists Agency dream factory. Ovitz told Nike CEO Phil Knight something Knight presumably already knew: that “sports is bigger than entertainment now.”22 Humankind walked the globe for millennia without the specialty items developed in the last few decades for professional athletes. Today when 40 percent of all shoes sold are already athletic shoes, if Nike, Adidas, and Reebok have their way, no one will walk at all without their products; and this will be a consequence of a lifestyle choice arising out of the manipulation of emotions linked to sports and winning rather than to the satisfaction of needs linked to walking and shoes.

  Nike started up just over twenty years ago and sold a little over $3 million in sneakers to Oregon consumers, many of whom (Nike now gleefully reports) thought the logo said “Mike.” Today the company does better than $3.5 billion in sales worldwide. “We are not a shoe company,” explains Liz Dolan, Nike’s corporate communications vice president, “we are a sports company.”23 Nike CEO Phillip H. Knight is even more forthright: “How do we expect to conquer foreign lands?” he asks in the 1992 Annual Report. “The same way we did here. We will simply export sports, the world’s best economy.”24 Well, not exactly sports and not just sports, but the image and ideology of sports: health, victory, wealth, sex, money, energy—don’t name it, “just do it.”

  If actual athletes were the only consumers of athletic shoes, there would be far too few of them to keep sales perking in the billions round the world, so the object becomes to make those who watch athletics believe that in wearing Nikes they too are athletes, even if they never get up out of the armchairs from which they watch the world’s most famous Michael sail across the heavens in his Air Jordans. Mr. Knight is pretty blunt about it: “Our target consumers have been watching John McEnroe and Charles Barkley for years. The emotional ties are in place.” Watching, not doing. Emotional ties, not real needs. Nike is not trying to export sneakers (a limited market, the corporation acknowledges), it is trying to export Michael Jordan who, Chairman Knight assures us, is tied for first place in China as the world’s greatest man with Chou En-lai (an astonishing comparison that, from the viewpoint of sales, is apparently nonetheless worth flaunting!).

  In the new McWorld of global sales, the trademark has surpassed the sales item and the image has overtaken the product as the key to earned income. Michael Jordan himself, until his temporary retirement into a mediocre minor league baseball career, earned $3 million a year for playing basketball and $36 million a year selling his name.25 In a section titled simply “The Nike Image,” Nike’s corporate report notes that while “early advertising and promotional efforts focused on the shoe, its features and benefits … in the years since, corporate communication has broadened to make Nike one of the few global leaders with an actual personality.” The new virtual reality corporation, even as it sheds its traditional character as a concrete corporate person, acquires an “actual” personality.26 Nike wants customers not simply to buy its goods but to believe in Nike; not only to assess the quality of the products but to believe in the “motivations” of the producers. This rhetoric suggests the corporation is acting more like a civil state or a state religion than like a shoe company. It aspires to “the development of strong Pan-European, Asian and Latin American media channels” that will “allow Nike to communicate its message and personality to consumers in every corner of the world—an integral part of ensuring a consistent global brand image.”

  In communicating messages and conveying a personality, Nike is shaping the affective and behavioral contours of McWorld. Attesting to the sincerity of its
globalism, the Nike chairman’s letter in the Annual Report in which these excerpts are found is presented in Japanese, French, German, and Spanish where those prized “emotional ties already in place” appear multilingually as “les liens émotionnels … déjà en-place” and “die gefühlsmässige Bindung … bereits vorhanden” and “los lazos sentimentales … en el lugar apropiado.” The Japanese version I will leave to the reader’s imagination. Nike’s new virtual reality defined by information and communication cyberspace, a full remove from any reality you and I know, is reified and brought back to earth in new stores like its multiplying “Nike Towns,” the template for which in suburban Beaver-ton (Portland), Oregon, has been described as “part Disneyland, part MTV,” outfitted with video screens, exotic fish, flute choruses, and the dum-dum-dum sounds of an epiphanal dribbling basketball. The Nike Towns have become tourist attractions that draw overflow crowds looking not for shoes but for “fun.”27 These stores stand to traditional stores as the new marketing of images stands to the traditional selling of products. They are sneaker theme parks in which sports (winning? exercising? just doing it?) suffuse reality. That reality, corporate public affairs officials being quick studies, is as well attuned to fashionable political attitudes as to fashionable footwear. Nike has thus acquired a conscience. Having marketed shoes to inner city kids whose tough urban image is crucial to international sales but who are themselves unlikely to be able to buy the shoes, Nike is pushing a volunteer program called P.L.A.Y. (Participation in the Lives of American Youth). It hopes a little of its own money will leverage a lot of customer effort on behalf of urban kids, some of whom are robbing and killing one another to secure a pair of Nike’s pricey high-tops.28