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• Wednesday, June 4, 2008 12:42 AM

  My Closing Statement

  ChillyDog: Points for the Tyler Durdan quotes.

  MCM: Jackpot!

  spacekase:

  While I think your deconstruction of the culture of branding (or whatever you choose to call it) is dead-on, your cynicism is breathtaking.

  I can see where it would be.

  I do not believe that it is impossible to resist it, and though it does require some conscious thought and effort to see through the lies and hype of “hypercapitalism” and branding, it’s really no more difficult than not shopping at the mall.

  I'm quite sure many people would agree with you.

  Don’t watch TV. Cast a critical eye whenever they try to market to you. Think for yourself and get your news from a variety of sources, read widely and develop your own opinions.

  How many people do you know who don't watch TV? Should people also avoid reading magazines? Refrain from listening to commercial radio [insert joke here]? Avoid for-profit newspapers?

  The effectiveness of advertising can be mitigated - but not eliminated - by avoidance and awareness.

  Of course, we are all subject to the influence of brand marketing to some degree simply because of its omnipresence in the culture we live in.

  Exactly.

  Even people who never see a particular ad campaign are very often affected by it through vicarious exposure. (And you thought secondhand smoke was a menace.) Humans are social creatures and mass [and even niche] media is the glue preventing American society from total fragmentation. It's truly a pity, but this is where we are - not where I'd like for us to be.

  This does not mean that I have to be a passive vessel for whatever meaningless “lifestyle” brand that some corporate marketing wizard thinks up to make a buck.

  I never asserted otherwise.

  People don't have to be passive vessels for anything.

  And I don't have to be twenty pounds overweight.

  You can go ahead and titter about your industry’s god-like powers to manipulate humanity’s wants and desires, but in reality it’s just another branding scheme that you seem to have bought into yourself (i.e. “ it doesn’t matter if you think that you think for yourself because that’s what “the industry” wants you to think”).

  While I understand the reflexive compulsion to kill the messenger, a re-examination of my posts is unlikely to reveal any genuine tittering, although I did use the term "laugh." It's a bitter titter, at best; one directed toward those who think of themselves as beyond corruption (a dismally common affliction). But, rest assured, I find nothing humorous about the boundless human appetite for material satisfaction and the astoundingly destructive lengths to which people will go to avoid critical self-examination.

  What people fail to understand about marketing is that it works on the collective subconscious level because that is where it originates. Affluent or non-affluent. Educated or uneducated. Young or old. Narcissistic or altruistic. Sensitive or callous. None of these qualities matter to a marketer because *everyone* - even you - has prejudices and insecurities which make them vulnerable to exploitation. Regardless of the veneer we choose to show the world, we are all afraid of something.

  I don't know if Ajax is Stronger Than Dirt, but forty years after being assured by Ajax that it is, only dementia or death can erase it from my memory. The things we are exposed to, intentionally and unintentionally, changes the wiring in our heads in ways we do not yet understand.

  Your use of the term god-like is, if inadvertently, an appropriate adjective. If the ability to influence mass behavior isn't god-like, I don't what is.

  I think you should leave some room for the fact that some of us never bought into it in the first place. Maybe I'm just hopelessly deluded, a testament to your industry's omnipotent will, but I don't think so.

  I wouldn't say hopelessly deluded. Hope springs eternal.

  As for marketers imposing our will, it would be easy to take a conspiratorial "big picture" view of the marketing profession, but doing so gives them/us too much credit, if only because it is in no way separate from the society in which it operates. Marketers even market goods and services to each other, and few give it a thought. Consumerism is a basically a mass hallucination. Like a dream in which one can be awaken within the dreamscape one moment, only to confuse it with waking reality the next. Those fleeting moments of lucidity - to the extent they occur at all - are virtually impossible to maintain in our media-saturated society.

  I agree with you that too many people already have bought into it, though. Anyone who would tattoo a corporate logo on their body deserves no respect and cannot be taken seriously.

  I can certainly attest to the fact that changing others' points of view on this subject is an exceptionally difficult task, but I try very hard to resist writing people off. Occasionally - very occasionally - one of 'em gets it.

  —Arvin Hill Read Arvin Hill's other letters
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