Patagonia, brought to you by Patagonia

I was waiting for a package in Paresky the other day and, perusing the catalog table, picked up the latest from Patagonia, an outdoor clothing store.  Taking it back home, I flipped through it, loving the great photography and informative, eco-friendly “mini-articles” that are interspersed with the product descriptions.  The features in this particular issue dealt with conservation issues in northern Patagonia, with artfully-written diatribes against hydro-electric projects initiated the Chilean government that would ruin the stark, beautiful landscape.  Their answer?  Wealthy North Americans—some of the creators of Patagonia and The North Face—have bought up vast swaths of land in this remote region and have created a private park, called Parque Pumalín (http://www.parquepumalin.cl/content/index.htm).

            I had heard of this interesting approach to conservation before, but after reading Papson’s “Green Marketing and the Commodity Self” I was prompted to adopt a more critical attitude toward the park and the Patagonia magalog as well.  The point that resonated with me the most in the article was the companies’ questionable dedication to an eco-friendly lifestyle.  Papson argues that if the people at a company like Patagonia were really friendly to the environment, they wouldn’t manufacture consumer goods in the first place.  Patagonia as a brand and as a company is about as “eco-friendly” as you can get—they advertise their manufacturing practices and charity donations almost as much as their products. The catalog adopts an almost conciliatory tone towards the consumer, saying, “we know that this sort of thing is crass, and you’d rather just be outdoors and away from all of this, but we’re the best of all the consumer evils that you have to deal with.”  In a sense, the catalog practices a form of self-hatred—it doesn’t want to be a gross, common catalog, so it inserts “articles.”  It doesn’t want to peddle environment-destroying, consumer-society-based products, so it highlights its photographs of sweeping, exotic mountain ranges and active people over the actual things that it’s selling. 

            Like Papson says, what the catalog is really selling is Nature, or a road to Nature.  The Patagonia Person is one that is spiritually at peace, going “outside” as much as possible, is ecologically conscious and down-to-earth.  In practice, however, many times a different sort of person emerges.  Back home, I was one of a group of people who might spend almost as much time in an REI store as actually outside doing things (EMS to you east-coasters). We referred to ourselves facetiously as “gear-whores,” as we would walk into the shop with usually no real objective in our mind as to what to purchase.  Often we would not buy anything, just hang around and intake the brand-created atmosphere of the climber-biker-hiker-camper jet set.  Looking back on this now brings to mind DeBord’s society of the spectacle—we were always prepared to do whatever adventurous things we wanted to with all of our fancy gear, but actually doing stuff outside tended to be wet, dirty and often miserable.  The actual escapades were good stories to tell our friends while sipping coffee in REI and buying a new sleeping bag.

            Why the aforementioned Parque Pumalín interest me, though, is because, from what I’ve heard of it, it resembles the Patagonia-brand “ideal” transplanted on earth.  The park has a corporate-funded infrastructure, complete with rest houses, trails, cool-and-groovy organic farming projects and ecological-stability programs—all on private land. While this is all very cool, what’s next? Zimbabwe brought to you by Nike? The idea that a company can give us branded nature, to me, is repulsive, no matter how “ecologically-friendly” the company is.

Foisted Consumerism

     I was doing some research for my term paper this weekend, and just had a conversation with a friend of mine about globalization and the impact of Western brands on developing nations, so I think I might end out this first half of my blog soliloquizing a bit on the nature of foisted consumerism.  This will be somewhat of a preview for my paper, as I plan on doing it on the social aspects of consumerism in modern Chile, with a focus on how the 1973 military coup affected them. 

            In most nations on this earth, the adoption of the capitalism/consumerism duality has not been “natural,” if that word can be applied to something like this at all.  The world market as we know it today has definite origins in the development of capitalism in Western Europe (especially Britain and France) and the US.  There was no global corporatization at any one time; those original corporations simply spread out and bought up holdings in other countries, inflicting their business practices on workers and shoving new needs down consumers’ throats.  Some nations, like China and India, are just now starting to initiate their own capitalist revolution, starting home-grown corporations. They are all modeled on the Western business model, however, and most are in direct business and service to the West.

            This sort of consumer culture infliction upon one country by another can be related easily to the military colonialism of other peoples in the past.  I was especially made aware of this when we were reading the article dealing with consumerism in South Africa, and the troubles about marketing to the black population.  The culture attempting the insurrection is sure about their motives, giving light to the barbarian in the form of soap and deodorant. This patronizing attitude reinforces class structure in that it relegates physical symbols of a person’s place in society.  When this system is placed upon a society not used to such a delineation of a person’s worth, the effects are even more devastating.  We saw how in Africa, the capitalist market of consumers held an archaic apartheid government in place; this does not sound like progress to me.

            In Chile, especially, we can see explicitly the effects of a forced consumer society.  Politically, it came with the US-backed military coup in 1973, replacing democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende with a dictator, General Augosto Pinochet.  In a social sense, the population of Chile was suddenly inundated with the product- and class-based capitalist system brought in from the West and by the social elite.  What had been the beginnings of a more original culture and economic system was effectively shut down.  Homogenization of a distinct culture ensued, and Santiago de Chile today is more reminiscent of Buffalo, New York than a South American culture hub.  In my paper, I’ll show that the rather insidious insurrection of the Chilean population in a weak point in their history is directly linked to consumer ideas and prejudices in Chile today as well as a far-reaching passivity in terms of politics and social issues.

Self-Branding in College Admissions

 Talking to my 17-year-old brother on the phone the other day, the call was all about one thing: college admissions.  He had just gotten back from a research trip/apprenticeship in Churchill, Canada, where he was studying the effects of climate change on polar bears, and was wondering how to incorporate it into his essay on the application. He’s a cross-country skier, primarily, but didn’t want to write his essay about skiing because he didn’t think it was distinctive, didn’t think it would separate him from his peers in the eyes of the all-seeing admissions officer.  I’m not inferring that my brother is insincere about where he spends his time and what he does; he came back from Canada inspired, as far as I could tell.  It is more the feeling of the whole ordeal—the idea that, to get in to a school, the candidate must portray a brand of themselves, trying for a sense of cohesiveness and “spice” in who they are and how that is shown on the six pages of a college application.

            This branding of self through admissions came to me while I was reading Joseph E. Davis’ The Commodification of Self and he was commenting on the “self-brand in order to stand out from the competition.” (pg 47) Davis argues that to stand out in modern times, you need to dumb down your real, multifaceted self, to a certain extent.  You have to create your own brand, and the brand, by definition, is somewhat intangible—an image, or Debord’s spectacle. I think that this is manifested in various parts of life, but none so explicitly as in undergraduate admissions.  Colleges are intentionally vague on their websites about who will gain entrance to their ivory towers—criteria such as “academic curiosity” and “a sense of self” are matched with what could be argued, equally subjective grades and standardized test scores.

            With these muddled directions, and with their fantasy-castle college accepting 1 out of 10 applicants, it is no wonder that applicants turn to trying to make it as simple as possible for the admissions officers to see “who they are.” This involves trying to make applications more “smooth” in terms of readability and connectedness; college counselors advise trying to “send a message” with the application, sounding chillingly like the definition of brands today. Applicants put on their brand mask; my brother is a driven cross-country skier with a passion for the environment and saving the animals native to his home. This is not remotely all of who he is, of course, but it is what he is exuding.  It is his comparison to his classmates; it is what he says when asked about what he is interested in doing for the rest of his life.  If you wear a mask too long, you may not remember what your face looked like in the first place. 

            The other effect of this student brand competition is the quantification of un-quantifiable values.  A person’s artistic, athletic and academic skills are transformed into exchange-values as they are stacked up next to extremely different individuals.  Kids stack themselves up next to their friends, and enter the capitalist brand market of not valuing the uniqueness and integrity, the different use-values, of each person, but determine who is the best, in terms of being a person.  My brother and I used to have a joke going—instead of one-upping each other in terms of a certain field of expertise, we would just say, “Yeah, but I’m better than you.” We’d always laugh at this, because we realized how ludicrous it is to compare one person to another, holistically. This is what the culture of self-branding, exemplified in the college admissions process, is trying to do—establish a monetary system for intrinsic human worth.

The O-Brand

            The election’s been in the forefront today, and after reading the second chapter of No Logo, I started to make some connections between the two candidates and, say, Nike and Reebok.  This is not to say (at least in this post) that there are no real substantive divides between Obama and McCain, but that the whole race can be looked at through the lens of brand warfare. 

            Essentially, a political campaign is the perfect model for a brand.  They are not “selling” anything, in the direct sense (except the “limited edition” t-shirts and other doodads that you can get if you donate right now), but are putting forth a set of ideas about what people fit into their certain brands.  The quest to find these people is the marketer’s job, and a cursory look at the candidate’s web sites finds that this is some of the slickest marketing going on today.

            Obama’s site has a calm, blue background and smooth, professional looking lines. Things are fuzzed out a bit to make them easier on the eyes.  When you first enter, a sign up page for solicitations is offered, with a “first edition” Obama/Biden car magnet as a free gift for a donation of $15 or more (much like a magazine). Continuing on to the main home page, I was struck by the sheer amount that the Obama logo (a rising sun on a field of red and white, making an O) was present.  There was even a little red “Obama volunteer man,” reminiscent of the America Online Messaging man, with a logo on his chest, knocking on doors and making phone calls for the candidate. Overall, the site was clean, polished, and very clear in its presentation, exuding the character of his brand—that of modernity, change, and that lovely ambiguous word, hope.

            John McCain’s website seems to want that same message, the same control over his brand.  It too is a shade of blue (a little bit more blue-grey, a little more sober), and has Obama attack ads playing.  What struck me, though, was the bar across the top: Select Your JohnMcCain.com Edition, with supporter, undecided and unregistered voter boxes to click.  Essentially, McCain is trying to narrow down his consumer group so he can target them more easily, just as car commercials do on different channels of the television.  Trying to piggyback on Obama’s internet success, there’s constantly a “volunteer action center” sidebar on the page, with a big volunteer “points” meter (I sadly had zero). 

            Points? Logos (McCain’s is a 5 pointed star, reminiscent of the military bronze star medal)? It’s all part of the new politics—one that Barack Obama seems to have partly created.  Because today’s social conversations are in terms of the brand, Obama’s lead, especially with young people, can be partly put to his capitalization of the brand industry in his campaign.  In a way, Obama has turned around the same formula that helped George W. Bush win in 2000 and 2004—sticking to a simple, strong message that is easy to understand.  Obama, however, has upped the ante to a certain extent in that he makes his message more ambiguous.  Hope is anything to anybody—it can be the promise of getting out of the ghetto for his black constituency, the promise of health care for a working-class family, or the prospect of guilt alleviation for wealthy white liberals.  Obama has made his brand everyone’s brand—adapted it everyone’s lives.  He doesn’t control it, really; he just presented it as adaptable to whatever the voters want to do with it.  McCain hasn’t been able to define his brand well enough, hasn’t been able to relate it to what people want to identify themselves with.

            Check out this article on Obama and branding: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/124/the-brand-called-obama.html

PBR

 After our stealth-marketing discussion Friday, I decided to go look up the article on Pabst Blue Ribbon that I had seen.  It was in the New York Times (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EFD81538F931A15755C0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1) and interestingly, mentions No Logo, by Klein, as a big influence in the marketing of the “underdog product.”  Klein describes accurately, according to PBR’s marketing department, the consumer backlash against bullying, in-your-face brand marketing. It wasn’t that they didn’t want a brand—they just wanted one that wasn’t forced on them, and described their social sphere accurately (in this case, that of counter-culture, like bike messengers and skateboarders).

            So they took a “product of the people,” a cheap beer, and turned it in to a rallying cry for a social group.  I like this example because it is such a definitive rejection to the concept that consumers are mindless drones (I don’t want be a mindless drone).  The counter-culture social group didn’t have a brand to define them, so they chose one and gave it new meaning.  The industry wisely didn’t latch on to the trend and try to exploit it with the same kind of blunt marketing that scared the “new blue collar worker” away in the first place—it recognized its niche and quietly continues to play the underdog industry, even though it is doing pretty good in the cheap-beer market. 

            The presence of a phenomenon like PBR and the bike messengers presents a couple of interesting points.  First off, why does such an anti-mass culture social sphere, who would presumably be adherents to Naomi Klein and Juliet Schor’s views, adhere to a product to define themselves?  Probably they would say that their PBR mania was self-made, and that makes all the difference.  There was no market forces that encouraged them to accept this brand because it described their lifestyle—they took a once rather innocuous product and bent it to their will, so to speak.  Big Brother wasn’t involved.

            But why do they have to have a brand to define their social sphere and position anyway? Like it or not, they are advertising a product and giving their money to Big Business when they buy the beer.  Why give attention to the certain kind of cheap beer they buy?  I drink Keystone Light when I don’t want to spend very much to have a good time, but I don’t invest the brand with the kind of meaning that those in the article do. I’d rather associate myself with (do my unremunerated consumer labor for) beer that actually tastes good.

            Perhaps it’s all about communication.  Like it or not, the clothes that one wears and the drink that one drinks when you meet them at a party are the first indicators of what kind of product choices that person makes, and thus which social group that person identifies with (if any).  Meeting a bike messenger with tattoos, clothes from thrift shops, a vintage road bike, and a can of PBR in his hand projects an image of a rebel who likes to have a good time.  Perhaps some social groups have realized that, in this age of communication and increased social interaction, brands have become the new form of communicating the values of the group to an outsider.

La Boheme

Following our discussion last Friday concerning Jay-Z and Lupe Fiasco’s “product songs” and how they used them to define themselves, I was reminded of a piece of short fiction that I read in The New Yorker a while back.  It’s called “Raj, Bohemian,” (located here: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/03/10/080310fi_fiction_kunzru) and tells the story about a young hipster in New York and his encounter with mass consumerism.  I point out the “mass” in “mass consumerism” because that’s what brings the hero in this story down—the thought that other people are controlling his use of the products he defines himself with.  It seems like the main character’s raison d’etre is to differentiate himself and his friends from the mainstream, and if you live in New York City, the way to define yourself is to have different or cooler products than the next guy.

I’m not going to do a story summary, but it turns out in the end that the way most of his friends supported their cool, unemployed bohemian lifestyle was to be the front line in a new form of corporate advertising—the word of mouth.  They sold their friends on new products, and the company paid them for it, hoping that their coolness in the social sphere would help the products trickle down into what we know as mainstream society.

What I found interesting was how differently people in the story reacted to this discovery.  The sellers themselves obviously had no problem with it—they saw no disconnect in that they were using their social lives as a way to sell products.  The main character, however, felt cheated to his very soul.  His definition of himself depended so much on his products—his chic-yet-ironic clothes, his bootleg art movies, his trendy vodka.  The idea of his identity being sold to him through his social life only so he could propagate it more was deeply disgusting. 

Though this was a work of fiction, it didn’t sound too far-fetched.  I found this story relevant to our last two discussions having to do with the Adorno/Horkheimer and de Certeau articles and the question of identity through products.  I think A/H would probably argue that the character really hadn’t discovered anything new in knowing that his possessions were sold to him by his friends; anyone who defines themselves by mass produced products to that extent is not an individual anyway—he is a product of a sales pitch. I certainly think that this was part of the point that the author was making—he’s the archetypal consumer.  He attaches complex social meanings to products, he is always moving, never satisfied with what he has, and above all, is not a producer.  His full-time occupation is being on top of the heap, above the mass consumer society, and the ironic part is that he’s their strongest devotee.

De Certeau, however, would probably take issue at the very notion that defining yourself by products is bad at all.  If products are just an external extension of your tastes and interests, which in turn represent the person that you are (or wish you were) why not put them on display?  He would argue as well that these products mean different things to different people—if the protagonist in the story did pick up on products from his friends who were getting paid to disseminate them, what does it matter?  He would still identify the products with the person that recommended them, and think of that personal relation when he looked at or used the product.  In a lot of ways, the exchange of products is like a conversation—tastes are compared and contrasted, discussions piqued.

The fact remains, however, that there is something deeply wrong, even disgusting, about a situation like the one described in the story.  Part of it is the Big-Brother-like hand of corporations infiltrating holy ground, the social sphere, so that even talking to your friends is a form of advertisement.  This isn’t so strange, though.  We compare and make judgments about products with our friends all the time; it’s a topic of conversation.  The real center of the problem is the inescapability of it all.  As the protagonist says, “There must come a time when you’re allowed not to be a consumer.”  I think the choice of the word “allowed” in this is very interesting.  The experience of being a consumer today does not engender a feeling of individuality or personal power, at least for me.  We are “allowed” to be cool, we are “allowed” to buy products to heighten our social station: patronization is the name of the game.