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.