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