jaguarshoescollective:

Automotive giant Jaguar / Land Rover has launched legal proceedings at the Trademarks Registry against the East London arts collective and bar, Jaguar Shoes.

For fuck’s sake.

Work experience programme must be voluntary, says major employer amid complaints it is profiting from forced labour.

Supermarket group Tesco said it has asked DWP officials to make the work experience scheme voluntary after thousands of angry customers wrote in and posted messages on Twitter and the company’s Facebook site accusing the multinational of profiting from hundreds of thousands of hours of forced unpaid work.

On the one hand, a victory. People power.

On the other hand, not.

People power proving powerless when it’s enacted through democratic political means - the Tory party denying there’s any opposion; the Lib Dems apparently silent, and Labour nowhere to be found. Even the very idea of writing to your MP about this or turning up in a constintuency surgery asking him/her to ask a question in the Commons seems ludicrous, seems tilting at windmills - who believes that works? (Did it ever?)

But when - as consumers, not as citizens - we put the pressure - on companies and brands, not on our elected representatives - then something happens.

This blurring of citizenship and consumption is neoliberalism in action. In its public-facing ideology at least, the interests of business and state are thought to be mutually supportive - with a resultant blurring as to which of these really holds power. Baudrillard - once a Marxist, then a nihilist - becomes our guide to this modern terrain. In The Consumer Society (1998) he quotes President Eisenhower saying that government best secures economic growth by encouraging the individual to spend, and that taxation is a less profitable way of connecting an individual’s money and their desired services than consumption could be – consumption as a “social levy”, and also “civic duty” keeping the economy going (1998:82-3).

Furthermore, society and civic responsibility become just another pair of values to be consumed - hollowed out as empty signifiers fit only for endless exchange (not use). In Simulacra And Simulation, Baudrillard claims:

Advertising, “fundamentally saying and repeating incessantly, ‘I buy, I consume, I take pleasure’, today repeats in other forms, ‘I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned’ – mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.” (1994:91)

Seems apt.

From the Santa Brand Book

Magazines need to stop treating people like they are stupid. We can look at these covers and recognize that these are all women who have something to promote. You are so deeply in the pockets of PR people that you let them choose who you put in your most important cover of the year. These women have no fashion story to tell, hell even lifestyle stories are nonexistent after you’ve given identical interviews for the last 5 movies you promoted by being on the cover of a magazine. This is NOT how you save a dying industry.

(KDS310 on NYMag - The Cut - September Fashion Magazines Earn Praise for Skewing Older This Year)

Magazine circulations are actually doing ok, I understand, but this comment is nonetheless bang on. None of these women means anything in fashion terms - very few celebs do (e.g. Tilda Swinton, Chloe Sevigny, Gaga cos she wears catwalk McQueen in videos). Halle Berry on US Vogue is a lousy fashion choice too, even if it is sadly still important to see a black woman on the cover. And yet these magazines have chosen these slebs for the covers of their September issues, i.e. the biggest most important fashion issue of the whole year.

I understand US fashion mags don’t have quite the same brand images as their UK equivalents do - e.g. UK Bazaar is higher fashion that its US equivalent, but US Glamour is a bit classier than the UK version. Still, US Bazaar and Elle are both supposed to mean something in fashion terms, yet with these covers they diminish themselves to populist celebrity-enthralled pap. There is sure enough a market for that, and perhaps that’s all that matters. But what a massive, massive brand dilution.

It’d be really interesting to see how far this has affected the advertising they carry. In the UK, Vogue, Bazaar and Elle carry adverts for the designer mainline collections, e.g. four pages of Chanel showing the unwearable furry things they put on the catwalk. Cosmopolitan and Glamour, by contrast, only get ads for Chanel perfume, sunglasses and cosmetics, as it’s presumed their readership is unable to afford the clothes and perhaps a bit less interested in high fashion too.

Let’s see if I’m a big enough nerd to buy the US mags and do a page-count…

People have talked about the conflicting messages from Dove and Vaseline Fair & Lovely as being perfectly reasonable branding – Unilever tailoring its brands’ advertising so it addresses different beauty trends in two different markets.

It’s still a problem for Unilever, however, because those marketing campaigns haven’t stayed safely confined to their own markets – instead, Vaseline Fair & Lovely is getting a lot of coverage on the Anglo-American parts of the internet. A bunch of Westerners not liking the ads doesn’t just mean they’re not going to buy the Fair & Lovely product – obviously enough we were unlikely to do that anyway. Rather it does two things:

1. Make Unilever look pretty nasty for preying on the caste-driven pressures on young people in India, where skintone can affect employability and marriage options;
2. Makes the ‘niceness’ of Dove really, really visible as a BRAND, as nothing more than a branding trick.

It’s this latter that’s the main problem for Unilever. While anyone seeing the Dove adverts should be aware that, simply enough, they are adverts and therefore they’re trying to sell you something, the ads were good enough and played well enough off an anti-size-zero zeitgeist that they felt quite sincere. They did a really good job of making people like the brand and seeing it as something that’d make them feel good about themselves.

Awareness of what Unilever are doing in other markets, however, makes their brands in this one – i.e. Dove – look very hollow. The success of the Dove campaign was predicated on a kind of cognitive dissonance: consumers could only swallow what it was saying about ‘real women’ and self-acceptance if they didn’t think too hard about it being an advert designed to sell stuff. The Fair & Lovely marketing, though, shows the depths of manipulativeness that Unilever will sink to in order to sell their beauty products, and as such I would argue it’s damaging to other brands in the portfolio.

Maybe that’s the problem with individual product branding… In February my then-colleague Sue Burden said in Marketing Week that, “With the Individual product brand model, the benefits are mainly an absence of possible negatives - no great fear of negative news about a parent or sibling brand affecting them.”

This only works, though, if consumers don’t ‘join the the dots’ between individual brands (Dove; Vaseline Fair & Lovely) and the parent company (Unilever). As this episode would indicate, that can be quite an easy thing for consumers or the media to do – and as such it’s not a very strong advantage.

“The label thinks Cadbury’s ad for its Flake bar, in which a woman floats in a yellow dress, is suspiciously similar to the Kate Moss hologram projected at its fashion show in 2006, when the model was mired in a drug scandal. The director of the Flake ad also did the Moss hologram. Cadbury said they weren’t intending to copy the hologram, “but the director has a particular house style.”

I saw this advert for the first time a couple of days ago and loved it - the sinuous tentacular dress, the simplicity and apparent ‘uncommercial’ content. “What is this for?” I wondered. Shampoo, if the dress is blonde and moves like hair? Perfume - the colour and class would be fitting for Chanel’s Beige, perhaps, even if the ruffles are more Valentino. When for a second the model’s face is revealed, who was she - a gap-toothed Lara Stone? - I felt sure she must be a name. Why was it so brilliantly not trying to sell me something - a strategy which of course piqued my attention and achieved its ends so elegantly?

I loved the ad because it seemed so uncompromisingly capital-F Fashion, a rare commercial claiming a place in the world of design. And now I find out that it is indeed a rip-off of proper fashion, of one of the most artistic designers in the industry, Alexander McQueen. Why did I not recognise this parallel myself?!

And does this ad actually work? My reaction, on discovering it was a commercial for Flake, was disappointment. Flake to me is still a slightly downmarket brand of chocolate-with-air-in-it aimed at women who’re a bit scared of the 255 calories in a bar of Dairy Milk. The advert is beautiful but so distant from a 50p chocolate bar that I don’t really believe it able to elevate perception of the actual product involved.

Whatever the boost to brand awareness, is it possible for an ad like this to actually remind customers of the gulf between brand values and reality?