From Adbusters #50, Nov-Dec 2003
The brandmasters sound nervous. More than two years into the Brand America Project, the campaign is in disarray and the triple-whammy tagline — opportunity! democracy! freedom! — is in freefall. The target market isn’t just refusing to buy into the brand, it’s actively boycotting the product. And the target market is five-and-a-half billion people.
Writing in Advertising Age, marketing poobahs like DDB Worldwide chairman Keith Reinhard and Saatchi & Saatchi vice chairman Tim Love grope for answers everywhere from “sensitivity and communications training” to “new mind-sets.” The tone is one of surrender. “It’s hardly a secret that respect for ‘Brand America’ has plummeted to new lows outside the US,” writes Reinhard, while Love comes hard on his heels with the admission that “Favorability ratings for America in most countries of the world have declined significantly.”
Even more remarkably, there are hints of acknowledgement that Brand America’s problems may not be reparable with a quickie image makeover. Terms like “root causes” and “cultural imperialism” and “gross insensitivity” — dismissed as the language of terrorist appeasement in the months following the September 11 attack — are now rolling off the tongues of ceos at America-as-Brand seminars and globalization conferences.
All the fuss, of course, is just the sound of corporate honchos covering ass. America’s cluster of brand associations — its values, products, policies, memes, logos and ideas — is changing as rapidly as at any time in its history. The marketing gurus are sending mixed signals. (New York consultants RoperASW report that America’s corporate brand power is stalled or slipping; their peers at Interbrand counter that US brands still dominate the global top-10.) But what’s really hurting the brandmasters is the oldest measure of all: gut instinct. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that a large part of the appeal of Levi’s, Coke and ibm is a premium dose of American cool. So what happens when America loses it?
There are signs of desperation at the top. The White House “public diplomacy” push in the Middle East now includes the pop-propaganda of Radio Sawa and the lifestyle magazine Hi, which will be joined later this year by the $62-million launch of the Middle East Television Network. There is still the dream that Justin Timberlake will catch on as the rebel leader of Mideast youth, just as some East Germans remember smuggled Phil Collins albums as their music of liberation.
US corporations aren’t so sure. This summer, McCann-Erikson WorldGroup, an “integrated brand communications” company operating in more than 130 countries, cautioned its US clients not to “wrap their brands” in the American flag. The new strategy, at least for the moment, is to distance your product from George Bush’s Brand America. Roperasw warns that 38 percent of the world’s consumers say social issues and causes are “very important” to their choice of brands, and even Interbrand, with its stay-the-course view of American brand power, admits that American corporations may only be succeeding to the extent that consumers can separate US government policy from American brand identity.
Still, all the navel-gazing and painful introspection continue to spiral back to the same old conclusion: just keep rebranding the product. The rest of the world associates Brand America with exploitation, corruption, arrogance and hyper-materialism? It must be time for a new “brand platform,” some charity work, a media campaign and organized, unified, “private-sector diplomacy.” The blue-skying quickly turns ludicrous — among the solutions suggested by Tim Love over at Saatchi & Saatchi are these two quick ’n’ easy adjustments: “make capitalism inclusive” and “improve life.”
Jesus, what an unreality gap. On the one side, America has embarked on a political mission of violence and empire, of divide-and-conquer diplomacy and manufactured loyalty, with occupation abroad and isolation at home. On the other, the global culture is responding, as Harvard Business School dean John Quelch has said, with “the emergence of a consumer lifestyle with broad international appeal that is grounded in a rejection of American capitalism.” In the middle, the brandmasters build their castles in the air.
James MacKinnon
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