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Why is Madison Avenue gripped by insanity? | page 1, 2, 3, 4
Victor Turner, your Happy Meal is ready! Curiously, however, Deutsch was unable to obtain university funding for these sort of mustard-stained aperçus. "I'm very thankful to the advertising industry," he says. "They've given me -- and the industry continues to give me -- venues to look at questions and issues that no one else was willing to really look at, let alone pay me for." Deutsch cites another example of what he is talking about. "A couple years ago, I did a project where I studied three types of experts," he says. "It was such great fun. I studied cosmologists. I studied chief firefighters. And I studied pig auctioneers from Kansas. And I found out that all of them are exactly the same. They're all more concerned with problem structuring than problem solving. They all give themselves leeway to play." When it came to fleshing out his path-breaking theories, Clothaire Rapaille, too, encountered frustration at every turn. "First came Freud, who deals with the individual and consciousness," he tells me in his charmingly accented French. "Then came Jung, who deals with the species. I came after them. And, of course I learned a lot from them. My theory is that between the individual and the species, there is the culture. I am the missing link between Freud and Jung." Sadly, the academic establishment did not see it quite this way. "I want to understand all the cultures of the world," Rapaille says earnestly. "Who is going to pay me to do that? Not universities. They don't understand what I'm speaking for. Business people -- they understand. Because they see results." Over the last five years, Rapaille has conducted over 200 Archetype Discoveries in more than 20 countries, eliciting atavistic musings on such diverse topics as "Nutrasweet," "Snack Food" and "Nuclear Energy." Even in this age of incredible material prosperity, it's hard to fathom responsible corporate types forking over the cash to pay for this stuff. Advertising executives, casting about for an explanation, tend to credit the rise of "experiential marketing," and the cult of the brand as a kind of psychosomatic medication through which all of our complexes, vanities and blockages can be channeled. "It's become intellectually proper to acknowledge that people can have a deep relationship with brands," says Gad Romann, chairman of the Romann Group, a Manhattan ad agency. "Even the most serious academics and the most acute existentialists now acknowledge that brands become anthropomorphized. They enter our lives as relationships -- in order to either enhance or dissolve other relationships." Romann, a jaunty, exuberant German in a black turtleneck and jeans, glances at his watch. "Today is what?" he asks. "August 27. All right. As of 10 to 5 on August 27 -- as of today -- advertising is no longer a flimsy business. That's what people have to recognize. Advertising is no longer just jokes and fun, and TV commercials. It's taken a much more serious turn." The turn probably began back in the '50s, when the admen realized, much to their chagrin, that advances in technology and the growing standardization of ingredients were resulting in brands that were technically identical. The old approach -- reciting product benefits, hammering home a "unique selling proposition" -- didn't work anymore. And so, as the marketers wrung their hands, wondering how to cope with this newfound problem of "rapidly diminishing product differences," the ad agencies groped for new and deeper persuasion techniques, sexier approaches, sharper hooks. The result, as Richard Tedlow writes in "New and Improved," was the dawn of our current era of image-based marketing -- the insistence that products not only be good, but that they appeal to our hidden yearnings, "deep in the psychological recesses of the mind." By sprinkling onto their creams, deodorants and pancake mixes a variety of traits known to be dispersed among the public -- glamour, efficiency, kindliness, hearty good cheer -- the marketers hoped to give their brands a more deep-down appeal. Toward this end, Tedlow writes, the image mavens at Proctor & Gamble went so far as to craft a portable personality for each of their (technically identical) brands of vegetable shortening, depicting Crisco in the image of a "no-nonsense professional dietician," and Golden Fluffo as a "warm, robust, motherly character."
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