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Why is Madison Avenue gripped by insanity? | page 1, 2, 3, 4
Ruth Shalit Part 1: The return of the hidden persuaders
Driven by a booming economy, a corporate obsession with brand-building and a feelgood philosophy, a motley crew of ex-grad students, starry-eyed admen and hypnosis gurus are probing the consumer unconscious to sell soap. Part 2: Hypnotizing slackers for Starbucks, and other visionary acts of marketing research
Through hypnosis, deconstructive theory and other advanced techniques, marketing experts have definitively established that champagne is associated with romance.
Once upon a time, the well-packaged brand was supposed to induce a kind of emotional frenzy in the consumer. Women shoppers seeking guidance in their purchases and "splurchases" would be inexorably drawn to "the package that hypnotizes them into picking it," a representative of the Package Designers Council happily told Vance Packard. In the 1990s, in a twist Packard would have relished, marketing history has veered off in a quite different direction. These days, it is the consultants, not consumers, who are in an emotional frenzy, driven to distraction over the psychodrama of the brand. To hear Bob Deutsch talk about brands -- or, as he calls it, Brand -- you'd think he was referring to some sort of unimpeachable deity. "Brand is not name recognition," he tells me. "Brand is not even positive attributes. Brand is something very specific that the consumer produces. The advertiser doesn't and can't and shouldn't. Brand is this: Brand is when a person creates -- the word I like to use is designs -- a metonymic link between their own self-story and the story of a product, such that to be loyal to the product is a misnomer. It's loyalty to the self." One might think the idea that the Self is constructed of Yoo Hoo and lollipops and cinnamon buns, that brands are truly constitutive in this real and deep-seated way, would be offensive to social scientists such as Deutsch, who presumably believe that individuals can discriminate between reality and illusion. But as market research comes to take on the character of therapy, such distinctions seem increasingly meaningless. If we are our own brands, as management guru Peter Drucker has theorized, then it follows that our brands are also us. Reading the case studies of the products revitalized by Semiotic Solutions is like reading a psychiatrist's log of his fretful patients, each one a querulous bundle of neuroses and dysfunctions. "Ginny Valentine's semiotic autopsy of Peparami revealed a truly schizophrenic personality," the group reports. "The brand had a unique ability to straddle both cultural meat values (power, masculinity, real food) and snack values (fun, unisexual, improper food) simultaneously." Valentine and Derrida then pull out the big salami: "The advertising has to be as radical as the product itself. Peparami is a rule-breaker, a paradigm shifter, a cultural rebel. That is where the creative strategy had to be located." Putting lunch meat on the couch doesn't come cheap: Semiotic Solutions charges $60,000 per "semiotic autopsy."
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