Salon.com > Ruth Shalit http://www.salon.com Wed, 30 May 2012 09:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 The day the brands died http://www.salon.com/2001/07/11/brands/ http://www.salon.com/2001/07/11/brands/#comments Wed, 11 Jul 2001 19:53:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2001/07/11/brands In recent months, newspapers have devoted hundreds of column inches to the economic, social and sartorial impact of the dot-com collapse. Top-flight reporters have been dispatched to Silicon Valley to document the pathos of the boarded-up lofts, the shuttered trattorias, the boy millionaires who have gone back to working at Starbucks. But one aspect of the crash has gone unexplored: the effect of the death of so many brands on consumers themselves.

A year and a half ago, at the height of the e-commerce spending spree, Internet companies invested enormous sums of money in making an impression on the public. Over $3.1 billion was spent on offline advertising alone, a land grab for consumer "mindshare" unprecedented in marketing history. Unlike traditional companies, which build brands over time through a combination of advertising, in-store experience and product quality, the dot-coms attempted instant branding. As Brian Mulhern, advertising director for Outpost.com, told the New York Times in 1999, "First and foremost, the job of dot-com advertising is to gain top-of-mind awareness."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/07/11/brands/feed/ 0 The early-adopter wars http://www.salon.com/2001/03/22/hipsters/ http://www.salon.com/2001/03/22/hipsters/#comments Thu, 22 Mar 2001 20:16:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2001/03/22/hipsters Have you ever walked into a party and suddenly realized that your hair was all wrong? Or found yourself secretly wondering which was cooler, cigar lounges or oxygen bars? Witches or bike messengers? Woodstock or Zenfest? Maybe, in darker moments, you've even asked yourself some tough questions: Am I the only one who doesn't get it? Will I ever get it? Will I ever fit in?

You're not alone. Fortune 500 companies have been asking themselves the same questions. Stumped by the vagaries of youth culture, afraid of being caught flat-footed by the next big trend, managers of mainstream brands have become fixated on "early adopters." The alpha consumers. The top of the pyramid. The edge of the wedge. The scenesters and snowboarders and thugged-out matrix skaters whose consumption patterns set the trends for the rest of America.

In their zeal to understand this elite crew, executives at conservative companies now spend a great deal of time communing with consumers who bear no relation to the actual users of their product. Connie Jones, senior culinary researcher for McCormick spices, recently attended a workshop called "Trend Tracking in Trendy South Beach." Joined by executives from Amway and Hallmark, Jones visited "a lot of edgy places," she says. "Scooter stores, that kind of thing. We went to a restaurant called 'Bed.' All the food was served on a bed! But we didn't make judgments. We just recorded the data."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/03/22/hipsters/feed/ 0 I went to Brand Camp and all I got was this dumb snack-food epiphany http://www.salon.com/2001/01/02/brand_2/ http://www.salon.com/2001/01/02/brand_2/#comments Tue, 02 Jan 2001 20:21:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/col/shalit/2001/01/02/brand It's become a cliché of the new prime time. A telegenic bunch of slackers is herded into a confined space and commanded to interact meaningfully. Surrounded by pool tables, PlayStations and other sassy props, the slackers feel liberated to be their playful selves, fighting, cuddling and otherwise engaging in wacky fun. Defenses are stripped away and basic truths affirmed. Alliances are formed and broken. When things threaten to get dull, a goatee-wearing rebel erupts defiantly.

This fall, the final, hundredth iteration of the reality-television theme comes not from the coolhunters in network programming, but from BBDO, one of the world's largest and most profitable ad agencies. Over the weekend of Oct. 13-15, acting at the behest of large institutional clients Pepsi, Wrigley and Hostess Frito Lay, the agency staff convened the first BBDO Brand Camp, in which 20 young visionaries were dispatched to a loft in Toronto, Ontario, for a weekend of deep thinking about brands. In a predictable twist, the 48-hour lockdown was videotaped, with portions broadcast live over the World Wide Web.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/01/02/brand_2/feed/ 0 The focus group is bubbling and sparkling! http://www.salon.com/2000/12/12/italy_6/ http://www.salon.com/2000/12/12/italy_6/#comments Tue, 12 Dec 2000 20:10:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/col/2000/12/12/italy A focus group is such an everyday experience, I never imagined there could be a thread of poetry running through it. But that was before one of our e-services clients, which I'll call Headsnack, decided that the path to profitability lay in a week's worth of market research in -- Milan.

In America, focus groups are conducted in stale, windowless rooms in sick-building-syndrome "facilities" generally located in Takoma Park, Md., and possessing an almost experimental ugliness. Our Milan focus groups, by contrast, took place in a market-research palazzotto with stone-vaulted ceilings and a resplendent, rose-gold color scheme. In lieu of the usual focus group repast of Fritos and M&Ms, there was risotto, tagliatelle and hot, fresh focaccia. As we lounged on crimson settees, waiting for the respondents to arrive, we consumed large quantities of sweet biscuits, macaroons and little jellies and puddings. A parlormaid, Giulia, poured water from a blue jug.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/12/12/italy_6/feed/ 0 Chain saws, drugs and lesbians http://www.salon.com/2000/09/30/olympic_ads/ http://www.salon.com/2000/09/30/olympic_ads/#comments Sat, 30 Sep 2000 19:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/col/shalit/2000/09/30/olympic_ads Tape delays. A bribery scandal. A gold medal snatched from under the nose of a snuffly Romanian pixie. These are not the attributes that the brand burnishers of corporate America want us to associate with the Olympic Games. No, what they have in mind is something a bit more rhapsodic. "We envision the Olympic attributes as 'leadership,' 'competence,' 'fair competition' and 'being the best,'" says Joe Carberry, director of corporate affairs for Visa. "And the chief goal of our sponsorship is, obviously, to align those attributes with those of our own brand."

The strategy, Carberry says, is working. Since 1986, when Visa first became a top-tier Olympic sponsor, "an interesting thing has happened," Carberry says. "In focus groups, people now talk about Visa in the same way they talk about the Olympics. They talk about things like leadership, competence and acceptability ... There's been what we call an 'equity transfer.' That, to us, is proof of return on investment.'"

But should it be? Visa's Olympic sponsorship has always made more sense than most, because of its association with a real benefit -- the fact that Visa is more widely accepted than American Express, even at something as big, global and omnipresent as the Olympics. But Visa isn't content to use its sponsorship of the Summer Games simply to convey a product benefit.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/09/30/olympic_ads/feed/ 0 Oh Boy! The new beef jerky http://www.salon.com/2000/09/14/jerky/ http://www.salon.com/2000/09/14/jerky/#comments Thu, 14 Sep 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/col/shalit/2000/09/14/jerky One of the joys of working at an ad agency has been finally getting someone to foot the bill for my subscription to Brandweek. At $149 a year, Brandweek is not cheap; but few other magazines cover the Kremlinology of salty-snack land with such single-minded, Woodward-and-Bernstein intensity. If you long for news about the cranberry glut, crave a preview of the new Toaster Strudel positioning, or if you just like to ogle centerfolds of dripping cheese lasagna, golden-brown drumsticks and succulent Sunkist oranges spewing jets of nectar, then this Baedeker's of brand building might be for you.

I love almost everything Brandweek does, but several weeks ago, the magazine published its best article yet. Titled "It's Good to Be Jerky," the article reported that beef jerky had changed its image, and was now seen as "a healthful snack for on-the-go urban professionals." Resounding confirmation of jerky's surge came from no fewer than four meat-snack professionals. "People's minds have already changed about beef jerky," Alan Bridgeford, president of Bridgeford Foods, told Brandweek. James Sampson, marketing manager for Frito Lay's Oh Boy! Oberto jerky, went a step further, vowing: "If you eat our jerky, you'll get past your problems." Yet a third meat-snack executive confirmed the writer's suspicion that jerky "has arrived."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/09/14/jerky/feed/ 0 Buying short http://www.salon.com/2000/08/07/midgets/ http://www.salon.com/2000/08/07/midgets/#comments Mon, 07 Aug 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/feature/2000/08/07/midgets Last fall, when Long John Silver's creative VP Charlie Thomas commissioned a national branding campaign for his chain of fast-food restaurants, Thomas urged Fallon McElligott, his newly hired agency, to think big.

Though keen to emphasize the mouth-watering pleasures of Long John's crispy fish, shrimp basket and thick, hand-cut, home-style fries, Thomas felt strongly that the advertising shouldn't "just be a beauty shot of food," he said. "We're trying to build a brand here. There's got to be a bigger vision involved."

Or a smaller one. The new TV spots, unveiled last week in selected cities, feature dancing dwarves in pastel bodysuits. The dwarves, whose outfits carry such dish names as "Shrimp Basket" or "Chicken Plank," are meant to represent the "little cravings" people have for Long John Silver's. One ad shows a surly looking dwarf, labeled Shrimp Basket, clinging to a man's pants leg.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/08/07/midgets/feed/ 0 Bush and Cheney: The secret transcripts http://www.salon.com/2000/07/26/satire_4/ http://www.salon.com/2000/07/26/satire_4/#comments Wed, 26 Jul 2000 19:34:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/politics//feature/2000/07/26/satire "For months we worked closely together to review the qualifications of many impressive candidates. As we worked to evaluate the strength of others, I saw firsthand Dick Cheney's outstanding judgment. I benefited from his keen insight. I was impressed by the tough and thorough way he addressed his mission ... I kept the thought of him joining me in the back of my mind. When secretary Cheney visited me and Laura at our ranch in Crawford, Texas, over the last Fourth of July weekend, we reviewed many candidates, all of whom are very impressive. But I continued to believe the best candidate might be sitting next to me."

--Gov. George W. Bush, July 25

July 4

BUSH: Hey, terrific news. Powell's guys are sending out feelers.

CHENEY: That's great! He'd sew it up for us. His approval ratings are through the roof. (pause)

BUSH: So, what do we do? Should I call him? Are we done?

CHENEY: Almost. There is one thing.

BUSH: What?

CHENEY: Well, I'm sure you remember, back in your father's term, that incident at the dinner for the Japanese prime minister.

BUSH (chuckling): Oh, you mean El Puko. The champion hurler. Heave-ho! Hey, maybe my dad just knew what was going to happen with the Japanese economy.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/07/26/satire_4/feed/ 0 Send in the clowns http://www.salon.com/2000/06/21/clowns/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/21/clowns/#comments Wed, 21 Jun 2000 20:57:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/feature/tues/2000/06/21/clowns Imagine you work at a consumer Web site, a late-entrant player in a second-tier space. You don't know exactly what it is you're selling, or if you're selling anything. Actually, truth be told, you don't really know what you are. Of course, that hasn't stopped dozens of start-up Web sites just as amorphous as yours from driving away with vanloads of venture capital cash. All the same, it's a little unnerving to be in business, with offices, payrolls, fax machines, leased potted plants and everything, and not know exactly what it is you're supposed to be doing. And so, just days before the big launch, there is a whiff of panic in the air, an undertone of concerned murmurs about the future of "the brand." OK, so you have no brand to speak of. But the fact that its "equity" may be "eroding" is worrisome all the same.

Fear not. An army of consultants stands at the ready, eager to uncover your mission and vision, anxious to apply the time-tested techniques of Fortune 500 brand building to corporate identity in the digital space.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/06/21/clowns/feed/ 0 The Mr. Peanut chronicles http://www.salon.com/2000/03/24/doughboy2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/24/doughboy2/#comments Fri, 24 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/2000/03/24/doughboy2 Despite the bewildering complexity of the guidelines governing product spokescharacters' every move, appearance, thought and emotion, it's still possible to come up with a few rules of thumb. The first seems to be that at no time should the character be placed in an undignified or embarrassing situation. He must never be seen as a bumbler, or made the butt of jokes. Throughout all his pratfalls and blunders, he must always retain his chubby, rubbery dignity. "The Doughboy is always treated with love and respect by the people in the commercials," says Dennis Ready of Pillsbury. "He might be teased, but it's in the lightest possible way. He's never taken advantage of. He's never made the butt of the joke ... That sort of negativity, that sort of hostile area, aren't feelings we want him to be associated with."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/24/doughboy2/feed/ 0 The inner Doughboy http://www.salon.com/2000/03/23/doughboy/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/23/doughboy/#comments Thu, 23 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/2000/03/23/doughboy Early last summer, Jeff Manning, executive director of the California Milk Processor Board and one of the architects of the celebrated "Got Milk?" campaign, dreamed up yet another winning idea. The milk lobby would team up with famous cookie-makers -- Entemann's, Keebler, Nabisco -- to produce spots that extolled the glories of milk and cookies together. From the point of view of the cookie-makers, Manning's offer was a no-brainer. "Basically, it was us approaching the Oreo people and saying, 'Hey, we've got $22 million to spend. Can we help you sell more Oreos?' Manning recalls. "How do you say no to that? We got cooperation from everybody." Until, Manning says, "we thought up a very clever idea for an ad that involved Pillsbury."

Manning had asked his San Francisco ad agency, Goodby, Silverstein, to draw up storyboards featuring that squeezably soft gob of goo, the Pillsbury Doughboy. The Goodby creatives came back with a concept that was "a little bit of a spoof," Manning concedes. The ad opened with a shot of an all-American family sitting around the kitchen table, "super clean-scrubbed, looking as perfect as can be," Manning says. "The wife comes to the table and asks her husband and son if they'd like some freshly baked chocolate chip cookies from Pillsbury. The husband says, 'Oh, thank you, darling.' The Doughboy says, 'There's nothing like something fresh from the oven.' Everyone's looking joyous. The Doughboy is looking as happy as can be. All is going well."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/23/doughboy/feed/ 0 Super Bowl ads: Winners and losers http://www.salon.com/2000/01/31/ads_4/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/31/ads_4/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2000 09:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/2000/01/31/ads It's now a clichi to note that the Super Bowl ad blitz has become a parallel spectator sport to the game itself, a $135 million soap opera with its own winners, losers and squalling corps of color commentators. But to the guests at Bill Westbrook's party Sunday night, the Ad Bowl was no game-inside-a-game. It was the game.

For the last few years, Westbrook, who is worldwide president at the New York agency Fallon McElligott, has generously opened his plush SoHo apartment on Super Bowl Sunday to fellow agency types who share his preference for tag lines over linebackers. In this brand-building Bizarro world, guests all but tune out the game -- even this year's spellbinder -- perking up only when the announcers cut away to the commercials. The air hums with shop talk.

"What do you think of the letterbox?" the guests ask each other as they feast on a folksy repast of chili and barbecue. "Doesn't it arrest your attention?" A whimsical TBWA-Chiat Day spot for Pets.Com provokes widespread guffaws. "All those titles in the left-hand corner!" marvels a Fallon design director. "What a fuck-up!"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/31/ads_4/feed/ 0 The name game http://www.salon.com/1999/11/30/naming/ http://www.salon.com/1999/11/30/naming/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 1999 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming When Hewlett-Packard decided last year to spin off its instrumentation and measurement division into a separate company, executives at the computer hardware giant did everything they could to smooth the transition. Shareholders had to be notified. A top-flight management team hired. The trades brought on board. But such housekeeping duties were a minor matter compared to the vast existential task that loomed -- a five-phase, cross-unit "identity project," intended to unearth a suitably momentous name for the $8 billion enterprise. The name had to be a grand, monstrous, powerful thing -- broad-shouldered yet luscious, tempered by oaky bass notes of maturity, courage, character -- like a 1961 Cheval Blanc. "This was similar to the Lucent process," says David Redhill, global executive director for Landor Associates, the identity firm hired last year to supervise the project. "We needed a tremendous name that really was magisterial and compelling, and had a certain amount of stature right away."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/11/30/naming/feed/ 0 Why is Madison Avenue gripped by insanity? http://www.salon.com/1999/09/29/persuaders3/ http://www.salon.com/1999/09/29/persuaders3/#comments Wed, 29 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/09/29/persuaders3 Over a late-summer dinner, Robert Deutsch, the cognitive anthropologist, describes his circuitous journey from underpaid policy savant to Madison Avenue oracle. "The Max Planck Institute has a position called Visiting Foreign Fellow," he begins. "But about four and a half months before I was going to do that, Konrad Lorenz had heard me give a talk at the Herbert Marcuse Institute, which is part of the Max Planck Society, about my work. They invited me because they had heard a talk I'd given in France, analyzing the present political situation in South Africa. Now, keep in mind, up until that time I'd spent about 80 percent of my time in the field, living with primitive cultures in New Guinea, Amazonia and the Kalahari."

At this point, both sides of a 60-minute tape have been filled, and we have only gotten as far as 1978. Politely, I ask Deustch if he wouldn't mind skipping ahead to the early '90s, and the anthropologist kindly obliges. "At that point," he says, "I was slated to go back to UCLA Medical School, which has an Institute of Bio-Behavioral Science." By coincidence, he says, the Account Planning Group, the national association of ad-agency strategists, was holding its annual conference in Los Angeles that year. "They said, 'We want Bob Deutsch to give a talk on the nature of the mind,'" Deustch recalls. "I said, 'I'm not interested.' I had never thought of working with advertising agencies. I had never thought about how I could work with advertising agencies."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/29/persuaders3/feed/ 0 Hypnotizing slackers for Starbucks, and other visionary acts of marketing research http://www.salon.com/1999/09/28/hypnosis/ http://www.salon.com/1999/09/28/hypnosis/#comments Tue, 28 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/09/28/hypnosis The motivation researchers of the '50s viewed consumers not as rational citizens, but as cooperative puppets of ad-manipulation. The consumer, researcher Louis Cheskin told Vance Packard, "acts emotionally and compulsively," guided not by logical thought, but by "unconscious reaction to the images and designs which, in the subconscious, are associated with the product." Packard was horrified by this mechanistic view of consumer behavior, which he viewed as irresponsible, socially dangerous and inherently involving a disrespect for the human personality. "Some of the persuaders, in their energetic endeavors to sway our actions, seem to fall unwittingly into the attitude that man exists to be manipulated," he wrote in the conclusion to "The Hidden Persuaders." "When you manipulate people -- regardless of your motives -- you take away their right to decide for themselves what they want to do and who they want to be."

Virginia Valentine, the critical theory-trained president of Semiotic Solutions, might as well be channeling the spirit of Cheskin when she writes that "in semiotic theory, consumers are not independent spirits, articulating their own original opinions and making their own individual buying decisions." Instead, she clarifies in a promotional leaflet, "consumers are constructed by the communications of [popular] culture ... They are not prime causes. They are cultural effects."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/28/hypnosis/feed/ 0 The return of the hidden persuaders http://www.salon.com/1999/09/27/persuaders/ http://www.salon.com/1999/09/27/persuaders/#comments Mon, 27 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/09/27/persuaders Sixtus Oeschle, manager of corporate advertising for Shell Oil, was at his wits' end. For months, he and his team of researchers had pumped the consumer psyche, desperate to uncover the real reason behind a decade-long sales slump at the $26 billion conglomerate. For months, they'd come up empty. "We tried psychographic memory triggers," Oeschle recalls. "We tried dream therapy. We tried what I'll call tangible manifestation exercises." All to no avail. "We weren't generating anything that was breakthrough," he says. "It was all kind of the same sort of stuff." At one point, respondents were given mounds of wet clay and urged to mold figures that expressed their inner feelings about Shell. When that, too, proved a dud, Oeschle passed out sketchbooks and Crayolas. "We said, 'Draw what Shell is to you,'" Oeschle recalls. "Then we said, 'Draw what you would like Shell to be to you.'" The results, while eye-opening, were not particularly useful from a marketing standpoint. "I can't tell you what they drew," Oeschle says glumly. "Let's just say it was something so magisterial, so huge, that there was almost no way a corporate entity could do that."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/27/persuaders/feed/ 0 Budweiser: Bad for your waistline — and bad for America http://www.salon.com/1999/06/14/morris/ http://www.salon.com/1999/06/14/morris/#comments Mon, 14 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/06/14/morris Dick Morris, uncontrite guru of political attack ads, has a bright new idea. Now affiliated with the New England Consulting Group, he is urging his corporate clients to apply the tactics of negative, or "contrastive" advertising to their campaigns for consumer brands. In a June 14 interview with Forbes, he offered reporter Julie Androshick several examples of how his signature techniques could be applied to consumer pitches. For instance, Morris advised the Gap to retain its current advertising featuring teens dancing in khakis, but suggested that the company add this voice-over: "All of our clothing is produced in factories where there is no child labor and where there is housing for workers, not sweatshops." And he urged Reebok to focus on Nike's image problems with its suppliers. "The ad should show an American kid wearing Nike sneakers dribbling a basketball," said Morris. "He'd shoot, then you'd go to the kid who's barefoot in a third world country. And HE'S BAREFOOT SO YOU CAN WEAR NIKES!"

Sadly for Morris, companies contacted by Forbes rebuffed his innovative suggestions. "That's why he's a consultant, and we have our own ad agency," a Reebok spokesman scoffed to Androshick.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/06/14/morris/feed/ 0 The ad from hell http://www.salon.com/1999/05/28/kenya/ http://www.salon.com/1999/05/28/kenya/#comments Fri, 28 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/05/28/kenya Last fall, when Just for Feet CEO Harold Ruttenberg learned his company had nailed down a coveted time slot for a third-quarter Super Bowl ad, the sneaker mogul could hardly contain his jubilation. Though a public corporation with over $775 million in annual sales, ranked No. 6 in Fortune magazine's recent list of "America's Fastest Growing Companies," Just for Feet had never before tried its hand at national brand advertising. "We specialize in selling shoes, not commercials," Ruttenberg says. "We had never before created hoopla." Now, here was a chance to burnish Just for Feet's corporate reputation and brand image on a national scale. He says he couldn't wait to tell viewers about the footwear chain's friendly atmosphere, its neighborliness, its reputation for social responsibility. "We're a family type of retailer that caters to a family atmosphere," he says. "We've got shoes we sell. We've got a public that we love. It's a very dynamic atmosphere we have in our stores. Here was an opportunity to tell our story to the largest audience in the world."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/05/28/kenya/feed/ 0 The woman in the gray flannel Mao jacket http://www.salon.com/1999/05/11/advertising/ http://www.salon.com/1999/05/11/advertising/#comments Tue, 11 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/05/11/advertising Almost from the time the first evaporated milk jingle hit the airwaves, advertising has been denounced as a tool of social control, a sinister instrument of mass persuasion and a stupendous waste of money. Lately the critique has moved into high gear. In such celebrated works as "Captains of Consciousness" and "Fables of Abundance," historians Stuart Ewen and Jackson Lears advance devastating critiques of America's high-powered account men and their ever-more-obtrusive schemes to snatch the souls of today's consumers. In this dark view, ads are "channels of desire" in a sinuous matrix of commodity capitalism, in which cars are offered up as engines for wish fulfillment and colonialism is reinforced in the name of oat bran. Until we safeguard the public from the snake oil of silver-tongued pitchmen, "until we confront the infiltration of the commodity system into the interstices of our lives," writes Ewen in "Captains of Consciousness," social justice will be impossible, and "basic human needs will be laid to waste or ignored."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/05/11/advertising/feed/ 0 Out of focus http://www.salon.com/1999/04/23/tk/ http://www.salon.com/1999/04/23/tk/#comments Fri, 23 Apr 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/04/23/focus_groups About a month ago, Mad Dogs & Englishmen, the advertising agency for which I work, set out to do some focus groups on the topic of personal grooming. The groups were convened at the request of a client whose company offers spa services to men and women, and who wanted to gauge the level of interest in a separate, premium-priced tier of treatments. In San Francisco and New York, we had little difficulty convening four groups of affluent, spa-hopping females. But now we had to horn in on a more elusive target: the high-maintenance male. We were looking for the scrubbers, the buffers, the exfoliators and extractors. The kind of guy who values his pedicurist as much as his portfolio manager. Where was he? Who was he?

Our San Francisco market research firm said it could help. It designed a phone questionnaire, known as a "screener," intended to roust our quarry out of his saunas and his treatment rooms and into our facility. There, we would delve beneath his polished surface to discover his inchoate needs and cravings, his unredeemed hopes, his price ceiling for a Dead Sea mud wrap.

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