the marketing 'we' and other lies

Consider these two symptoms of the new culture of capitalism:

• Adverts which say "we love great-tasting [insert bourgeois, pseudo-natural produce]  which is why we make it fresh every day using only the plumpest looking [insert plant-life] picked from our farms in [insert rural backwater]. All we do is crush it all up, then give it a stir and... " SHUT UP PLEASE.

• The growth in Free newspapers and legal free music services, funded through advertising, that's received plenty of discussion over the last week.

There's a connection here. The first, with its bogus use of the first person plural, is a false pretense of abandoning advertising. What advertising does (as consumers know all too well) is to divert attention from a product, towards various externalities that are associated with it. Rather than paying for a seven-blade razor, a man is led to believe that he is indirectly paying for an attractive woman to stroke his neck. The exchange of cash for  a box of little plastic things becomes secondary to the various non-economic hopes and dreams (externalities) that have nothing to do with shopping.

What the royal 'we' does is to replace one bogus strategy with another. Where the traditional advertising model pretends that it is only externalities that matter (and therefore why worry that you are now paying about a tenner for a razor blade), the new model pretends that there are no externalities at all: you are in possession of £2, and in exchange, we will give you some crushed fruit... deal?

The obvious reason why this is bogus is that the 'we' in question doesn't exist, and these slogans are also the product of multi-million pound marketing campaigns. But more importantly, this 'back to basics' nonsense is still hinting at a host of  externalities: the experience of shopping in a market, memories of childhood, the conservative yearning for some lost authenticity and so on. It's not impossible that Gillette could do something similar: "we like to shave. That's why we decided to add a twelfth blade to our razor. We like it and hope you will too..."

The rise of privately financed 'free' stuff does precisely the opposite. By removing money from the exchange, the economic frame involved becomes invisible. Does a free newspaper represent  good value? Impossible to say. The exchange is not a conscious economic one of paying for something, but an unconscious one of stumbling upon advertising as one is reading the articles in it, with associated behavioral consequences In this sense, everything about the exchange is contained in externalities - the newspaper itself costs nothing, but it brings with it certain accidental costs (such as the sudden desire to own a 15-blade razor).

What's going on? The first strategy claims falsely to achieve a complete equivalence between price and product, while the second strategy claims falsely to achieve zero relation between price and product. The first offers pure exchange, the second, pure gift, whereas in truth (as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Callon have argued) all economic culture sits on a continuum between an exchange and a gift.

These marketing strategies are bogus forms of anti-capitalism, fraudulent denials of the unbreakable-but-contradictory relationship between quantity/exchange value and quality/use value. Between them, they promise a new economic culture, in which 'economy' and 'society' become entirely separate domains, neither polluting the other. Innocent Fruit smoothies are just something you buy in a shop; legally available free music is just something that knocks around the internet. Neither of these claims is true.

Comments

[Phil]

"The exchange is not a conscious economic one of paying for something, but an unconscious one of stumbling upon advertising as one is reading the articles in it"

Um... have you ever read a trade magazine? Come to that, I can't see many paid-for newspapers surviving in anything like their current form without advertising. This isn't a new development.

Good rant, though.

[Matt Edgar]

On the food thing, it seems the industry recognises that we want to reconnect with the way their food is produced - but then goes on to patronise us with this whole Janet and John sitting at the kitchen table cooking with mother kind of narrative.

For my money, the Cheesestrings ad is much smarter - they're just made of cheese, it says, but check out the amazing machinery you need to roll them, stretch them and double wrap them in plastic. Bring back child-like wonder at the miracle of processed food (cheesy grin :)

Matt

[Will Davies]

Phil - in general, I suppose you're right. But in the realm of media, something is new. Thanks to the internet/digitisation/Google a new business model has obviously emerged where the goal is scale of audience first and foremost, which is then 'monetised' on the margins by whatever means possible. Admittedly this doesn't apply to the free newspapers that now cover London's pavements (the floor of the bus this evening looked like the debris at the end of a large family christmas), but the drift of marketing might have been diverted marginally anyhow.