Search Results for: "buying in"

by jenks

Hardcore Norm

Because dressing different is such a cliché.

 

stereotyped_classified

art by Curtis Mead

 

“The kids are doing the normcore,” my friend Quang said, trying out the new phrase with a deliberate, old fart dialect.

Only a few moments earlier I had tossed off the word like common parlance.

“‘Normcore?’” he had repeated, making sure he’d heard correctly.

“Yeah,” I explained, “It’s exactly what you think it is. It’s us, now.”

A shockingly pleasant March afternoon had arrived in Boston that day, on the heels of a cold that had felt like osteoporosis. A decade in LA had turned me into a wimp. I had forgotten how I’d ever managed to live through this in my youth.

I had grown up here. In high school I discovered raves. By college I was throwing them in 20,000 square foot warehouses in Dumbo. After that, I moved out to the west coast and managed a vaudeville circus troupe, produced electronic music festivals, and worked with a bunch of bands, among other things. In the span of the past decade I saw the niche “electronica” genre evolve into mainstream “EDM;” I saw the circus subculture infiltrate pop performance acts, and the signature, post-apocalyptic, tribal fashion aesthetic originated within the Burning Man community become a major fashion trend.

But that day in Boston, in 2014, hanging out with friends who had come up through the rave, circus, and goth subcultures, you could hardly tell where any of us had been. What we wore now was nondescript. Non-affiliated. Normal.

The week before, at a craft beer tasting party at an indie advertising agency in Silver Lake, a sculpture artist was remarking about recently looking through photos of style choices from the aughts. “What was I thinking,” she said in bewilderment. That evening she was wearing a black tank top, and, like, pants. Maybe three quarter length? Or not? Maybe black jeans? Or not-jean pants? I couldn’t recall. Perhaps, I thought, this was just a symptom of getting older. There was some kind of sartorial giving a shit phase that we had all grown out of. But it turned out this, too, was a trend. Kids, too young to have grown out of anything, were dressing this way.

“By late 2013, it wasn’t uncommon to spot the Downtown chicks you’d expect to have closets full of Acne and Isabel Marant wearing nondescript half-zip pullovers and anonymous denim,” wrote Fiona Duncan, in a February New York Magazine article titled, “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion:”

I realized that, from behind, I could no longer tell if my fellow Soho pedestrians were art kids or middle-aged, middle-American tourists. Clad in stonewash jeans, fleece, and comfortable sneakers, both types looked like they might’ve just stepped off an R-train after shopping in Times Square. When I texted my friend Brad (an artist whose summer uniform consisted of Adidas barefoot trainers, mesh shorts and plain cotton tees) for his take on the latest urban camouflage, I got an immediate reply: “lol normcore.”

Normcore—it was funny, but it also effectively captured the self-aware, stylized blandness I’d been noticing. Brad’s source for the term was the trend forecasting collective (and fellow artists) K-Hole. They had been using it in a slightly different sense, not to describe a particular look but a general attitude: embracing sameness deliberately as a new way of being cool, rather than striving for “difference” or “authenticity.”

Oh my god, I thought reading this: this is me.

In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, published in 2004, cultural critics, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter examined the inherent contradiction in the idea that counterculture was an opposition to  mass consumer culture. Not only were they not opposed, Heath and Potter explained, they weren’t even separate. Alternative culture’s obsession with being different — expressing that difference through prescribed fashion products and subcultural artifacts — had, in fact, helped to create the very mass consumer society the counterculture believed itself to be the alternative to.

“To me, Nike’s famous swoosh logo had long been the mark of the manipulated,” wrote Rob Walker, author of  2008′s Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy And Who We Are, ”A symbol for suckers who take its ‘Just Do It’ bullying at face value. It’s long been, in my view, a brand for followers. On the other hand, the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star had been a mainstay sneaker for me since I was a teenager back in the 1980′s, and I stuck with it well into my thirties. Converse was the no-bullshit yin to Nike’s all-style-and-image yang. It’s what my outsider heroes from Joey Ramone to Kurt Combain wore. So I found [Nike’s] buyout [of Converse] disheartening…. but why, really, did I feel so strongly about a brand of sneaker–any brand of sneaker?”

In response to Buying In, I’d written, “Whether we’re choosing to wear Nikes, Converse, Timberlands, Doc Martens, or some obscure Japanese brand that doesn’t even exist in the US, we’re deliberately saying something about ourselves with the choice. And regardless of how “counter” to whatever culture we think we are, getting to express that differentiation about our selves requires buying something.”

But that was five years ago. A funny thing happened on the way to the mid twenty-teens. The digital era ushered in an unprecedented flood of availability — of both information and products. This constant, ubiquitous access to everything — what Chris Anderson dubbed the “Long  Tail” in his 2006 book of the same name – had changed the cultural equation. We had evolved, as Anderson predicted, “from an ‘Or’ era of hits or niches (mainstream culture vs. subcultures) to an ‘AND’ era.” With the widespread proliferation of internet access, mass culture got less mass, and niche culture got less obscure. We became what Anderson called  a  “massively parallel culture: millions of microcultures coexisting and interacting in a baffling array of ways.” On this new, flattened landscape, what was there to be counter to?

“Jeremy Lewis, the founder/editor of Garmento and a freelance stylist and fashion writer, calls normcore ‘one facet of a growing anti-fashion sentiment,’” Duncan writes in New York  Magazine. “His personal style is (in the words of Andre Walker, a designer Lewis featured in the magazine’s last issue) ‘exhaustingly plain’—this winter, that’s meant a North Face fleece, khakis, and New Balances. Lewis says his ‘look of nothing’ is about absolving oneself from fashion.”

That is how normcore happened to me, too. When I quit the circus, leaving behind its sartorial regulations, I realized that difference wasn’t an expression of identity: it was a rat race.

“Fashion has become very overwhelming and popular,” Lewis explains in New York Magazine. “Right now a lot of people use fashion as a means to buy rather than discover an identity and they end up obscured and defeated. I’m getting cues from people like Steve Jobs and Jerry Seinfeld. It’s a very flat look, conspicuously unpretentious, maybe even endearingly awkward. It’s a lot of cliché style taboos, but it’s not the irony I love, it’s rather practical and no-nonsense, which to me, right now, seems sexy. I like the idea that one doesn’t need their clothes to make a statement.”

“Magazines, too,” Duncan writes, “have picked up the look:”

The enduring appeal of the Patagonia fleece [was] displayed on Patrik Ervell and Marc Jacobs’s runways. Edie Campbell slid into Birkenstocks (or the Céline version thereof) in Vogue Paris. Adidas trackies layered under Louis Vuitton cashmere in Self Service. A bucket hat and Nike slippers framed an Alexander McQueen coveralls in Twin. Smaller, younger magazines like London’s Hot and Cool and New York’s Sex, were interested in even more genuinely average ensembles, skipping high-low blends for the purity of head-to-toe normcore.

One of the first stylists I started bookmarking for her normcore looks was the London-based Alice Goddard. She was assembling this new mainstream minimalism in the magazine she co-founded, Hot and Cool, as early as 2011. For Goddard, the appeal of normal clothes was the latest thing. One standout editorial from Hot and Cool no. 5 (Spring 2013) was composed entirely of screenshots of people from Google Map’s Street View app. Goddard had stumbled upon “this tiny town in America” on Map sand thought the plainly-dressed people there looked amazing. The editorial she designed was a parody of contemporary street style photography—“the main point of difference,” she says, “being that people who are photographed by street style photographers are generally people who have made a huge effort with their clothing, and the resulting images often feel a bit over fussed and over precious—the subject is completely aware of the outcome; whereas the people we were finding on Google Maps obviously had no idea they were being photographed, and yet their outfits were, to me, more interesting.”

New media has changed our relation to information, and, with it, fashion. Reverse Google Image Search and tools like Polyvore make discovering the source of any garment as simple as a few clicks. Online shopping—from eBay through the Outnet—makes each season available for resale almost as soon as it goes on sale. As Natasha Stagg, the Online Editor of V Magazine and a regular contributor at DIS (where she recently wrote a normcore-esque essay about the queer appropriation of mall favorite Abercrombie & Fitch), put it: “Everyone is a researcher and a statistician now, knowing accidentally the popularity of every image they are presented with, and what gets its own life as a trend or meme.” The cycles of fashion are so fast and so vast, it’s impossible to stay current; in fact, there is no one current.

Emily Segal of K-HOLE insists that normcore isn’t about one specific aesthetic. “It’s not about being simple or forfeiting individuality to become a bland, uniform mass,” she explains. Rather, it’s about welcoming the possibility of being recognizable, of looking like other people—and “seeing that as an opportunity for connection.”

K-HOLE describes normcore as a theory rather than a look; but in practice, the contemporary normcore styles I’ve seen have their clear aesthetic precedent in the nineties. The editorials in Hot and Cool look a lot like Corinne Day styling newcomer Kate Moss in Birkenstocks in 1990, or like Art Club 2000′s appropriation of madras from the Gap, like grunge-lite and Calvin Klein minimalism. But while (in their original incarnation) those styles reflected anxiety around “selling out,” today’s version is more ambivalent toward its market reality.

In a post Hot-Topic world, where Forever21 serves up fast fashion in processed flavors like, Occupy:

and Burning Man:

Screenshot-2014-03-10-15.20.59 Screenshot-2014-03-10-15.20.48

we’re realizing that alternativeness, as a means for authentic self expression, is futile.“Normcore isn’t about rebelling against or giving into the status quo,” Duncan concludes, “It’s about letting go of the need to look distinctive.”

In our all-access, always connected, globalized world, obscurity is scarce. When everything is accessible, nothing is alternative.

“In the 21st century,”  Rob Walker wrote back in 2008, not recognizing the quickly approaching end of counterculture, “We still grapple with the eternal dilemma of wanting to feel like individuals and to feel as though we’re apart of something bigger than ourselves. We all seek ways to resolve this fundamental tension of modern life.”

In 2014, normcore is one solution we’ve found to resolve it.

    



Subscribe for more like this.






by jenks

Charlie Sheen Is Not Crazy

Image: Culture Wins

Charlie Sheen is not crazy. Or, at least, he’s not crazy the way you think he is. Charlie Sheen may finally be admitting that he’s lost his mind — exclusively to Life&Style, of all places, if we are to believe it — but that’s something that would have already been a long, long time in the making. What’s been happening over the past few weeks is not Charlie Sheen going crazy. Although it’s certainly easy to get confused. No doubt, Charlie Sheen wants you to think he’s crazy. After all, the boring recovering-addict Charlie Sheen Show — or the boring functioning-addict Charlie Sheen Show, depending on your preference — is much less interesting to watch than the “Crazy” one. And we are still watching….

In the course of this production it’s hard not to think about the film I’m Still Here, the cinéma vérité chronicling of Joaquin Phoenix’s “retirement from acting.”


.

For a year and a half, the twice Oscar-nominated Phoenix gained weight, stopped shaving, and tried to start a career as a rapper while his brother-in-law and fledgling filmmaker, Casey Affleck, came along for the ride to document this seeming descent into madness. Phoenix even famously came on Letterman in the course of I’m Still Here‘s production, disheveled and incoherent — an appearance that, by the end, prompted Letterman to say he owes an apology to Farrah Fawcett, til then considered his most disastrous guest of all time.

Of course, in the end it turned out this was not just another overindulged celebrity losing his mind. Nor, even after it was revealed that Phoenix’s “retirement” and subsequent actions weren’t exactly the plot of a straight “documentary,” was it all just simply a hoax. Back on the Late Show a year and a half later, now clean-shaven, and charming as usual, Phoenix explained:

We wanted to do a film that explored celebrity, and explored the relationship between the media and the consumers and the celebrities themselves. We wanted something that would feel really authentic. I’d started watching a lot of reality shows and I was amazed that people believed them; that they called them, like, ‘reality.’ I thought the only reason why is because it’s billed as being ‘real’ and the people use their real names. But the acting is terrible. I thought I could handle that. Because you don’t have to be very good. You just use your name, and people think that it’s real.

For a year and a half, Joaquin Phoenix lived the life of a character who shared his name and history and circumstances, both in private scenes and in the public eye. What then, truly, is the difference between what’s “real” and what isn’t? What does “hoax” even mean in the age of “reality TV?” I’m Still Here, along with the context around it, is a philosophical exploration of these questions.

It’s a very similar postmodern paradox that is at the heart of Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop:


.

“The world’s first street art disaster movie” tells the story of Thierry Guetta, an eccentric French-born shop-keeper living in L.A. whose compulsive need to record every waking moment, and a cousin who happens to be the street artist Space Invader, combined to lead Guetta to become the de facto documentarian of the street art scene, tagging along on late-night art missions with its luminaries, including L.A.’s Shepard Fairey and, ultimately, the elusive reigning godfather of street art himself, Banksy. About two thirds of the way through the movie, Guetta, who had never previously edited any of the mountains of footage he’d been obsessively recording, goes to the U.K. to present a first draft of his “street art documentary” to Banksy for feedback. Deflecting his true opinion of the unwatchable film, Banksy suggests that perhaps Guetta should consider becoming a street artist himself and sends him back to L.A. with the idea of putting on a small show. Banksy also requests Guetta send him his raw video footage so that he can reedit it himself. And this is where the movie becomes something like an Andy Warhol adaptation of the Blair Witch Project.

A few months before Joaquin Phoenix would be announcing his acting “retirement,” Guetta’s artist persona, Mr. Brainwash, or MBW, had moved from plastering L.A. with his own likeness — an image of a guy holding a video camera — straight to mounting a massive “street art” show, called “Life Is Beautiful,” in a 15,000 square-foot venue. Seemingly overnight, Mr. Brainwash was being positioned as an up-and-comer with the oeuvre of a Shepard Fairey or a Banksy — by then both artists, as well as many other leading names in the street art world, had begun having their art on display inside galleries as opposed to on the exterior of walls — except unlike these artists with years, even decades of creative evolution and refinement, Guetta had no experience. He’d hired an army of sculptors and designers to manufacture the pieces for his show, ripped straight from bookmarks in art books — even the illustration of Guetta holding the camera had been created by someone else.

The day of the show the line to get in stretched for blocks. Four thousand people attended the opening. By the end of the day nearly a million dollars worth of Mr. Brainwash art had been sold.

The story, at face value, seems so preposterous that the question of whether it could truly be real has dogged the film, as well as created the suspense that’s made it even more of a phenomenon. Could an amateur who’d never actually made art himself succeed at pulling off a show that so blatantly counterfeited and so quickly eclipsed those of the art form’s recognized heavyweights? And would they really release a movie about it happening? Or is all of it — the movie, Life is Beautiful, Mr. Brainwash — simply Banksy’s greatest prank yet? Theories abound. The New York Times labeled it as a harbinger of a new cinematic subgenre: The Prankumentary. “The whole thing, it’s clear now,” Fast Company insisted, “Was an intricate prank being pulled on all of us by Banksy, who has never publicly revealed his identity, with Fairey as his accomplice.” Their conjecture about what really happened: “Banksy… convinced Guetta to pose as a budding graffiti artist wannabe so he and Fairey could ‘direct’ him in real life — manufacturing a brand new persona.” Yet when asked at the end of the film how he feels knowing that he is in part responsible for Mr. Brainwash, Shepard Fairey laughs ruefully, “I had the best intentions. But sometimes even when you have the best intentions things can go awry…. The phenomenon of Thierry becoming a street artist, and a lot of suckers buying into his show and him selling a lot of expensive art very quickly, anthropologically, sociologically, it’s a fascinating thing to observe. And maybe there’s some things to be learned from it.” For his part, Banksy, even as his voice is scrambled beyond recognition, conveys unmistakable melancholy as he says, “I used to encourage everyone I met to make art. I used to think that everyone should do it….. I don’t really do that so much anymore.”

“This brutal and revealing account of what happens when fame, money and vandalism collide” could just be an L.A. story simply too bizarre to have been made up, and just as easily, it could all be a fabricated fable about what happens to an artistic movement when it becomes commercialized. From “selling out” to “cashing in” the concept is so mundane it’s a cliché, but Exit Through The Gift Shop‘s treatment is primarily to emphasize the absurdity of the progression of events rather than to make any concrete statement about them. As Banksy’s art dealer says at the end of the film, “I think the joke is on… I don’t know who the joke is on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke.”

Which brings us back to Charlie Sheen. Not that what Sheen’s doing is any kind of joke or “prank.” This is all very much for real for him. And it is also a very deliberate performance. How did we get here? February 28, Charlie Sheen goes on Good Morning America, The Today Show, TMZ, Radar, Piers Morgan on CNN, 20/20 — basically, every celebrity interview news show he possibly can, and attracts a tsunami of flabbergasted attention for bein’ all ka-raaaazy. The next day he launches a social media empire.

Suddenly sounding not so crazy. Hell, as a digital strategist, I’d say it’s a pretty smart move. Within 25 hours and 17 minutes, Charlie Sheen had broken the world record for amassing 1 million Twitter followers faster than anyone else. Less than a week after his first tweet, he’d reached 2 million. “Another record shattered,” he tweeted, “We gobbled the soft target that was 2.0 mil, like a bag of troll-house zombie chow.” By then, he’d also launched a social media intern search:

which received over 74 THOUSAND! submissions in 5 days. Arguably no other celebrity has “gotten” the way social media works as fast. Even Conan had a slower uptake, though he’s undeniably provided a template for Sheen to work off of. (After getting canned from his TV job, Sheen did like MBW to Conan’s Banksy and announced he’s going on tour — the “Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not An Option” Tour — just like Conan’s Banned From Television Tour last year in the wake of his own network debacle.) And, obviously, Sheen’s not doing it all on his own.

In Sheen’s 11-minute livestream episode, titled, “Torpedeos of Truth Part 2,” recorded on March 7th, 2011 — a week after his “old media” blitzkrieg — a terribly lit, grossly contrasted video in which a curmudgeonly, borderline belligerent Sheen looks like he might not have showered for days prior then rolled out of bed that morning, turned on his lap top, and started recording through the built-in camera above the screen, at 6 minutes, 40 seconds, when he ducks “below the frame line,” the camera moves. This is a recording made to look like it’s being done through a shitty built-in computer camera, but when it moves to follow Sheen as he ducks it’s suddenly clear there may be a camera person involved. If there is someone behind the camera, there could just as easily have been a lighting guy, a makeup person, but No! “Make me look as crazy as possible,” was clearly the direction here. By episode four it’d been announced that Sheen had officially been fired from his sitcom. The ante was upped. Suddenly Sheen, well-lit, made-up, looking as healthy as a marathoner — if not for the chain-smoking — in his sweat-wicking Nike shirt, was performing a soliloquy sounding like some misplaced Hunter S. Thompson diatribe. Clearly some writing talent may have been called in — if it hadn’t been already: consider that basically everything coming out of Charlie Sheen’s mouth becomes a meme — it’s been impossible to escape hearing someone say #winning (a hashtag in Charlie Sheen’s very first tweet) for weeks; then there’s #tigerblood, which is so meme-able it can’t even be summarized properly:


Tiger Blood Energy Potion found in a hotel lobby at SXSW Interactive. Photo: Danny Newman

Right now 4Chan, the primordial ooze that has spawned everything from lolcats to Rickrolling to SadKeanu to every other Internet meme you’ve ever heard of, is looking at Charlie Sheen like Woh. The last guy anywhere near this unstoppably memetastic was the Old Spice Guy–

and that guy was created by an AD AGENCY!

Something else you might notice — Charlie Sheen almost never swears. You have never heard him bleeped in any of the interviews he’s done on TV. There are no R-rated words on his Twitter stream. Every so often there’s some sprinkled in his livestreams, but for the most part The Charlie Sheen Show is all-ages. Where he could say “assholes” or “douchebags,” he says “silly fools” or “trolls.” These Playskool insults are unexpected, amusing, almost benign, yet nostalgically cruel. This is not the syntax of a man out of control.

“Where do these words come from, Charlie,” 20/20’s Andrea Canning asked.

“I don’t know,” he rolled his eyes, “They’re just words that sound cool together. Stuff just comes out and it’s entertaining and it’s fun and it sounds different from all the other garbage people are spewing, you know?”

Charlie Sheen doesn’t have Tourettes. He is deliberately saying these things to entertain and be funny and unique. And he’s good at it. Bret Easton Ellis — the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, as well as Lunar Park, a haunted house story in which the main character is a writer named Bret Easton Ellis who’s lived the same history as his eponymous creator (“It was always the A booth. It was always the front seat of the roller coaster. It was never ‘Let’s not get the bottle of Cristal’ … It was the beginning of a time when it was almost as if the novel itself didn’t matter anymore — publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour.”) or is it, rather, the life he was expected to have been leading? (“What was I doing hanging out with gangbangers and diamond smugglers? What was I doing buying kilos? My apartment reeked of marijuana and freebase. One afternoon I woke up and realized I didn’t know how anything worked anymore. Which button turned the espresso machine on? Who was paying my mortgage? Where did the stars come from? After a while you learn that everything stops.“) — writing in an article titled, “Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire,” calls Sheen, “the most fascinating person wandering through the culture:”

You’re completely missing the point if you think the Charlie Sheen moment is really a story about drugs. Yeah, they play a part, but they aren’t at the core of what’s happening—or why this particular Sheen moment is so fascinating…. This privileged child of the media’s sprawling entertainment Empire has now become its most gifted ridiculer. Sheen has embraced post-Empire, making his bid to explain to all of us what celebrity now means. Whether you like it or not is beside the point. It’s where we are, babe. We’re learning something. Rock and roll. Deal with it.

Post-Empire isn’t just about admitting doing “illicit” things publicly and coming clean—it’s a (for now) radical attitude that says the Empire lie doesn’t exist anymore, you friggin’ Empire trolls. For my younger friends, it’s no longer rare; it’s now the norm. To Empire gatekeepers, Charlie Sheen seems dangerous and in need of help because he’s destroying (and confirming) illusions about the nature of celebrity.

It’s thrilling watching someone call out the solemnity of the celebrity interview, and Sheen is loudly calling it out as the sham it is. He’s raw and lucid and intense…. We’re not used to these kinds of interviews. It’s coming off almost as performance art and we’ve never seen anything like it—because he’s not apologizing. It’s an irresistible spectacle. We’ve never seen a celebrity more nakedly revealing.

It’s the contradiction we could never quite reconcile in I’m Still Here or Exit Through The Gift Shop; one we can accept in Lady Gaga because she’s not using her real name and we’re sort of OK with it when it’s just a “character.” Charlie Sheen is real and not real at once: a spectacle and a revelation. It’s meta-postmodernism. It’s existential performance art. Minutes before Charlie Sheen’s first livestream was set to start, the audio feed came on. You could hear Sheen rehearsing the rant he would perform that night, prompting the question: is this all an act? Of course it is! He’s an acTOR. From a family of actors, who’s spent his entire life performing. There’s no way he’d go on camera ever without rehearsing. Charlie Sheen’s whole life has been a performance, and this now is not so much different, just with a bigger audience and, as we say in the 21st century music business, cutting out the middleman. As far as Charlie Sheen knows, this is what real is. And as far a we know that’s what it is, too.

Ellis writes:

If you can’t accept the fact that we’re at the height of an exhibitionistic display culture and that you’re going to be blindsided by TMZ (and humiliated by Harvey Levin, or Chelsea Handler—princess of post-Empire) while stumbling out of a club on Sunset Boulevard at 2 in the morning, then you should be a travel agent instead of a movie star. Being publicly mocked is part of the game, and you’re a fool if you don’t play along. This is why Sheen seems saner and funnier than any other celebrity right now. He also makes better jokes about his situation than most worried editorialists or late-night comedians.

What does shame mean anymore? my friends in their 20s ask. Why in the hell did your boyfriend post a song called “Suck My Ballz” on Facebook last night? my mom asks. But nothing yet compares to the transparency that Sheen has unleashed in the past two weeks—contempt about celebrity, his profession, the old Empire world order.

Ellis’s “Empire” is a reference to Gore Vidal’s definition of global American hegemony, which Ellis dates from 1945 until 2005: the era that defined the 20th century. Post-Empire is where we are now. For Ellis, Empire is the lie, the having to hide who you really are, the keeping up appearances; post-Empire, on the other hand, is what Ellis calls, “aggressive transparency.” But his perspective has one flaw: for Ellis, both Empire and post-Empire are binary. It’s one or the other. It’s true or it’s a lie; it’s real or its counterfeit. The post-Empire reality, however, is not the end of the lie, it’s the end of the binary. Sure, “radical transparency” has become a 21st century marketing buzzword. Sure, Mark Zuckerberg believes that Privacy is Dead and has remade Facebook in that image. Sure, I wrote last year, what makes Iron Man the first 21st century superhero? His lack of alter ego; his unconflicted, absolute identity. But that all is only part of the Millennial story.

Social media researcher danah boyd writes:

There’s an assumption that teens don’t care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways.

Just because teens choose to share some content widely does not mean that they wish all content could be universally accessible. What they want is a sense of control.

I’d argue this is, in fact, true of all of us now in the post-Empire. Not just teens. “What Sheen has exemplified and has clarified,” writes Ellis, “Is the moment in the culture when not caring what the public thinks about you or your personal life is what matters most—and what makes the public love you even more (if not exactly CBS or the creator of the show that has made you so wealthy).” Except that Charlie Sheen still very much DOES care. And so do all the rest of us in the 21st century. It’s there in every Facebook photo you’ve untagged yourself from. You had your reasons. It’s there in every location you pulled out your phone to check in at, and then decided not to. It’s there every time you hovered over, and then didn’t click the “Like” button. As tech blogger, Robert Scoble, writes:

The other day I found myself over at Yelp.com clicking “like” on a bunch of Half Moon Bay restaurants. After a while I noticed that I was only clicking “like” on restaurants that were cool, hip, high end, or had extraordinary experiences.

That’s cool. I’m sure you’re doing the same thing.

But then I started noticing that…. What I was presenting to you wasn’t reality.

See, I like McDonalds and Subway. But I wasn’t clicking like on those. Why not?

Because we want to present ourselves to other people the way we would like to have other people perceive us as.

I’d rather be seen as someone who eats salad at Pasta Moon than someone who eats a Big Mac at McDonalds.

This is the problem with likes and other explicit sharing systems. We lie and we lie our asses off.

Not only do we still care what other people think about us, we now curate it more obsessively. Trent Reznor calls it “A hyper-real version of yourself.”

This is the hyper-real version of Charlie Sheen. It is a role that Charlie Sheen is performing. And it is also who he actually is. Because how could he not be? Whatever Charlie Sheen does, that is who he is. This is the only way he has to take control over the flow of his information. For a celebrity in particular, as Ellis points out, that control is virtually non-existent. So how did Charlie Sheen wrest it back? By outdoing TMZ and the news shows and the magazines at their own game. He is no longer just a commodity of the tabloid industrial complex. He is the creator and star of his own show, the Crazy Charlie Sheen Show, and all the press is simply promotion.

Then again, it could be something much more simple. At Coachella 2008, Prince, headlining, kept demanding over and over, “Say my name, Coachella! Say my name, Coachella! Say my name, Coachella!” And like some epic call-and-response an ocean of 150,000 voices roared back: “Prince! Prince! Prince!” And I realized that if you’re Prince, there’s probably no way you can even get off anymore without 150,000 people screaming your name. Perhaps, if you’re Charlie Sheen, you can’t stay sober unless two million people are following your every move — just over two weeks after his first Tweet, it’s now closing in on 3 million.

“We’ve come a long way in the last two weeks,” Ellis concludes. “Sheen is the new reality, bitch, and anyone who’s a hater can go back and hang out with the rest of the trolls in the graveyard of Empire.” Like I’m Still Here and Exit Through The Gift Shop, what Charlie Sheen is doing is part of a continuum exposing the now inherent unreliability of the markers we’d previously depended on to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. In some ways it’s as basic as the shift from the 20th century to the 21st; from analog to digital, from binary to exponential complexity. What, truly, does reality mean when it’s photoshopable? Or just another marketing campaign for some new movie? Not that reality doesn’t exist. Things are, out in the world; you can touch them. Earthquakes happen; nuclear reactors break; nations perch perilously on the verge of catastrophe. Reality exists, but it is no different from not reality. From the inscrutably contradictory government statements about radiation levels, from the fake Nuclear Fallout maps that spread like wildfire. Reality and not reality exist in the same plane now. It’s enough to make you go crazy. Unless you’re Charlie Sheen. In which case you’re not crazy. You simply are as your world is.

.

    



Subscribe for more like this.








by jenks

does good matter?

“Companies: How to Make Millions By Switching to A Green-Colored Logo”
– Headline in The Onion’s “Obligatory Green Issue”

I’ve been thinking about this, the third in what’s evidently become a series of posts inspired by Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between Who We Are and What We Buy, by Rob Walker, since I read the section in the book (it’s also been reprinted as a Fast Company article) where Walker writes about American Apparel changing its brand messaging. Initially the company’s identity hinged on its “Sweatshop Free” production, but sex, surprise surprise, turned out to be a much better sell than good labor practices. Walker writes:

American Apparel seemed to me to be a marquee example of a business that had positioned itself to respond to a rising tide of ethical, antibrand consumers. At a moment when practically every clothes maker was offshoring to cut costs, American Apparel made its wares at a U.S. factory in which the average industrial worker (usually a Latino immigrant) was paid between $12 and $13 an hour and got medical benefits. The company had taken out ads in little arty magazines, noting that it was “sweatshop free.”

[But] Another self-consciously ethical clothing brand, SweatX, had just gone out of business. The lesson of SweatX, [American Apparel CEO Dov] Charney said, was that building a brand solely around a company’s ethical practices was not a good strategy for reaching masses of consumers. The ethical sell was too limiting. It was a niche strategy, at best. Which was why American Apparel was moving away from the ethical sell to something very different.

Charney pulled out a copy of a book called The 48 Laws of Power and read me No. 13, which suggested that to get what you want, you must appeal to people’s self-interest, not to their mercy. “That’s the problem with the anti-sweatshop movement. You’re not going to get customers walking into stores by asking for mercy and gratitude.” If you want to sell something, ethical or otherwise, he said, snapping the book closed, “appeal to people’s self-interest.”

By the time I visited American Apparel’s headquarters and factory in Los Angeles to meet with Charney a second time, the company had transitioned to an image soaked in youth and sex. This was apparent in its stores — where the decor often included things such as Penthouse covers — and in its print ads. Yes, some of these ads mentioned quality and the sweatshop-free angle, but usually in small type, under a photograph of a half-naked young woman.

The company was producing 32,000 pieces a day and struggling to keep up with orders. In months, [the company’s] system was churning out 90,000 pieces a day and would eventually reach 250,000. While the company was projecting an air of almost reckless decadence in its ads, it was quietly building a thriving made-in-America business model.

All of which, of course, made me wonder–and perhaps might make you wonder, too: Does good matter?

Good itself, I mean, without a gloss of sex covering it over, does it matter as a selling point to us as consumers?

Researchers Remi Trudel and June Cotte were trying to figure out the same thing in their studies for the May 2008 Wall Street Journal piece Does Being Ethical Pay?

For corporations, social responsibility has become a big business. Companies spend billions of dollars doing good works — everything from boosting diversity in their ranks to developing eco-friendly technology — and then trumpeting those efforts to the public.

But does it pay off?

To find out, we conducted a series of experiments. We showed consumers the same products — coffee and T-shirts — but told one group the items had been made using high ethical standards and another group that low standards had been used. A control group got no information.

In all of our tests, consumers were willing to pay a slight premium for the ethically made goods. But they went much further in the other direction: They would buy unethically made products only at a steep discount.

Our first experiment asked two questions. How much more will people pay for an ethically produced product? And how much less are they willing to spend for one they think is unethical?

To test these questions, we gathered a random group of 97 adult coffee drinkers and asked them how much they would pay for a pound of beans from a certain company. We used a brand that’s not available in North America, so none of the participants would be familiar with it.

But before the people answered, we asked them to read some information about the company’s production standards. One group got positive ethical information, and one group negative; the control group got neutral information, similar to what shoppers would typically know in a store.

After reading about the company and its coffee, the people told us the price they were willing to pay on an 11-point scale, from $5 to $15. The results? The mean price for the ethical group ($9.71 per pound) was significantly higher than that of the control group ($8.31) or the unethical group ($5.89).

Meanwhile, as the numbers show, the unethical group was demanding to pay significantly less for the product than the control group. In fact, the unethical group punished the coffee company’s bad behavior more than the ethical group rewarded its good behavior. The unethical group’s mean price was $2.42 below the control group’s, while the ethical group’s mean price was $1.40 above. So, negative information had almost twice the impact of positive information on the participants’ willingness to pay.

Trudel and Cotte also researched just how ethical companies really need to be in order to reap marketplace rewards, that is, are consumers willing to pay more for a product that is 100% ethically produced versus one that is 50% or 25% ethically produced? Their findings showed that there is a certain “ethical threshold” beyond which any ethical acts might reinforce the company’s image, but don’t induce people to pay more. And lastly, they examined the effect of pre-existing consumer attitudes, and found that people with high expectations about how companies should behave doled out bigger rewards and punishments than those with low expectations.

For companies, the implications of this study — albeit limited — are apparent. Efforts to move toward ethical production, and promote that behavior, appear to be a wise investment. In other words, if you act in a socially responsible manner, and advertise that fact, you may be able to charge slightly more for your products.

Not an overwhelming rallying cry to assert that good is here, it matters, and we should get used to it, exactly, but clearly an opportunity to explore a new ethical “market segment.” As Walker writes:

Perhaps this is why many big companies and brands are not so much changing their products as adding new alternatives to their existing product mixes, or carving a small donation to charity out of their profit margins. Pepsi-Cola is testing an all-natural version of its flagship drink called Pepsi Raw, and Clorox has launched an eco-friendly line of cleaning products. The Bono-promoted (Product) Red initiative brands existing products that dedicate a portion of the purchase price to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. There’s even a (Product) Red version of the iPod.

A whopping majority of American shoppers may consider themselves environmentalists, but, according to the Journal of Industrial Ecology, only 10% to 12% “actually go out of their way to purchase environmentally sound products.” Similarly, Brandweek reported on a survey that found that even among consumers who called themselves “environmentally conscious,” more than half could not name a single green brand.

Ask most people whether they care about the environment, and it’s not particularly surprising that many would say yes. Ask whether they would back that up by “buying green” if they had the chance, and again, it’s likely that very few would admit to being hypocrites by saying no. What we do in the marketplace is another matter.

There is a real-world overload of factors that confront consumers in the marketplace — price, quality, convenience, pleasure, plus the countless number of symbols that provide us with rationales to buy. The Yale Center for Customer Insights designed an experiment to test this phenomenon. It divided 108 subjects into two groups. Members of one group were presented with a straightforward consumer choice. Would they prefer to buy a vacuum cleaner (a utilitarian object) or a pair of jeans (a bit of a luxury), each of which was assigned the same price, $50? About 72% chose the vacuum cleaner. Members of the other group were told to imagine they had volunteered to spend three hours a week either teaching children in a homeless shelter or “improving the environment.” They were asked to explain their choice, a process meant to prod them into engaging with the idea. Then they faced the vacuum-cleaner-or-jeans choice. In this group, a majority (57%) opted for the jeans.

Although very few of the subjects made the connection, the researchers concluded that “the opportunity to appear altruistic by committing to a charitable act in a prior task” gives us license to choose a luxury item. A similar set of studies indicates that subjects are more likely to splurge on fancier sunglasses or pricier concert tickets after giving to charity. If you buy ecological or green products or consume alternative health care or practice yoga, it’s easy to conclude, “Hey, I’ve done my part.”

These efforts [by big companies] add just enough options to the miles of retail shelves to give us all an ethical fix — to do our one good shopping deed. Then we can push our basket a little farther down the aisle, letting other rationales take over: Here’s a bargain, here’s a great product, here’s something that I could probably get cheaper elsewhere, but as long as I’m here, I’ll just get it — and here, yes, here is something ethical. I’ll take one of those, too.

Trudel and Cotte concluded at the end of their research: “The lessons are clear. Companies should segment their market and make a particular effort to reach out to buyers with high ethical standards, because those are the customers who can deliver the biggest potential profits on ethically produced goods.”

Rather than marketing ethical products to a mainstream audience, big companies can simply create a separate ethical brand or product line, repackage it as a luxury “good,” and sell it at a premium to the niche, conscientious consumer demographic–which may be willing to pay more for ethical products, but couldn’t scale to support a company like SweatX, or to motivate the big companies to change their practices overall.

Is that the fate of good, then? Is the extent of it’s significance as a selling point simply the justification for a reverse “ethical tax”?

At the PSFK conference in San Francisco last week, GOOD Magazine co-founder Max Schorr’s presentation, “Aligning Interests,” (echoing that 13th law of power) was subtitled: “When cynical people admit they’re idealistic you might be on to something.” At the beginning of his presentation Schorr asked a room full of marketers how many of us wanted to make a positive impact. Pretty much everyone raised their hands. When he asked how many of us wanted to make money, the same hands shot up. The idea then is that to effect real positive change these kinds of interests have to align. Doing good has to be separated from the bleak, unprofitable, un-fun, self-righteous, and ultimately ineffectual idea lf altruism, and the “triple bottom line” of sustainability, profit, and positive impact, needs to become a single bottom line. Schorr’s presentation was the most loudly applauded of the whole day, and thereafter the most frequently referenced. There is no doubt that marketers–well, those of us that raised our hands anyway–we WANT good to matter. We WANT consumer demand for ethics and sustainability to affect the substance of what the market supplies. We want good to succeed.

But does it have to matter as a selling point to do that?

In his presentation, Schorr talked about how the magazine has stopped using the word “Green.” The reason behind this move being to stop presenting sustainable practices as some kind of distinct “alternative” from what should simply be the default standard. In a sense, this is what American Apparel did as well when they stopped trumpeting their ethical practices to distinguish their brand identity.

Maybe it’s all about thinking ahead. We shouldn’t confuse current consumer attitudes with what they’re likely to be in the future. No doubt a company’s environmental friendliness matters more now to the average consumer than it would have before the release of An Inconvenient Truth. And I’d be willing to bet that ethical production practices in general matter more to us now than they did before the wave of mass internet adoption hit, and access to information about a company’s practices became easily accessible to the average web surfer. Trudel and Cotte even acknowledged that if 100% ethically produced products become the expected norm, anything less may be punished by consumers. So perhaps good actually WILL matter quite a bit more in the future than it does now.

But will it ever matter more than sex?

Maybe that gloss on top won’t hurt anyway. Just…. you know….. in case.

    



Subscribe for more like this.






by jenks

what ad agencies can learn from indie brands

In Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between Who We Are and What We Buy, Rob Walker talks about “underground brands”–lifestyle symbols created by independent entrepreneurs. In fact, I actually think it’s easier to think of underground brands as “independent brands,” (cuz what does “underground” really mean, anyway?) much like independent music:

In popular music, independent music, often abbreviated as indie, is a term used to describe independence from major commercial record labels and an autonomous, do-it-yourself approach to recording and publishing.

Similarly then, indie brands are independent from major publicly-traded companies, and reflective of a do-it-yourself approach to lifestyle symbol creation. Both indie and major brands appeal to consumers for the same reasons–as expressions of identity, and community belonging–but the indie side functions very differently. Indie brands can often take risks that the major ones wouldn’t know how to were they even interested, they are able to maneuver more deftly in a rapidly changing consumer landscape, take advantage of new opportunities more swiftly, and now more than ever before, they are blazing the trails and creating the models that many major brands are starting to emulate.

As someone who’s been intimately involved in the development of several independent brands I thought I would share some suggestions both from my own experience, as well as from insights synthesized with various examples from Buying In, of what ad agencies (and major brands) can learn from the indies about staying competitive in contemporary culture.

1. INTEGRATE DEPARTMENTS
Agencies talk of integration like it’s the latest buzzword since “viral,” (which, incidentally, before it was a buzzword, was also first tested by independent brands) but most are still set up to approach marketing in a compartmentalized, paint-by-numbers way that doesn’t fit with how any of us in the digital era actually interact with media and messaging. In a time when we update our facebook status while watching TV online, and google something we’ve just seen on a billboard we drove past, all media overlaps. As natives of this environment, indie brand creators don’t think “Print” vs. “New Media” or “Creative” vs. “Media Buying.” Of course, a variety of skill sets is necessary, but when a “media channel” can now basically exist anywhere that people are playing attention, it’s counterproductive to continue enforcing separation between all the various departments of messaging development and dissemination. Without the imposition of this bureaucratically segregated setup, indie brands approach marketing as an inherently integrated process, dealing with the way the different channels at their disposal feed into one another as part of an interconnected system.

2. HIRE DIFFERENTLY
None of the indie brand creators I’ve ever worked with majored in marketing–and that goes for me, too. Marketing majors end up at ad agencies, indie brand creators, on the other hand, end up creating culture. Music, fashion, publications, events, blogs, graffiti, whatever. If it’s a genre of DIY expression, that’s where indie brand creators can be found, and it’s where strategies that take on new marketing options are going to be developed. I’ll admit, I did take one Marketing 101 class, though, and it’s probably because marketing is taught as a segregated process that its students are primed to continue thinking within the same kind of box once they graduate. Indie brand creators think outside the marketing box because 1. They were never taught there was a box to begin with, and 2. They couldn’t afford to try out the box anyway, so developing “alternatives” is their default. This is who you want to be hiring to help develop progressive marketing strategies.

3. INVEST IN CULTURE NOT MEDIA
In a consumer landscape niched up into various lifestyles, “mass marketing” is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Indie brands have never had the luxury of a mass marketing budget, so they’ve instead focused on building and sustaining meaningful relationships with the communities that nurture them. In Buying In, Walker talks about Pabst Blue Ribbon’s strategy after discovering that their brand, whose history was essentially as a staid Midwestern working class beer, was experiencing an unexpected popularity surge among the pierced, tattooed, bike messenger alterna kids in Portland Oregon. Clearly this was not a demographic that PBR had sought deliberately (the brand just happened to become quite eagerly adopted by a young culture in need of a cheap beer), but once they noticed what was going on instead of buying up a ton of media targeting this demo, PBR began sponsoring community events such as “bike polo” matches. In fact, a particularly ardent PBR fan that Walker talks to specifically noted he appreciates that he’s never seen a PBR ad of any sort. It shows that “they’re not insulting you,” he says. If advertising AT a community can be perceived as an insult, supporting it can make a brand an integral part of the community’s culture.

4. A BLANK SLATE IS THE BIG IDEA
Ad folks think it’s their job to create advertising. Indie brand folks think it’s their job to make sure their product sells. The disconnect between these two perspectives is perhaps nowhere more blatant than in the ad agency reticence towards “user generated content.” This is not to say that ad agencies shouldn’t create branded content, by any means, but rather to point out, as Walker does, that some of the most potent brands are ones that have allowed people to project their own meanings onto them. His two biggest examples of this are Hello Kitty and the Live Strong bracelet. One benefited from an inscrutable expression, the other from a statement that allowed innumerable personal interpretations. Neither sought to define what specifically it was supposed to mean or stand for, and thereby each allowed people to cast their own relevance onto the brand. Unequivocally cementing a brand into a “big idea” couldn’t accommodate that. Creating a brand that functions as a “platform” for consumers to create their own meaning (whether it’s as literal as UGC or as ephemeral as a personal projection) is now just as crucial as messaging.

5. COMMUNITY FIRST, BRAND SECOND
It is tempting to think that a brand creates a community. In fact, many brands, realizing the power of community as a resource, strive to create their own, and brands such as Apple definitely have a cult-like following. But the reality is that brands do not create communities from scratch, they become symbols of communities. Brands can reflect a community’s values and lifestyle, but I don’t think it’s possible to brand a lifestyle before it actually already exists. Was Apple as hot before the rise of the creative class? (The trend itself, I mean, not just the book about it.) Of course, the Apple technology certainly helped facilitate the expansion of the creative class, but the bottom line is that the societal predisposition that can come to constitute a community has to be there, and a brand does not invent it, it reflects it. Indie brands are spawned out of the very communities that they represent, so it’s not like they need to conduct massive amounts of consumer insight research, and their understanding of this community first, brand second dynamic is deeply intimate. For many major brands, however, the focus shouldn’t be on fabricating their own “community” but on developing a more significant understanding of the needs of the communities that buy and endorse them. (Then, see #3).

6. THINK BEYOND THE QUARTER
The relationship between a culture and a brand, like any kind of relationship, takes time. That it can’t always be statistically documented after three months does not necessarily make the relationship unsuccessful. My favorite example of a brand thinking “beyond the quarter” is Scion integrating it’s cars into Whyville, an online community for tweens. Pretty much the coolest thing you can buy in Whyville is a Scion, and its added bonus is that then you can drive all your other friends around in it in the game. They start at 15,000 “clams” (Whyville dollars), but for 20,000 you can get it all customized. The most fascinating thing about this whole strategy, however, is that the Tween demographic is between 8-12 years old. It’s gonna be a while before they even have a driver’s license at all, let alone be in a position to be buying a car in the real world, but when they are, owning that virtual Scion will no doubt be an experience they draw on when making the purchase decision. This is thinking five, ten, fifteen years beyond the quarter, and it’s how indie brands think. Ok, maybe they don’t necessarily have the forethought to think that far ahead, but they do have the luxury to not have to think of success as based on proving something to shareholders every season. After all, just ask Starbucks about how rampant growth can even undermine success in the long-run.

The trend of more and more kinds of facilities cropping up to support DIY creative endeavors means that more and more kinds of indie brands are getting created. The evolution of marketing that doesn’t look anything like what it has before is only going to continue. Might as well take a cue or two from the side that’s plowing head-first into the changing the landscape.

    



Subscribe for more like this.