Remember David Manning? He was an illusory movie critic who wrote for a paper in Connecticut and praised movies like Hollow Man and The Patriot for one full year. The films he praised were all distributed by Columbia Pictures, which is of course a subsidiary of Sony.
While David Manning may be ludicrous, think about the next time you talk to your neighbour about diapers. She might begin a chat by recommending Pampers or a comparable brand, talking to you about how it makes her baby feel and how the diaper is the best around. What you don’t know is that your fellow citizen has actually been dispatched by Pampers to offer WOM about the diapers.
In today’s modern world, we are becoming more individualized each year. Conley describes the General Social Survey (GSS), which measures socioeconomic status, family characteristics, race relations, and morality issues, and its findings regarding our changing social ways:
“In 1985 the GSS asked participants to number their ‘close friends.’ Respondents were likely to claim three…. In 2006, the American Sociological Review published the survey’s most recent findings, which showed a threefold increase over the past two decades in the number of Americans who didn’t have anyone with whom to discuss important matters. Specifically, the GSS found that nearly one-quarter of the 1,500 participants claimed they had no confidants at all.”
Marketers and advertisers love a separated, individualized public. Despite our world’s advances in communications technology (cell phones, email, instant messaging services, chat rooms, social networking websites, Blackberry devices), we are, as a people, becoming more and more alone with each passing generation. The pledge of a product and of a sense of belonging and community through that product is becoming more and more attractive.
Conley’s book does an excellent job at demonstrating the magnitude of the issue of brand obsession. With a world sliding ever-downward away from concrete social relationships, families, and a focus on community, marketers are establishing their own brand communities, brand tribes, brand promises, and proxy relationships through Coke or Nike to “fill the void.” And people are buying it.
When branding encroaches on our basic relationship and even on our social policy (post-Katrina New Orleans allocated public funds towards restoration of its “Mardi Gras image” rather than actually addressing safety concerns), it’s time to take a stand. Lucas Conley’s book lays the structure and is a solid read through a whirlwind of examples and stories that describe a riotously disquieting state of affairs in a world gone brand crazy.
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