Marketing Values: Rising to the No Logo Challenge

Published in Admap: January 2002.

Introduction
Recent rumours of the death of marketing and the demise of the brand may have been somewhat exaggerated. Nevertheless, few marketers would dispute that their craft is under attack. Brands are on the back foot. Naomi Klein’s No Logo, the anti-branding bible and bestseller, is but a symptom of an emerging chapter of consumerism that is antagonistic, or at least indifferent, to the marketing machine. At the Dawn of the Third Millennium, we have witnessed the demise of the monolithic mass market. The deferential consumer, conditioned to salivate upon being buzzed by brands, has been buried along with the golden era of marketing.

So how should we as marketers respond to the new market reality? To answer this, the marketing dilemma of the 21st Century, it is instructive to focus on how consumers are responding to three defining Meta-Trends of contemporary consumer society; NO LOGO, OVERLOAD and FASTER.

NO LOGO
The heart of the NO LOGO trend, that is the subject of Klein’s vitriolic attack, is that consumers have gotten marketing literate. The result is that consumer society is becoming increasingly brand immune and, in some cases, consumers are developing brand allergies. Marketing literacy means that consumers have become skeptical of the marketing medicine for meaninglessness. The post-modern malaise: ‘I buy, therefore I am’, and ‘To buy is to be perceived’ no longer washes with the brand savvy buyer. Instead, it is the marketing medicine that is being increasingly diagnosed as the disease: Brands seen as mental pollutants, brand managers as brand pimps pushing their psycho-effluent of hype, spin and lies to the last of the brand whores, attempting to sucker them with their message ‘I have something to ease your pain’. If Klein is correct, now it is the era of the anti-brand backlash and de-marketing chic, where consumers begin to trash the image factory and hit back at the Pac-Man brands. Take Nike, the brand that once flesh-branded a generation, but is now branded as exploiter by that generation. Just Don’t. The new consumer sophistication has seen Nike outswoosh itself with the Swooshtika and sweatshops. More generally, the NO LOGO trend means that disaffected consumers are beginning to look for a way out of Brand-Hell, an escape from so-called ‘life-style’ brands, Prima Donna brands and their corporate green-wash, in search of their own identity.

Whether or not brands are the cause of post-modern existential malaise is not the point. The point is that the brand-baddies stand accused of degenerating life from ‘being’ to ‘having’, and then to merely ‘appearing to have’. Brands are now the focus of consumer discontent and resentment, and are being subverted and parodied by consumers who realise that where the self is by proxy, it is not. In this new hostile environment of marketing literate consumerism - brands can become negative baggage as they are undermined by the very values they own in the mind of the consumers. CK means heroin chic, McDonalds – deforestation and Mc Jobs; Shell – pollution; Nike – sweatshop; Barbie – child labour; Adidas – All Day I Dream About Suicide; Baby Gap – Baby Billboards; Disney - 13c/hr salary; Starbucks – Brand Bombing Category Killer; K.L. Gifford – Exploitation. As adbuster Kalle Lasn concludes, NO LOGO’s real challenge to marketing is that consumers have graduated from Consumer Philosophy 101: ‘If I break a nail, but I’m asleep, is it still a crisis?’ and are working towards a new nirvana: ‘Nothing – what you have been waiting for’.

OVERLOAD
Working with the NO LOGO trend and against marketers is the fact that marketing has been accused of exacerbating perhaps the most striking feature of contemporary consumer society – a saturated and overcrowded market place, buckling under chronic information overload. OVERLOAD, the second of the Meta-Trends of consumer society means that everyday consumers are swamped with an assault of 5000 commercial messages; adverts, madverts, blurbverts, direct mail, telemarketers, and billboards. In the US, 12 billion display ads, 3 million radio commercials and 200,000 TV commercials are mashed into the minds of consumers everyday, all fighting for attention as they peddle the 60,000 product lines, 1,300 shampoos, 200 breakfast cereals, 350 soft drinks, and 50 brands of toothpaste that overcrowd supermarket shelves.
In his overview of OVERLOAD called Data Smog, David Shenk suggests that the tyranny of consumer choice has blown a fuse. Critical OVERLOAD means that the consumer mind has effectively closed for business whilst it deals with an acute case of Attention Deficit Disorder. The logic is inescapable: More products and more product information mean consumers have less time for each input, which means they must reject and discard before they can assess. So they ignore. QED. In increasing desperation, madverts and manufacturers compete to grab withering attention, trading irrelevant entertainment, cheap thrills and sensationalism for increasingly desensitized consumer minds. Brands that were once simple, memorable and compelling become diluted, fragmented and stretched to meaninglessness. Endless shout‘n’shock ‘breakthrough’ products and campaigns seek to saturate the chronically saturated: As Joop tells us: In the uterus of love, we are all blind cave-fish. Whatever. The challenge for marketers is that consumers want less not more, sense not nonsense, and above all, Simplicity.

FASTER
The third Meta-Trend of consumer society is FASTER, manifesting itself as an accelerated culture where disruptive change and vanishing lifecycles are defining features. As change speeds up, through increased connectivity and technology, hits have no time to happen, innovations seem to be ‘out’ before they ever had time to be ‘in’. As James Gleick, author of the book describing the FASTER trend, states, we live in an era of instant obsolescence, where consumer durables are as perishable as fresh groceries. Most importantly for marketers, this speeding clock of FASTER has changed the nature of the consumer, who now bathes in the Now Culture of instant gratification. How can marketers capture attention, if the consumer has gone before we make contact? There’s no time for brand loyalty – only time for change as consumers endlessly trade up to feel current. In this way, the connectivity that once worked for marketing, turning minor whims into mob obsessions, has turned against marketing; turning trends into fast fads, momentary diversions driven by novelty becoming obsolete within nanoseconds. The more novelty marketers make, the faster the contemporary consumer becomes jaded.

Now suffering from ever-decreasing attention spans, hurry sickness and permanent indigestion, today’s consumer has become a victim to fast time in a time-obsessed society. Living on speed, rushing through life, they try to keep up with fast food, fast ovens, fast-living, fast credit, fast-forwarding, one night stands, speed dialing, quick playback, quick-freezing, instant replay and rushware, all in real time please. Exhaustion and chronic fatigue set in as symptoms of the 24/7-rush society, leave our organs strewn across time zones and the face of the 24hr clock. As the speeding clock accelerates us up the curve of information neglect, we hide our anxiety and confusion behind 8.2-second sound bites guaranteed to travel faster than truth and genuine understanding. Propped up by visual candy, pop-com, and visceral gratification, the marketplace is transformed into the post-Warhol FASTER world of Woody Allen: Almost no brand is famous, for even a minute. In the FASTER world, instantaneity rules and fundamentals can be left behind as marketers fast-cycle from conceptualisation through commercialisation to oblivion. Like the physician’s lament of ‘beeper medicine’, where healthcare is reduced to crisis management – marketing can become a game of operational tactics with no room for strategy: As a CEO of a leading consumer electronics brand recently lamented: Forget 3 year marketing plans, obsolete before they are circulated, it is the most we can do to keep to 3-week schedules. Gleick figures that behind our ever increasing haste lies the fear of mortality, that we are driven by a fear that if we stop, our brains might also stop. But the critical point is that consumers are beginning to do just that, calling STOP! to the trade-up-to-keep-up mantra. They are beginning to realize that Gleick got it the wrong way round: We didn’t stop for fear our brains might start.

RISING TO THE CHALLENGE
So how can marketers deal with the emerging hostility to marketing in a consumer society being transformed by The Three Meta-Trends: NO LOGO, OVERLOAD and FASTER? Whilst there can be no magic bullet for cutting through overcrowding, disaffection and rush, marketing will have to show proof of ingenuity by adapting brands to this harsh new reality. Concretely, this means repositioning brands to survive in an environment of savvy, cynical marketing literate consumers no longer seeking solace in false brand gods, hype and spin. Ironically, this may mean a return to classical marketing: Solving People’s Problems at a Profit. Period. There is a compelling rationale for this focus on problems: The consumer mind, like all minds evolved for the sole purpose of solving problems – as the humble sea squirt graphically demonstrates: The sea squirt has just one problem to solve in life, finding a home. Once it finds a suitable rock to be its home, it settles down in satisfaction and proceeds to eat its own brain! With no problems to solve, there is no need for thought and therefore no need for a mind. The key point for marketers is that unless brands are solutions to real consumer problems, the same fate may befall them as the brain of the sea squirt.

The good new is that the Three Meta-Trends of NO LOGO, OVERLOAD and FASTER have generated new and very real problem-opportunities for consumers. Problems of disaffection, overload and rush are problems that marketers can help solve by offering consumers integrity, simplicity, and quality time. In fact, Simplicity, Quality Time and Integrity are good candidates for becoming the core unmet needs of the New Consumer in the 21st Century. As marketers, we should be asking ourselves how we can solve these key consumer problems at a profit?

Secondly, marketers could turn to one of the debilitating consequences of NO LOGO, OVERLOAD and FASTER. Disaffection, rush and overcrowding have meant that many consumers have become alienated from the personal values that make their lives meaningful. As Maslow noted, actualizing our values in our words and actions is a key human need, and in today’s send-more-receive-less culture, this value expression can be suffocated to such an extent that people may no longer even know what their values are. Indeed, this disconnect between personal values and experience is a root cause of emotional problems. Solving emotional problems of value expression may come to be the marketing opportunity of the 21st Century. A first practical step to seizing this opportunity could be to turn marketing focus to the top of the attribute-benefit-value ladder, and provide consumers with products and services that stand for, and further core personal values. It so happens that decades of consumer research have shown that there are only a handful of these core values. By ‘owning’, that is, single-mindedly ‘standing for’ one these values in the mind of the consumer, the payoff for brands could be powerful and enduring affinities with consumers based on integrity rather than transient hype and spin.

Whilst marketers have long used value segmentations such as ValueScope by Roper Starch Worldwide and VALS to target consumers and adapt communications, a true values-led marketing approach could focus not simply on using values to talk at consumers, but on genuinely helping people solve their emotional problems of value expression. In short, brands would become a means of expressing core personal values.

If such a humanistic turn in marketing sounds less than compelling, remember that value-led marketing would make good commercial sense too; values are enduring, lie at the top of the human motivation tree, inform consumer attitudes, emotions, intentions, beliefs, and therefore purchases. They also work across categories, contexts and markets. By standing for something of consequence to the consumer, marketing could save itself from inconsequence and oblivion. Additionally and not insignificantly, by rising to the challenge of NO LOGO with a focus on core values, marketing itself may come to gain a humanistic voice.

Dr Paul Marsden is a research psychologist at the London School of Economics

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Further Reading

Gleick, J. (1999) Faster. London: Little, Brown & Co.

Kahle, Lynn R., Sharon E. Beatty, and Pamela Homer (1986), 'Alternative measurement approaches to consumer values: The list of values (LOV) and values and life style (VALS)', Journal of Consumer Research, 13 (December), 405-409.

Klein, N. (2000) No Logo. London: HarperCollins

Lasn, K. (1999) Culture Jam. New York: HarperCollins

Shenk, D. (1997) Data Smog. London: Little, Brown & Co.