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Liz Moor
© Liz Moor 2008
One of the most visible manifestations of the path taken by consumer capitalism in recent years is the opening up of more and more of the spaces of everyday life to promotional activity. The move from an age of advertising to an age of branding is characterised in part by a substantial increase in the range of media and spaces used to communicate with consumers; promotion does not only take place through conventional television, cinema, press and billboard advertising, but is increasingly factored into the design of buildings, themed environments and new types of commercial services aimed at building brand loyalty as well as increasing revenues. The scope of promotion has also been expanded through the use of new media and technologies, which allow the infrastructure of production and consumption to incorporate ongoing forms of marketing activity, as well as new types of data collection and consumer monitoring which can be looped back into the production process.
A less often commented upon phenomenon, yet one which is connected to the way in which contemporary capitalism is governed, is the expansion of this more sophisticated range of promotional techniques into new areas of social life. Marketing and branding techniques are now applied to charities, cities, government departments and policy initiatives. In many cases, this is linked to the neo-liberal tendency to emphasise the withdrawal of the state agencies from elements of social provision and to replace them by various non-governmental and 'third sector' organisations. To the extent that such organisations are required to compete with one another for contracts to supply goods and services, for limited amounts of statutory funding, or even simply for donations and voluntary support, they are also required to devise various types of promotional strategy by which they can demonstrate their professionalism, efficiency and expertise compared to other organisations. It is no surprise, then, that recent studies of charities1 have found a widespread 'brand orientation', and that a large proportion of charities have employed independent branding consultancies to advise on the development of institutional logos, campaign materials and strategies.
This new situation of competition also underlies the branding of cities and regions - this is not only undertaken to attract tourism and investment but also funding for social and cultural programmes; as governments are less inclined to spend money on these things, cities are put into competition with each other for increasingly small investment budgets and for extra-national sources of funding, such as the EU Capital of Culture initiative. Hence major branding consultancies like Wolff Olins find that cities and regions make up a growing proportion of their clientele, while smaller branding agencies have emerged to provide specialist services to non-profit organisations.
One of the more interesting and contentious examples of this new use of what were once predominantly commercial marketing and branding techniques is the rise of 'social marketing' and the use of promotional campaigns to govern the behaviour of national populations. Particularly popular since New Labour came to power, such initiatives have been used in cases as diverse as energy efficiency, waste disposal and recycling and health issues such as obesity and diabetes. Politicians have placed an enormous amount of faith in the capacity of well-tuned marketing campaigns to shift the behaviour patterns of entire populations, and thereby to reduce healthcare spending, meet EU targets and so on. Perhaps more significantly, the belief is that such campaigns can be used either in place of more expensive social programmes and politically contentious policy changes (banning certain ingredients from food, banning standby options from electrical goods), or as a holding tactic by which governments can be seen to be taking action, while waiting for a time when more stringent (and perhaps, more effective) policy measures may be more willingly accepted by business and voters.
These campaigns also exemplify current trends in neo-liberal governance in the sense that they use promotion to encourage individual responsibility, active self-management, and a connection to society through 'acts of socially sanctioned consumption and responsible choice'.2 As Nikolas Rose points out, the forms of citizenship modelled here are precisely not those of the selfish or atomised individual of the free market, but rather a responsible citizen linked to others through 'community'. For this reason, social marketing campaigns aimed at promoting healthy eating, recycling, energy-efficient consumption and so forth are almost always accompanied by surveys and forms of market research aimed at measuring success and uptake. These in turn have the effect of producing new categories of 'goodies' and 'baddies' (Rose calls them 'anti-communities'), with the latter made up of irresponsible citizens who don't recycle, who feed their children the 'wrong' foods, who don't obey norms of civility in public spaces, or who cost the state money by not taking enough exercise or not eating enough fruit and vegetables.
The problem with treating such 'pathologies of community' as individual and private matters is that it often tends to disregard the social determinants of health and illness, or the social, cultural and indeed economic capital necessary to make 'informed' purchases and lifestyle decisions, or to engage in responsible consumption and disposal. The promotional approach to social wellbeing appears to presume a self-disciplining and self-actualising middle-class individual, constitutionally inclined towards delayed gratification and intangible rewards, and highly receptive to injunctions that promise to combine the moral and status rewards of 'good citizenship' with the more private benefits of long life and health. Where this subject is missing, the strategy fails. We may object to this on political or philosophical grounds, but at a purely practical level this may mean that many social problems remain unsolved while divisions between people become further entrenched. From the point of view of a progressive left politics, we may support the end goals of such campaigns (healthy citizens, less waste, etc.) but it is surely worth querying the means by which these are to be achieved, particularly if the results are uneven, and if the side-effects include increased social divisions and the continued rise of a moralising 'will to govern' masquerading as local empowerment.
And what of the broader changes in the nature and scope of promotion under advanced liberalism? Historically, some of those on the left have tended to overestimate the effectiveness of advertising and other forms of promotion, as part of a wider tendency to see all consumption activity as inherently problematic. This simultaneously overstates the role of marketing in shaping consumer behaviour and understates the role of factors such as income, employment type (hours spent at work, etc.) and consumer credit legislation. Yet the more expansive and ambitious forms of promotion incorporated in place branding, themed environments or 'experiential marketing' certainly have their costs: regardless of whether they inculcate 'consumerism' (and regardless of whether this warrants quite the volume of critique that if often engenders), they undoubtedly increase institutional consumption (endless corporate 're-brands'), with the knock-on effect of increasing the cost of basic goods to ordinary people.
But for all this, it is perhaps the less spectacular forms of promotion that have most to tell us about contemporary cultures of capitalism. The uncritical adoption of commercial marketing and branding techniques by government departments and agencies is indicative of their faith in the capacity of market mechanisms and commercial techniques to deliver meaningful social change. Such faith in the power of commercial persuasion techniques is rarely shared by even the most ardent advocates of branding, so it is certainly worrying to see it become so central to social policy. More perniciously, however, it is also indicative of a tendency to see people as largely responsible for their own destiny, and to presume that all they need in order to improve their own lives and those of people around them is the right information and incentives, packaged in an appropriately glossy and eye-catching way. Glitzy corporate brandscapes may dismay us with their reminder of the ever-present forces of commodification, but it is in the state's fascination with such techniques that we find one of the most serious abrogations of governmental responsibility.
1. Hankinson, P. (2000) 'Brand Orientation in Charity Organisations: Qualitative Research into Key Charity Sectors', in Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, Vol. 5, No. 3.
2. Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, p.166.
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