Mark Bartholomew, Buffalo Law: F. Scott Fitzgerald said that advertising’s contribution to humanity was “exactly minus zero.” But TMs are ads and they’re useful. And sometimes we just like ads, e.g. the Superbowl. Google and Hulu use ads and make our life better. Today we have an interdisciplinary group talking about ads and what they do in the world.
Panel #1/Advertising’s Social Consequences
Marion Crain,Washington University School of Law: Consuming Work
Over the last several decades, the American economy has shifted from work-centered to consumer-centered. So we can have a “jobless recovery,” measuring consumption instead of employment. Branding has replaced ads, designed to persuade consumers to choose one virtually identical product over another. Advertising speaks but brands act, erecting a frame of reference for trust, loyalty, basis for brand extensions. Iconic brands influence and innovate cultural change. They represent social consensus about societal values. Marketers say, instead of asking consumers what they want, study social trends and look for cultural contradictions/breaches in social fabric that could be exploited by a product. Reagan era: This Bud’s for You—aimed at working-class men, designed to deal with anxieties of blue-collar men over outsourcing, a new phenomenon.
Branding is usually associated with products, but also increasingly with services, and it’s here that branding invades management, as it must because employees are part of the brand. They interact with consumers to deliver on the brand promise, portraying the brand and symbolizing corporate identity: front-line ambassadors. Employers must control and manage employee identity to communicate the brand effectively. Also, service work is fundamentally embodied: can’t separate the work from the workers. And those bodies have cultural and social attributes: race, gender, class, particular physical characteristics.
Dramatic rise in aesthetic marketing and aesthetic labor, triggering emotional associations at a precognitive level—things look/feel good and that’s why we choose them; the choice then signals our identity—I like this brand becomes I’m like this brand. Aesthetic marketing requires aesthetic labor: employees have to look and feel like the product/service. Thus, an increasing pattern of employee selection for aesthetics and not just skill. Service businesses also develop and commodify the workers once hired through training, appearance regulation, discipline and reward systems designed to produce an appealing service experience—hear a smile in the voice, see the expected brand image. Particular emphasis on middle-class look, with racial and gender connotations as well as meaning for mannerisms and modes of speaking. 93% of retail/hospitality employers in Glasgow searched for and developed aesthetic characteristics in employees.
Particular innovation: wearing the brand, work and consumption intertwined on the bodies of employees. This is especially exploitative. Significant effects on culture. Most pronounced in retail fashion, where it’s a practice to require employees to wear/model the brand as well as sell it. Employees not unionized, easily fired; used as walking billboards/talking statues. All employees are embodied, but wearing the brand communicates a prior act of consumption while performing the labor of selling. So it’s smart marketing and it has a powerful impact on employees’ identity. Shapes employees beliefs about the brand and induces/compels their participation in value chain in which they have to shop for the most flattering styles, figure out how to accessorize the look each day, and continue to respond to trends to constantly update their wardrobes. This also determines how others respond to the employees, because we perform so much identity through dress.
Retailers require employees to buy the clothes, albeit at a substantial discount of 25-75%. Employees are often drawn from the consuming base—Abercrombie & Fitch is notorious for recruiting off of the sales floor. Buying the clothes creates a captive branded community of consumers. Of necessity, they carry the clothes out the door. Employees generally don’t object; may want to align themselves with the brand. They appreciate the clothes.
So what’s the harm? First, qualitatively different from anything employers have done because of its powerful impact on identity and culture. Long history of (exploiting) employees as consumers: Henry Ford who paid his workers enough to buy his products; the Big Three automakers developed a system of employee friend & family discounts, which were incredibly profitable. Textile mills established company stores and company housing. Employment conditioned on buying and living there; employers even issued script redeemable only at the store. But there’s still a separation between identity and consumption. They don’t convert physical and cultural attributes of the workers into firm profits. Not so stereotypical.
Employers reinforcing a middle-class look and attitude are valuing employees for their cultural capital, not their human capital. Employees are being trained in look and feel, not real marketable skills. This contributes to income inequality and reduces class mobility. The captive branded audience is fundamentally dependent on the employer. Creates “addicts.” Erodes boundaries between work and leisure by extending the selling past the time the worker leaves. Excludes people based on race and gender—suits against Abercrombie & Fitch. Cultural capital deployed in sale of brand in ways that conflict with discrimination law—whiteness as property, on which the employer trades to increase profits. Employer taps into stereotypical assumptions about what whiteness means—reliability, power, choice, consistency and reputation. Transforms cultural narratives into action.
All this marketing is sold to employees and the public as the product of free choice. Reinforces assumptions about the power of the market, making collective resistance more difficult.
My Q: Relation to sex work, which is illegal/not corporatized but also exploits the body?
A: Sex work is work. The most exploited sex workers are so because it’s so hidden. In this context, the real work is hidden: the consumption is explicit but where do the dollars come from to buy these things? Employers are hiring for a middle-class look, but the employees are paid less than minimum wage by the time the deductions are made from their paychecks to pay for the clothes. Some have sued under the labor statutes when that occurs—but then there’s a big legal question of what counts as a uniform.
Q: How would this be different from a cultural studies perspective? What does law bring to this?
A: The law is structured to deal with exploitation segregated by subject: sex or race exclusion is actionable under Title VII. But they overlap, and the issue of uniforms shows this. How do you deal with employees who end up buying lots of clothes from the brand? Donning/doffing regulations: should employees be paid for the time spent putting on/taking off uniforms—courts really reluctant to extend that past blue-collar workers to white-collar workers. If paid for putting on “uniform,” why not for commuting time? Requirement to wear the brand might be a wedge situation where employees could get some compensation.
Q: Benetton ads mobilize race and ethnicity in a particular way—comment?
A: Similar to exploitation of Native American identity as mascots by sports teams—mirror image of her argument. Replicating subordination and profiting from it. Her project is the exploitation of white identity. (Ads v. real workers—similar to composition of hospital staffs on TV medical shows versus in the real world.)
Bartholomew: What’s the potential for resistance in this area? People rework school uniforms subtly. Can the Gap employee do so as well?
Q: A lot of research exists on this. Disney employees are heavily regulated in appearance and public interactions, yet they resist in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. But what intrigues her is that mostly employees don’t resist. They resist most when regulation is very specific and detailed. If you’d be sent home for failing to shave your legs recently enough, then backlash may occur. But in the US, with the way we valorize individual choice, the obscuring of the coercion here—where employees are allowed to pick their clothes—makes the clothes not a uniform and also makes resistance more difficult because consumption is fundamentally an individualistic, solitary activity.
Laura Bradford: What about the employer interest in having a uniform appearance? There’s some utility to consumers knowing what the image is they’re buying into. Nobody has to work in fashion—there are other jobs. But we now have nonwhite images of style; why not allow stylish people of all ethnicities to find jobs in retail?
A: Sure, there are reasons to create solidarity/communicate to customers—Wal-Mart’s blue aprons. What’s bothersome is the complete and all-encompassing control over the employee’s appearance. Choice to work: this goes back to how marketers draw brands from the culture—not just reflecting but innovating. The range of choices is constrained by the way marketers decide what they want to sell. And there are significant wage disparities between wages paid by upscale white fashion retailers and what minority employees are able to command.
Dianne Avery, University at Buffalo Law School: Ladies in Red: The Selling of Gendered Work
Focuses on airline attendants’ uniforms. Richard Tyler designed uniforms for Delta—“signature” red dress. Set off against men’s dark but stylish suits. Makes the women “stand out.” New, fresh, sexy image—and some flight attendants, through their union, object. It’s a story of technological and organizational methods used to deliver the brand internally and externally, and the legal, social and psychological relationships between producers and consumers. It’s also the story of one airline’s attempts to boost revenue by reprising days of glamor and sex in flying—anachronistic but perhaps understandable in a world where the public knows that airplanes can be weapons of destruction. The female employees who are the right size, and thus have the red dress option, perform sex appeal as part of the Delta brand.
Delta bought Northwest, making the largest carrier in the world. The attendants and groundworkers at Northwest are unionized, while those at Delta aren’t. Unionization of the merged entity is unclear. Big challenge: build a single airline with a single brand image. Delta’s spent a lot of money on new food and wine, new paint for planes, new uniforms. Nostalgia for the hypersexualized ads of the 1970s with scantily clad female flight attendants.
Stewardess couture first evolved within narrow boundaries: demure, tailored. Shift in the 1960s for all advertisers, including airlines; sex became a way to tout the expected gratification from a service: the apogee/nadir being Southwest Airlines in 1971, with attendants in hot pants.
Richard Tyler is a celebrity designer known for his sexy designs. In 2004, commissioned to design Delta’s clothing. Sent the Delta line down the runway in 2005 along with his couture line, unprecedentedly. A trend to have high fashion designers do airline uniforms (as well as other service industry uniforms). Past designer charged with redesigning British Airways uniforms said he wanted to bring glamor back: the girls will look very sexy and the men will look like strong heroes. Union replied: attendants are safety personnel; and revealing uniforms would lead to more sexual harassment and air rage. Ultimate collection was quite conservative. Big innovation: women had a choice of low-waist boot-cut trousers or skirts.
Another piece of the puzzle: the uniform industry. More than 5 million people wear Cintas uniforms to work every day. The company is aggressively anti-union; violated living wage ordinances in Los Angeles and Alameda County; sued many times for wage & hour violations, OSHA violations, antidiscrimination law; accused of running sweatshops. But it wins awards from the National Ass’n of Uniform Manufacturers and Distributors for creating good images. Delta’s manufacturer dresses 1 million employees every day.
Delta has a style clinic: employees get to pick/mix and match elements of the uniform. The problem: NW flight attendants began to wear the collection in March 2009, and learned that the red dress is only available through size 18, but every other piece of the collection in other colors (dark blue) is available in other sizes. Union filed a grievance. An injustice for one is an injustice for all: let employees decide. The red dress symbolized a reimposition of humiliating weight (and age, marriage, pregnancy) restrictions. Essentially a form of sex plus weight discrimination. (With the added fillip of choice.)
There’s also a separate Red Dress campaign for heart health, to which Richard Tyler submitted the Delta red dress. There’s a First Ladies red dress collection, a Mattel doll in a red dress, etc. 61% of American women now recognize the color red as associated with heart health. Irony: according to psychologists, red signifies sex to men. So what does this brand mean? Celebrating women’s health and beauty; aphrodesiac for men; etc.?
Crain: How much is about classing up air travel, especially in the era of cattle-car travel? Compensating consumers for the bad experiences; making employees feel better about their jobs because of the opportunities for choice.
A: Reaction to 9/11—a way to reglamorize travel. And the flight attendants apparently do like it, though they have to buy the uniforms themselves ($150 allowance per year; one vest costs $50). How the uniform is worn is highly regulated.
Q: In Japan, red means something different—it’s an international airline. Cultural analysis would help—red may have certain key meanings across cultures.
A: China Airlines also puts attendants in red—used differently in different places.
Q: Note also Air New Zealand ad with attendants in body paint.
A: Hooters Airline, a short lived experiment. Blurring of work and play.
Q: Paper mentions Song airlines, designed to appeal to mothers, in the paper—what uniform did they think would do that?
A: They sexed up the men with pajama-like outfits, put the women in sportswear.
Q: What’s wrong with the sizes?
A: Sends a message that there are different classes of employees. The workers who can wear the red dress and be the brand ambassador—the “signature” dress—will be preferred.
Mark Bartholomew, University at Buffalo Law School, State University of New York: Advertising and Social Identity
Why do ads work? Standard answers: Attractive people, cute animals, music, humor, etc. Exercise: describe yourself, then discuss your favorite brands—look at the links between brands and identity. What are the markers in ad campaigns that make us feel that brands speak to us? Marketers aren’t just interested in our attention, but in our emotional investment. How do ads influence our sense of self, and what are the consequences? Previous papers show the employees being affected by ad campaigns; he is interested here in consumer effects. Especially important in an age where ads are touted as the savior of the content industry.
How is identity formed? How does advertising piggyback on this process? What are the consequences? What are the appropriate regulatory moves?
Case study: ads to the gay community, because it’s been a darling of marketers since the early 1990s. Breathless pieces on how it’s an untapped niche for making money. He’s not arguing that ads influence being gay (whatever that means); they influence the meaning or construction of that identity. Doesn’t mean to imply that there’s only one gay identity, but using “gay” as shorthand because marketers do that.
Identity formation: identities aren’t innate, but we actively shape them. But identity is often formed subconsciously, from surrounding contexts. Like birds, if we’re near twigs and sticks we’ll make our nests out of twigs & sticks, but if we’re near People magazine we’ll make our nests out of People magazine. We define ourselves by group memberships—academic, Boston Red Sox fan. We take on the behavioral patterns and norms of people in those groups. Two-step process: self-categorization (looking around at potential models and seeing what fits) and comparison. We then look for metrics of difference favorable to our choice of group.
Ads fit in well as part of identity formation. They surround us. 3000 ads per day per American. Advertisers are also very skilled at subconscious, implicit appeals. And today they typically engage in niche marketing, a change from 50 years ago where appeals were more broad-based (patriotism, general insecurities). Triggered by the rise of identity politics and technology, which allows massive databases/sorting. Does that represent just an increase in welfare, more to choose from? Ads show archetypes.
Gay community-focused ads: depict white affluent males. Leaves out lesbians, people of color. Ads have been very conservative, depicting sexuality in essentialist manner, 100% gay or 100% straight, but monogamous anyway. Leaves out lots of people.
One might argue: there are other non-ad role models—friends, coworkers. This niche marketing, however, involves a coopting of the spaces groups normally use to engage in self-categorization. That’s Niche Marketing 101—the importance of infiltrating once less-commercialized group spaces. E.g., gay bars, gay bookstores, gay-oriented publications—important to developing a social group, allowing self-categorization. But now you can go to Amazon.com and still get something targeted to you. Gay publications that used to focus on gay identity and civil rights now talk about what it takes to participate in the gay lifestyle, which is an ad message.
Another important space for engaging in categorization: in-group codes used to identify one another, particularly important for groups with a history of discrimination. Words like pride/queer, or the rainbow flag. Advertisers appropriate these things, as niche marketing theory advises them to do to signal to the consumer that the consumer is being addressed in that social role. So there’s Pride brand beer. But that deprives pride of its power as signifier of difference—maybe it’s an outsider trying to tell you something. Shrinks ability to categorize self outside the market.
Second part of identity formation: comparison with other groups. The metric advertisers emphasize over and over—while they tell you your group is better than others—is trend-setting. Gays are supposed to be trendsetters. It’s a myth; market researchers told companies that gays were early adopters, but that was faulty statistics; gay market isn’t as affluent or style-conscious as was thought c. 1992. Problem: it costs a lot to participate in trendsetting lifestyle. You can’t buy your clothes at Wal-Mart. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: constant emphasis on taste that gay men have to which heterosexual men have insufficient access—must consult a gay man. This is linked to class. A lot of people without economic/cultural wherewithal but who want to be part of the gay community feel a lot of frustration that they can’t be what advertisers tell them they should be.
Implications: it makes sense sometimes for emotion to guide decisionmaking. But there might be collateral damage. Thoughts: use law to expand identity models. Greater need for fair use/First Amendment defenses when people tweak a brand to serve a different identity purpose. Most of us don’t process ads very much, though, so there may be little reworking of them. Counterintuitively, maybe there should be less protection of advertisers and their constructions and more allowance for confusion. We tend to rely on what the advertiser tells us, but if we were more conditioned to think ads were unreliable maybe we’d engage with them more.
Q: Instead of identity, what about talking about subjectivity? Might be helpful. Exercise: show men across the life cycle in ads. Gay men in ads don’t have a childhood or an old age; they deal with financial security and AIDS.
Sonia Katyal: Couldn’t you also argue that ads function to expand a lot of models? Every time a market gets identified, advertisers seek to fill/represent that niche and form it. Some results are negative, but some positive. As a reaction against gay male model, new businesses/ads have emerged representing lesbians. More trans-positive ads now. Normatively, is it possible/desirable for niche communities to escape ads when everyone is so pulled in?
A: He’s not sure how much escape is possible. There may be more nuanced advertising; it’s impossible to be comprehensive about this, but his take is that there’s still a conservative/stacked depiction despite some more sensitive campaigns.
Q: Brand hijacking: Timberland boots adopted by young black men, against the wishes of the brand.
My comment: I don’t think allowing uncertainty about factual claims (allowing greater confusion) would help if the problem in identity formation is the emotional, nonrational/preconscious part of ads—factual claims seem orthogonal to identity operations. Katya Assaf on cultural symbols v. brands might be a good source.
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