BACK IN THE ’80s, it seemed like a franchised Benetton clothing store was opening up every day, in every possible North American shopping district. In downtown Seattle, I could swear there were four or five of the boutiques at once. (This memory could be slightly exaggerated.)
Supporting this vast-growing empire were the ads in every magazine and on every billboard and bus exterior, with the slogan “United Colors of Benetton” accompanying pictures of scrubbed-faced young models sporting wild and wacky earrings, necklaces, badges, and rings atop drab-looking sweaters.
Once shoppers figured out that the Benetton stores were really selling just the sweaters, not the accessories, the number of Benetton outlets markedly decreased.
The Italian-owned company never went away (it still has one local outlet, in the same building as F.A.O. Schwarz). But as its physical presence (what the dot-com guys call “brick and mortar stores”) has lessened, and as a supposedly more cynical young-adult generation has succeeded the supposed Reagan-era innocents, the company’s adopted ever-“edgier” marketing angles.
One part of that push has been the “controversial” print ads, in which fashion-model imagery was replaced by increasingly in-your-face material–AIDS victims, wartime destruction, and most recently death-row inmates–keeping the company and the brand
The less mainstream-media-publicized part of Benetton’s branding push has been Colors magazine, “A Magazine for the Rest of the World.”
It’s published in five bilingual editions (the U.S. gets English and Italian). Its New York-based editors claim, “the magazine is based on a simple idea: Diversity is good.”
Yet it exists to sell a single global brand name to some 80 countries, to get everybody wearing the same sweaters and jeans from Rio to Osaka.
The editors finally got around to exploring this contradiction in the current issue, themed “Monoculture.”
Behind the cover image of Mickey Mouse’s head as a Photoshopped goop of neon-glo goo, the issue has picture after slick color picture of Coca-Cola in Egypt, Shell in Malaysia, Madonna CDs in Tokyo, etc. etc. The WTO protestors would interpret these images as the 666-marks of a corporate beast intent on devouring us all. A reader trained by the protests to see the images that way could easily see them that way.
But the editors insist they’re “celebrating” the rise of a single commercial lingua franca uniting all nations, all faiths, and, yes, all colors under a shared experience of Big Macs (even if the ones served up in India are all either chicken or veggie), Frosted Flakes, Toyota Corrollas, Tom Hanks movies, Barbie dolls, Hershey bars, and at least one certain clothing brand.
The images and the accompanying texts show, even inadvertantly, that we’re losing a lot in terms of real cultural diversity. As Jim Hightower once wrote, “There really is a new world order, but it’s not black helicopters. It’s global corporations.”)
But they also show the world as still having quite a bit still there, diversity-wise. Despite all attempts at imposing a Monoculture, most of these marketers still have to localize their products or at least their brand-images everywhere they go. (MTV, as I wrote here last week, has had to increase its regional versions around the world from 5 to 22, in order to compete with local channels in all those countries that play fewer US/UK corporate superstars and more indigenous pop.)
Before the violent Yugoslavian breakup, advocates of Global Business liked to note that no two countries that both had McDonald’s outlets had ever gone to war against one another. That doesn’t mean globalization has been all peaceful, or all progressive. As some of the WTO protestors noted, corporate imperialism has brought sweatshop labor conditions, environmental compromise, and the end of countless local business ventures across the globe.
Some lefty historians like to recite long histories of cruelties done to folks whose economies were colonized. (What were the tea and opium wars in old Asia, f’rinstance, but the result of intercontinental commerce?)
The marketing Monoculture is different from past colonizations in several ways. Perhaps most important: In older forms of colonialism, the people of the colonized societies made stuff for Global Business to sell. Nowadays, the same folks are also expected to buy the stuff of their lives from these same trading groups. You’re not just picking coffee beans for Procter & Gamble, you’re buying P&G toothpaste. You’re not just mining iron ore to become Fords, you’re supposed to dream of one day driving your own Ford.
Whether that’s really any more “empowering” is a topic for another day.
TOMORROW: The singular joys of single-artist Net radio.
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