The 16-24 demographic is an interesting one. In days gone by, deference to a maturer, more stable authority was essential to society. Resultantly, young adults could be repressed and disenfranchised, forced to await their turn in the aging process. The early part of last century saw times change. The two wars saw male youths on the front line and their girlfriends in the factories. The erosion of Christian values accelerated. The teenager emerged.
That the teenager is an economic phenomenon should not be underestimated. Youth with disposable income shifted market power. The McDonald brothers in 50s San Francisco were among the earliest beneficiaries. Ray Kroc, eyeing a lucrative chink in the market, commercialised the franchise and gave us perhaps the most enduring brand of the last half-century.
Without exciting youth tendencies, perhaps branding would never have taken off. Mass production could now produce the goods, but to shift them advertising was needed. Andy Warhol, a former commercial illustrator, scandalised the art world when, in 1962, he put up his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans for display. The painting of 32 uniformly ordered metallic soup cans with differences only in the titling of the soup variety brought to the fore themes of commercialisation, repetitiveness and cultural dullness. Whatever Warhol’s personal opinions, it was clear: advertising had much to overcome.
It was the youth market with their financial clout who propelled ad-men to consider branding in ever more innovative ways. The adolescent had a need to feel valued and esteemed - something that brands cottoned on to as they began to offer spiritual comfort in material goods. Now, minimum reflection will cause one to observe that the growing pains of adult awareness lead to highly suggestible, unreasonable and downright financially obnoxious young people. Today, in a world where advertising has become ubiquitous, society is found obsessing with youth value. The result is that political revolutionaries have been reduced to bland cultural icons recognised only for having some vague alignment to teenage rebelliousness. Sports megastars have been granted the right to tell us what we drink, eat and wear. Brand logos are now so personally sentimental that they are tattooed onto people’s physical bodies. We should be worried on the assault of the brands against basic intelligence. Advertising is stripping the ability to have a half decent intellectual debate from our society. Not for anything has television been called “the Idiot Box”, or the whole gamut of cinema, radio, newspaper etc as “the Great Stero Opticon.”
It was the activist author, Naomi Klein, who took up this question in her radical work No Logo (1999) to show that not only did the cultural degradation reflect badly on modern consumer society, but also that it was intertwined the sweatshop industries of child labour, poor pay and reinforced bondage. If the reader is unaware of Ms. Klein’s work, let me reproduce it in a nutshell: The artificial branding economy (e.g. mega-millions for Hollywood endorsements) is highly profitable so long as corporations outsource their production needs in order to keep their overheads to an absolute minimum. That outsourcing fosters and encourages labour practices which contravene any form of basic labour provision. However the countries to which they are being outsourced scrap any notion of labour rights in exchange for investment. This heavy deregulation which attracts multinational capital into their country leads to what can only be described as modern bondage.
Now, it is true, that there is a converse argument. To read it, one may flick through to Chapter 11 in Charles Wheelan’s Naked Economics, provocatively entitled “The Good News About Asian Sweatshops.” Here, Wheelan argues that to let the power of the market reign unbridled will allow a trickle-down effect. Sweatshop labour exists because there is a market for it, and the growth of that market will ultimately benefit the bottom-rung employees. Re-adjustment will happen by the forces of the market; any intrusive legislation is bound to hamper the process. Now, one could question how effective the so-called trickle-down effect really is. Yet, more worryingly, is it seriously possible to rule out legislating for humane working conditions? Anyone who is concerned about human rights will automatically cede the argument to Klein. Granted, she goes over the top (she rants against Wal-Mart’s decision to not stock products promoting Satanism because it contravenes their family value system) and her politics become a bit top heavy (she herself is part of the anti-globalization movement, granddaughter of Marxists, daughter of a staunch feminist i.e. left through and through) – but the core tenets of her work remain unassailable.
We need however to be careful of dismissing this network of teenage angst, scheming ad-men, profit-driven multinationals and victimised third-world labour as evil by definition. At the very least, financial capital is induced to flow through, money that would not be otherwise. Arguments must be made to reform and not to destroy. In my view, four things must happen: 1) Western media needs to re-examine its attitude to advertising and be more bold in challenging youth purchasing behaviour, 2) multinationals must be incentivised to work in 3rd world countries with strict labour laws, 3) we must rid ourselves of anti-trade-unions sentiment and realise that they will always be the first port of call for basic labour provision, and 4) the multinationals must engage in the trade-off between stratosphic profits and human rights. These are formidable tasks, but they are achievable. It is no good campaigning against the market – we need to reinvest it with a sense of humaneness.
