Why pay a celebrity not to wear your clothes?
There is a surprising amount of metaphysics in modern life. And, indeed, on television. We live in a meta-world of brand values and celebrity worship, a value system of chimaera where nothing is quite as it seems. There is no contest between appearance and reality: appearance wins every time. This, depending on your place in the greedy consumerist food chain, is either thrilling evidence of mankind’s evolutionary sophistication and its taste for complex symbolism, or damning condemnation of our pathetic need for social promotion through structured avarice.
Celebrities are the apex predators of Bond Street. Their approval is eagerly sought by fashion, accessories, car and food manufacturers. You don’t need to be a Marxist of the Herbert Marcuse stamp to see that a very great deal of what is sold in shops is superfluous. A way to give value to superfluity? Celebrity endorsement: increase vectors of desire by associations with the stars! But action and reaction are equal and opposite. Celebrity endorsement is balanced by celebrity contamination. Hence the fascination of Abercrombie & Fitch paying a feral oik – a reality TV numbskull known as “The Situation’’ – not to be televised in its fancy pants.
There’s a rich seam of comic material in this story of celebrity contamination. In 1956, when he was shadow chancellor (and happily coined the expression “gnomes of Zurich”), Harold Wilson began wearing a rubberised outer garment known as a Gannex mac. This was manufactured by a Yorkshire crony called Joseph Kagan. So stylish a figure did Wilson cut in his waterproof that Gannex was soon adopted by both Mao and Lyndon B Johnson; spectacular evidence, surely, of a brand’s universal appeal. If a raincoat could be a symbol of the white heat of technology, Gannex was that symbol. However, Wilson’s precipitate (and still unexplained) resignation in 1976 dirtied the reputation of his mac somewhat. And when Joseph Kagan went to jail for tax irregularities in 1980, Gannex was irreparably smeared with odium. Kagan’s mill was demolished in 2010.
Then there is Jay-Z, a rapper with a taste for grande marque champagne. For one reason or another, he discovered and became an enthusiastic drinker of Louis Roederer’s superb Cristal, with whose famous clear glass bottle he was often photographed. This “unwelcome attention” caused dismay among the fine fellows at Roederer. Their sniffy and well-publicised remarks did not, however, deter Jay-Z from his champagne habit and he avenged himself on French snobbism by devoting a crude lyric to them. They should have paid him to stop.
Aura, halo, starburst, gold dust, positive energy field… You can call it what you like, but celebrity endorsement is a powerful marketing tool. This is why Rafael Nadal is in Calvin Klein knickers and George Clooney sips Nespresso while checking on his next tanning session by reference to his Omega wristwatch. Nadal’s magnificent athleticism is a fine way to differentiate boring underwear. So too does Clooney’s handsome cool energise the products he endorses. But when it goes wrong, as it seems to have done with Abercrombie & Fitch, energy is sucked away from the product. It’s what business academics describe as “symbolic boundaries being breached”.
Related to this is the idea of deliberate product placement, or what the MBAs call “embedded marketing”. There was a time when US car companies paid movie producers to put baddies in the opposition’s cars, while goodies drove their marque. Why was Steve McQueen in a Boss 427 Mustang in Bullitt? A Ford retiree dozing today in a gated community in Naples, Florida, knows the answer. And they are still at it. Tradition required that Daniel Craig’s 007 drove an Aston Martin which, at the time of the Casino Royale remake, was owned by Ford. But Craig also drove a humble Focus, adding adamantine glamour to a supermarket car.
In a business environment where competitive advantage derives from patiently husbanded associations and expectations (“If I wear Calvin Klein Y-fronts, maybe my pale and weedy upper body, as well as my pouch, will resemble Rafa’s”), every marketeer’s nightmare is finding the wrong sort of person adopting his product. In the Eighties, when a certain urban demographic thought the initials stood for Bob Marley and the Wailers, BMW actively considered buying-in tired old cars so as to defend its prestige image. Then someone did the calculation about how damaging discovery of this might be for a company which supplied the Luftwaffe with aero-engines and the Wehrmacht with motorbikes.
Or take Burberry. A cleverly engineered renaissance was threatened when Burberry’s imitable plaid was knocked off on market stalls everywhere, but the assault was survived because the company kept one step ahead of saboteurs by a diligent investment in design. Thus, Burberry’s rapidly moving style overcame the social stigma of sluggish lumpen appropriation. Christopher Bailey beats Bluewater every time.
“Contextual cues” are part of the answer to the big question here. Did an Abercombie & Fitch competitor pay to place its product on trash TV to win damagingly “inappropriate attention”? Did Abercrombie & Fitch organise the whole scam itself? Whether it’s metaphysics or mischief, somebody is getting very good value here. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8709160/Why-pay-a-celebrity-not-to-wear-your-clothes.html
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