Children of the Brand
By DANIEL THOMAS COOK | In These Times | December 25, 2006 | See also: Repetition
| Image-Building |
As I sat in the café of a Borders bookstore in Chicago huddled over my
laptop and struggling to write about children and commercialism, I was interrupted
by an annoying clamor of loud talk, screams and laughter. I looked over and to
my horror discovered it was a group of … kids! How dare children disrupt
my ruminations on childhood!
Accepting my fate, I behaved like a social researcher: I observed the scene. “Welcome
to Borders Explorers,” exclaimed their hostess in a voice intended for seven-year-olds.
“We are excited to have you here. We have a lot of fun things planned for
your stay with us.” On each table stood a cardboard cutout of the “Border
Explorer”—a goofy-looking cartoon character sporting winged goggles
and an outfit that intimated a ’50s version of a “futuristic” space
suit. Clearly a boy (explorers are still male, apparently), the character displayed
a gigantic “B” on his belt.
As the students colored in an image of the Borders Explorer character, the staff
member explained the morning’s plan. Each table would be given several topics,
such as “seals” and “mountains,” to be divided among the students,
who would then go to the children’s section and find books on the topic.
The children’s section was clearly “kid-themed,” with an entranceway
in colorful “kid letters,” a soft stars-and-planets carpet, floor level
displays and a nonlinear arrangement of bookshelves. The iconography and organization
of the section revealed the same method of age ascendance that I had found in
my historical research on the rise of the child consumer. The books and small
toys intended for the youngest children were situated in the back corner; the
age ladder progressively moved up toward the entrance area where items intended
for the oldest children (9 and 10-year-olds) were displayed. Such an arrangement
is designed to avoid exposing the older children to undesirable “babyish”
things—which could “pollute” them by association—while giving
the younger children, who must pass through this area, a feeling of maturity,
perhaps even of desire.
Brands and branding
Delightful and insidious at once, Borders endeavors to brand the experience of
reading and exploring ideas. Paradoxically, Borders strives, on the one hand,
to stimulate the children’s curiosity and, on the other, to numb their critical
faculties with characters, arts-and-crafts activities and merchandise placement.
They’re encouraged to explore everything about Borders—except of course
the company’s brand strategy.
Branding resides, first and foremost, in the realm of design. The quintessential
marriage of art and commerce, branding, when it works best, is inspired by aesthetic
sensibility and intuition, and guided by market research. Brands—their iconography,
acoustics, tastes, physical feelings and smells—coax us to react but not
to analyze. Every moment is to be infused not just with “style” or “beauty,”
but with emotional bonding to a corporate entity. At least, this is the dream
of brand managers. Art, in its most general sense, serves as an ideal vehicle
for connecting human emotions to a material object because it strikes us at a
pre-analytic level. We experience it and react to it before we can reflect on
it.
However, corporate ingenuity and the colonization of art and design for promotional
effect is not the entire story. Children and adults, after all, want things, buy
things and identify with things. We are not completely helpless creatures, but
active beings searching for meaning and significance.
Meaning-full brands
The kids’ market has proven lucrative (well into $100 billion annually),
in large part because both kids and parents derive personal wellbeing from the
goods and images of contemporary consumer capitalism. When asked why she put “Blues
Clues” characters on her four-year-old’s birthday cake, a 33-year-old
mother told me that a simple “Happy Birthday” was generic and not special.
Brands—in their artful presence as icons, images and styles—seek to
accomplish the somewhat contradictory task of allowing people to forge personal
identities out of mass-produced, mass-distributed, readily available goods and
images. To grasp the power of brand appeal, one need only think of those who tattoo
the Nike swoosh on their bodies, name their kids after global brands like Puma
or spend hours blogging about their favorite products.
Retailers, designers, marketers and merchandisers have known for the better part
of a century something that social scientists are now just learning. To cultivate
a consumer market at a deep level, beyond simple functional need, consumers must
be approached and addressed as having desires and aspirations that transcend the
specific product at hand. For many of us, as brand managers have discovered,
the “need” for belonging, for intimacy, for respect, for individuality
and for being seen as someone worthy in the eyes of others is what drives consumption
and brand attachment. Some of the key “needs” of children, who by default
are relatively powerless economically (but quite powerful emotionally), include
recognition, aspiration and a sense of ownership over their world.
Kids aspire to be older than they are at whatever age because, early in life,
they recognize their position on the lower rungs of the social ladder. Hence
retailers, like Borders, design spaces that encode both aspiration to older, more
autonomous identities and distance from younger, undesirable selves. Any savvy
package designer knows that a child’s product, if it is to have any chance
on the market, must appear to appeal to the age group just older than the intended
end-user. Something intended for a six-year-old boy will probably not do well
if a six-year-old is pictured on it—better an eight-year-old.
Making such appeals directly to a child is, historically speaking, new and revolutionary.
The recognition and appeasement of the child’s point of view in commercial
contexts began in the ’30s and marked a change not only in marketing and
merchandising, but in parent-child relations as well. The child’s view
now must be acknowledged, addressed and satisfied in many arenas of social life.
For a parent to do otherwise is to set themselves up as morally suspect.
The strongest institutional urge to “know” and speak to the child’s
view comes from the world of marketing, branding and design. It is marketers,
often more than parents, who are in tune with kids and their worlds. They visit
children’s bedrooms and query them about their decorating, clothing and
music choices. They attend girls’ sleepover parties and convene focus groups
to observe “tweens” discussing the benefits of various products. In
doing so, marketers venerate children’s commercial choices as a democratic
exercise. They insist that, in this way, they are “empowering” children.
These children certainly appeared to be “empowered” as they actively
delved into the books. But, I had to wonder, if it is the kind of power that
will transcend its corporate inspired origins and help the kids navigate contemporary
life, or if this “category management” will serve only to infuse brand
attachment into the minds of those just learning about the world. It is almost
criminal to discourage the next generation from reading and engaging with books.
This day, however, was not about books or reading for the young Explorers. It
was about engineering the Borders™ experience and cultivating consumers,
ultimately re-empowering those who already have the power to produce experiences
in addition to products.
A version of this article will appear in the catalogue for the Branded and On
Display art exhibit at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign.
January-March 2008. Daniel Thomas Cook is an associate professor of advertising
and communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the
author of The Commodification of Childhood: The Children's Clothing Industry and
the Rise of the Child Consumer (Duke University Press, 2004) and the editor of
Symbolic Childhood (Peter Lang Publishing, 2002).
READER COMMENTS
• Imagine that, Reading Is Fundamental getting a boost with cultural consumerism.
Shame on Borders!! They are encouraging the highly impressionable minds
of our children by teaching them to navigate the book store, exposing them to
so many different title on their abundant shelves and encouraging a desire to
relate to a love of books. And having their image apparantly representing
a male? What do female astronauts wear? What about the pedistrian
street crossing signs in the very progressive Vienna that is now replacing the
“male"stick man to a “female” stick person...what does that
mean? Will it have long hair and a dress?! Gee, what the hell!
Educators have noticed a decline in male enrollment in high schools and colleges
and females are on the upswing, despite unplanned pregnancies and other obstacles.
There are a plethora of scholarships exclusively for women and of course minority
groups of both sexes. However, a white male has less scholarship and financial
aid opportunities. ASU created a white male club encouraging young men to
embrace their European heritage and boy did the media and special interest groups
have a field day exposing the club. Talk about reverse discrimination and
bullshit “hate groups”!
• I think any kind of program that exists to spark enthusiasm in reading
is a good thing! Its good for boys and girls both to read! Corporate
sponsorship and comsumeristic intrests aren’t a bad thing. It makes
good business sense. What the hell is wrong with business making money?
Isn’t that what creates jobs?! Aren’t jobs how we survive and
care for our families and needs?
• What does this “progressive” movement really stand for?
Socialism? Wellfare State? Are we all supposed to go back to an agriculural
ecpnomy, growing our own organic foods, raising our own animals for food and labor?
I am from a family that farmed for generations and I have great respect for families.
I do think all aspects of industry are important for a stabile economy and the
greatest benefit to our country.
• And when it comes to those “evil” beings that exclusively possess
the infamous “y” chromosomes, HURRAY! I love them and wouldn’t
want to live in a world with out them or even have a world of androgeny an/or
asexialality.
Sorry about the typos above. I can’t multitask like the young generation
can and my son kept talking to me and then my dayughter called and I just wanted
to finish typing my comments and get off of the computer! Consider me a
fallable female....they do exist, despite current politically correct focus groups.
jk
Posted by kimberlyausten on Dec 26, 2006 at 5:49 PM
The branding is everywhere. We thought keeping television out of our home would
do the trick, little did we suspect everything from our child’s diapers to
his teething rings would be establishing brand loyalty from the outset.
• Even the thrift stores have begun setting up a recognizable consumer space.
A Goodwill store in NE is like a Goodwill store in CA. Walking through the door,
there is an expectation regarding store layout, regardless of merchandise.
• In some ways, I worry that by not exposing my child to familiar products
and branded images, I’m setting him up to be some sort of social outcast
(home schooling as well) where he will lack an ability to comprehend the popular
culture (not a bad thing on the surface, though I wonder if it will hinder his
ability to make friends).
• For the moment, our trips to the grocer are quite peaceful as my little
one has no particular desire for certain products-but one of these days, someone
(a grandparent, neighbor) is going to expose him to pre-packaged food and then
you know he’s going to want the squealing mascot for the grotesque bread-in-a-tube,
or the cookie-pushing elves.
• We live in a very rural area of the US, miles from what one might call
a “city” yet we are exposed to the same, constant branding and marketing.
The rural children all aspire to the same clothing, fads and nonsense that urban
children do. The fast-food establishments are everywhere-even in towns of 1,000
people...and they all sell the children’s meals with toys promoting the latest
film-even when the nearest cinema is 70 miles away.
• Sometimes I wish I could put blinders on him until he’s forty (I’m
told that people who know something about child development frown upon that sort
of thing).
• Posted by JSM68 on Dec 26, 2006 at 9:07 PM
It’s not about the benefits of reading or whether making money is a good
or bad thing. Nothing in the article indicates those positions. The article
is about how it is getting increasingly difficult to imagine doing basic things
in the world without being infused with corporate meanings and sponsorship.
If Borders or anyone else was concerned about literacy, they could very well donate
to local public libraries anonymously where it does not take money to gain access
and enjoy books.
• Posted by DanC on Dec 28, 2006 at 7:49 AM
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