Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
honest,’ I instantly start to mistrust what they’re saying. The Ronseal effect is to disguise illusions as apparent down-to-earth reality, while dismissing idealism and overt ideologies as illusions.
In 2006, the PR maestro Harold Burson admitted in an interview for Der Spiegel that ‘Most of the things we do today were identified by Bernays eighty years ago.’ But today those tactics are disguised by a collective delusion of egalitarian empowerment and corporate candidness. ‘The bedrock of effective PR’, writes Amanda Barry in PR Power: Inside Secrets from the World of Spin (2002), is ‘honesty and trustworthiness’. ‘It is never OK to step beyond the line of reality,’ she says. ‘People want participation, not propaganda,’ writes David Meerman Scott in his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly (2007). ‘People want authenticity, not spin.’ PR today is all about a ‘conversation’ with active consumers and corporate social responsibility. Unlike advertising, PR isn’t salesmanship: it’s ‘information’. If you can see its work, it’s failed.
In her anti-corporate bible No Logo, Naomi Klein describes how – particularly during the nineties – companies turned their attention from producing products to producing brands. It was part of a general trend in modern life for everything solid to melt into air: for political organisations to become front groups, governments to become contractors of outsourced services, and money to become futures and derivatives. But for companies as well as for humans, this created a problem. Since brands were confections, spun out of nothing, they were vulnerable to unfavourable associations, like the allegations of child labour that tainted Nike’s former superbrand during the 1990s. Klein quotes David D’Alessandro, president of John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, complaining in 1999: ‘It can take a hundred years to build up a good brand and thirty days to knock it down.’ Marketers were flummoxed. They described consumers as ‘paradoxical’, ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘unpredictable’. Just like the fickle modern voter, consumers had become impossible to read. But this wasn’t a mystery at all: it was simply that brands, like modern political parties, no longer had any distinguishable substance. Faced with the radical choice of Coke v. Pepsi, it was no surprise that loyalties could shift so easily.
The solution, as the French journalist Christian Salmon describes in Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind, appeared in the form of good old-fashioned stories. From around the turn of the millennium, marketing departments started to fill out the empty ciphers of their brands with compelling, made-up narratives. Like that of Aleksandr Orlov, meerkat star of comparethemarket.com’s viral campaign. Aleksandr currently has over 750,000 Facebook fans and over 40,000 followers on Twitter, and his memoir – a tale of love, heroism, immigration and entrepreneurship – has become a huge bestseller, outselling Tony Blair’s A Journey. The hip new ad world of ‘immersive’ guerrilla marketing, word-of-mouth and online buzz seems a world away from 1920s German psychology professors; but it’s a more insidious form of the same sleight of hand. Because this time it’s supposedly ironic and tongue-in-cheek, engaging with active and knowing customers. The vision of the enthroned crowd has become a widely shared delusion. We’ve become pretty familiar with the empty con of brands: it’s the mock authenticity of participatory marketing narratives we need to watch out for now.
Modern focus-group politics, too, is about selling an enthralling story to voters. As Salmon puts it, ‘politics, as currently practised, is no longer the art of the possible, but the art of the fictive. Its aim is not to change the world as it exists, but to affect the way it is perceived.’ In a 2006 report entitled ‘Reconnecting the Prime Minister’, a focus-group company called Promise Corp recounted their work with Tony Blair in the run-up to the 2005 general election. New Labour had shifted from being a ‘Product-Oriented Party’, ‘which argues for what it stands for and believes in’, to a ‘Sales-Oriented Party’, employing ‘the latest advertising and communication techniques to persuade voters that it is right’, and finally to ‘a Market-Oriented Party’, ‘driven by frequent and intimate contact with voters, the party’s customers’. ‘A market-oriented party designs its behaviour to provide voter satisfaction,’ the report explained. ‘It uses market intelligence to identify voter demands and then designs its product to suit them.’ The same shift, in other words, from overt to covert ideology; but disguised with the rhetoric of ‘intimate contact’ with voters, with the myth of participation and engagement.
The report outlined the problem for New Labour: that it was perceived by the public as a ‘premium’, ‘high cost, high service’ brand like British Airways or Mercedes, whereas the Conservatives were regarded as a ‘value for money’ brand like Tesco or Ryanair. Under the heading ‘Analysis – Freud, Klein and the Mechanism of Splitting’, it went on to describe how Promise Corp deployed focus-group exercises that ‘allow as many unconscious motivations as we can invite into the group’s work’. Melanie Klein’s theory of the ‘good and bad breast’, corresponding to the nurturing or the withholding mother, was invoked to throw light on the focus groups’ perceptions of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Tony Blair. I would like to have seen Blair’s reaction when presented with that aspect of the research.
The problem with the focus group is that although it purports to listen carefully to what voters say, it doesn’t actually listen at all. Like a kind of patronising counsellor, it assumes people are essentially irrational, so it tries to read between the lines. ‘Most pollsters know what voters think,’ said an article in a 1994 edition of the trade magazine The Polling Report. ‘But too few understand how voters feel.’ The goal of a focus group was ‘to gain access to private, non-communicable, unconscious feelings and emotions’. An effective focus group will ‘draw out the “motivational factors” behind the “top of mind” opinions – which is critical to understanding what is driving public opinion’. Personally, I would rather be asked for my views. But most of all, I’d like my politicians to do their job: to come up with ideas of what they would like to do. Focus-grouping voters is not about asking people what they want and then putting it into action. It’s about getting under their skin in order to get more power. For example, focus-grouped voters often say they feel scared of violent crime. That fear is usually not the result of experience, but rather of reading tabloid newspapers. Politicians respond by promising tougher sentencing. But in fact, violent crime has fallen in recent years. Appealing to emotions rather than conscious views turns the world upside down.
Just as new-generation advertisers get modern online consumers to do their work for them in the name of empowered participation, focus-grouping is a way for voters to actively collude in their own manipulation. The focus-group politics that emerged under Clinton and Blair was couched in terms of listening, of responding, of authenticity; but although spin and consulting voters were presented as opposites, they are actually the same thing. What would be genuinely different is taking the lead, taking a position, making difficult decisions, prioritising competing concerns. But oh no, that’s old, ‘tribal’ politics, and we don’t want to go back there.
Well, why not? We drink out of mugs saying ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, our politicians call for a revival of traditional community values, old-fashioned church weddings are back in vogue, influential New York Times political commentator David Brooks resurrects David Hume, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith as policy guides for today, and soul singer Duffy looks and sounds straight out of the sixties. We’re more than happy to use elements of the past when it suits us: the point is, it’s a choice. The modernising ‘imperative’ is once again a way of disguising particular ideological agendas.
Delusion in denial
‘The vast majority of advertisers are truthful and honest,’ according to the Advertising Standards Authority in Britain. And consumers, for their part, are ‘savvy and enthusiastic recipients of advertising, who enjoy its entertainment value and make use of the information it provides … self and co-regulation continues to be the best and most effective way to secure high standards in advertising’. How reassuring that the body that’s supposed to regulate advertising is leaving it up to corporations themselves. But of course that’s fine, if we consumers are now wise to the tricks of the trade. According to the Australian marketing company Orangehammer, today’s consumers are ‘more intelligent, more sophisticated, more media savvy, more brand aware,