There’s no doubt about it, marketing can influence popular culture in such a way as to create self-fulfilling prophecies. In the U.S., there’s a common phrasing on a similar topic that questions, “does art imitate life, or life imitate art.” In many ways this poses a chicken-egg conundrum, and so begins the debate, does marketing imitate life, or does life imitate marketing?
According to Jane & Michael Stern’s Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, popular culture is the closest thing America has to a national faith. America was, they say, once a country of people who did things and made things, not just dreamed of things. As a result (or, is it instead a cause?), consumers have ‘relationships’ with goods that go far beyond utility … many brands convey identification with certain status groups. (No big surprise there, I know.)
This consumer dynamic is largely due to what I’ve heard in an academic setting referred to as a cultural production system (CPS), the constituents of which include not only the product manufacturers and service providers, but also the rich and famous celebrities, rock stars, retail environments, fashion magazines and anyone (or anything) else that influences consumer perceptions of what is to be desired and attained.
One of the three components of the CPS is a communications subsystem, which includes advertising agencies, opinion leaders and others who help assign symbolic meanings to products (i.e., Gucci equals ‘wealthy’). All along the watchtower there are cultural gatekeepers who act as tastemakers, or filters, for these symbolic representations in the media; radio deejays and fashion magazine editors, for example; and let’s not forget the influence many bloggers now have.
Such symbols become ingrained within our cultures and the line between a marketed fantasy and actual reality has become blurred to the point that marketing appears to exert a self-fulfilling prophecy: if ‘it’ is marketed as ‘cool’, then it may very well become cool; and when it’s cool, it’s marketed as being even cooler. Until, of course, it’s no longer cool because too many uncool people have bought into it. But that’s for the tastemakers to decide, huh?
p.s. the title of this post is a hat’s tip to the group Love & Rockets. In the late ’80s they were selling cool like no tomorrow. These days, unfortunately, they have no new tale to tell.
Posted by: Colin Mangham