Welcome to The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption! Subscribe to my RSS feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss any chapters from my year-long blog-as-a-book experiment on why we choose to consume, or not.
In the middle of a discussion on authenticity in marketing, I think of the Target poster from Judith Levine’s ‘Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping’ and smile to myself –
The job of consumer culture… is to blur the line between need and want. A poster for Target Stores… plays explicitly along this line. The picture is an Exquisite Corpse-like photomontage of a woman’s head, the upper half of which is a lampshade of ivory satin… a bit of twenty-first century Victorian kitsch. “The lampshade you need,” the copy says. The lower half of the montage is the woman’s face from bridge of nose to sly smile to slender throat, around which is tied a small scarf in a Fiftyesque green and white circle pattern: “The scarf you want”… It is hard to say which is practical and which frivolous, the scarf or the lampshade. We cannot see the model’s eyes, but she is winking at us. For both Target and the consumer know that… almost nothing that is advertised is actually necessary.
If all that is advertised is indeed unnecessary, then the only way a brand can be authentic is by embracing the irony of its very being, by sharing this not-really-secret secret with us with a mischievous self-referential wink. The Target poster Judith describes, then, is so fake that its real, like a camp movie that is so bad that it is good.
Comment (1)
http://www.webfilehost.com/images/materialism.php
…no disguises attempted here.