Promotional Cultures

The Rise and Spread of Advertising, Public Relations, Marketing and Branding

Aeron Davis

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745639833, 9780745639826
• eBook ISBN: 9780745671444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the twenty-first century, promotion is everywhere and everything has become promotable: everyday goods and organizations, people and ideas, cultures and futures. This engaging book looks at the rise of advertising, public relations, branding, marketing and lobbying, and explores where our promotional times have taken us.

Promotional Cultures documents how the professions and practices of promotion have interacted with and reshaped so much in our world, from commodities, celebrities and popular culture to politics, markets and civil society. It offers a mix of historical accounts, social theory and documented case studies, including haute couture fashion, Apple Inc., Hollywood film, Jennifer Lopez, the Occupy movement, Barack Obama's election campaigns, news production and the 2008 financial crisis. Together, these show how promotional culture may be recorded, understood and interpreted.

Promotional Cultures will appeal to students and scholars of media and culture, sociology, politics, anthropology, social and industrial history.

1

Introduction

This book investigates the rise of what Andrew Wernick (1991) first termed promotional culture. It begins by tracing the twentieth-century history of the promotional professions of public relations, lobbying, advertising, marketing and branding. Other early chapters look at promotional texts and consumer interactions with promotional culture. The book then goes on to observe how the professions and practices of promotion have spread and come to influence society more generally.

Throughout, the book asks what part promotion has played in historical transformations and in evolving social relations. Promotional practice was once fairly ad hoc and driven primarily by the selling of goods and services. Now it is professional and systematic. It is also about selling organizations, professions, ideas and people. For industry practitioners, everything is promotable: big or small, public or private, complex or simple, exclusive or common, solid or intangible, present or future. For individuals, too, promotion is part of everyday practices, both in work and in leisure. Over time, promotional imperatives have come to influence the behaviours of whole organizations, professions and institutions. Industry, politics, civil society, media, culture, markets and finance have all accommodated promotional developments, just as they have evolving new technologies or demographic shifts. In so doing, they have changed. The question is how?

Defining promotional culture and promotional intermediaries

To start, some clarification of the terms promotional culture and promotional intermediaries is needed. My definitions relate to active practices. When Wernick (1991) first used the term ‘promotional culture’, he offered a rather broad definition. He argued that ‘culture’ generally had become ‘saturated in the medium of promotion’. No object (image, product or form of communication) could be separated from the promotion of itself and all objects linked to it through communications. All objects are thus connected by ‘an endless chain of mutual reference and implication’. Bourdieu (1984: 359) first used the term ‘cultural intermediaries’, which I have adapted to ‘promotional intermediaries’. In his explanation, he referred to the ‘new petit bourgeoisie’ which were employed ‘in all the occupations involving presentation and representation’, ‘in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services … and in cultural production and organization’ – in other words, a wide section of society employed in a large range of symbolic activities. My use of these terms is narrower and relates to active promotional practices.

It is the promotional industries which have done most to define promotional practices. The industries include public relations, lobbying, advertising, marketing and branding, as well as those in related professional fields (e.g., pollsters, publicists, speech writers and agents). Promotional intermediaries are those who work in one of these occupations, either for a promotional company, in-house for an organization, or as an independent consultant. Although such occupations can be multifaceted and quite distinct from one another, they also overlap and converge in certain ways. Each is concerned to identify a saleable product (a commodity, message, idea or individual), a potential audience (citizen, consumer, social group, elite decision-maker), a communications medium (formal, informal, mass, digital) and a message. For industry historians, these occupations established themselves as ‘professions’, with identifiable institutions, norms and practices, through the course of the twentieth century (see chapter 2). According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2010), in 2008 there were 623,800 people employed as ‘managers’ in ‘advertising, marketing, promotions, public relations and sales’. This was predicted to rise to 704,000 by 2018. According to the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS, 2011), in 2011, 432,000 people were employed directly in marketing, advertising and public relations.^* These figures do not include the hundreds of thousands more employed in junior roles or those who work in linked or server professions.

However, promotional culture is not simply reducible to a few recognized professions. As will become apparent, promotional practices have been adopted, to a greater or lesser extent, by many non-promotional occupations. Lawyers, journalists, campaigners, religious leaders and industrialists, to name a few, gain promotional advice and training, and are all capable of using promotional techniques. At another level, ordinary individuals, in their day-to-day experiences, have both grown accustomed to a promotion-rich society and come to internalize and reproduce basic promotional practices. This is not the same thing as saying everything is promotional and everyone is a promotional intermediary. Rather, the point is that active promotional practices are rather more widespread and systematic than they once were. They have become absorbed into day-to-day culture.

The book’s core argument and approach

The book explains and engages with various perspectives on promotional culture. Some of these are quite dismissive when it comes to considering the significance and impact of promotion. Those derived from orthodox economics, or audience or consumer studies, strongly question the influence or effectiveness of promotional practices. Others, in cultural studies and parts of the industry itself, suggest that promotional culture is simply part of wider culture and thus cannot be an independent shaping force. Each therefore downplays the significance of the promotional professions and their activities.

In contrast, I argue that promotional culture’s impact has been rather more substantive. The argument is not just based on the idea that promotional techniques persuade individuals to believe in or buy things they would not otherwise do. This is often the case, although, as decades of effects and audience studies have found, the issues are complex. Promotion frequently fails and may well be more influential in various indirect ways. For example, advertising messages may not convince people to buy a product that promises to make them more attractive or improve their social lives. But such adverts may extend brand awareness, help define what is attractive, or link acts of consumption to social relationships. However, such debates are a relatively small part of the book’s broader position.

The larger point about promotional culture’s influence is based on the notion that individuals and organizations have become more promotionally oriented. That is to say, they give promotion a greater priority, more resources and more time. Similarly, promotional practices have spread to a number of occupations and settings which once had little or no promotional function. In many instances, strategic decisions to promote specific things are consciously made. But, in many respects, the need to promote has simply become unconsciously internalized by people and institutions. Over time this has had a subtle ‘social-shaping’ influence on those who adopt it. Politics, markets, popular culture and media, civil society, work and individual social relations have all adapted to promotional needs and practices.

At an institutional level, promotional intermediaries and resources are now employed in many areas of society and by many types of organization. Political parties, charities, news organizations, legal firms and police authorities are just as likely to turn to media managers and brand consultants as the producers of soft drinks or widgets. Heads of marketing, advertising and public relations sit on company boards and hold equivalent senior management positions elsewhere. Their objectives are given higher organizational priority. Budgets now routinely include promotional costs. Indeed, the promotional budget in many diverse types of organization has grown several-fold over the decades. For example, between 1987 and 1997, Nike’s promotional budget grew tenfold, to reach almost $1 billion annually (Goldman and Papson, 1998: 4). In 2005, the average Hollywood studio film had come to devote 38 per cent of its budget, or $39 million, to its promotion and distribution. It had been 12 per cent in the 1940s (Epstein, 2005: 7–9). In the UK, over the last three decades, the number of information officers employed in the Ministry of Defence has quadrupled while those in the Metropolitan Police increased elevenfold (COI, 2012). In 2008 the combined campaign expenditure for US presidential candidates, political party committees and political action groups reached $5.98 billion (Magleby, 2011: 19).

Organizational strategy and decision-making, in turn, is influenced by promotional imperatives. Heads of marketing have a significant say on which musical acts, authors, television productions and stars should be supported. Politicians and policies rise and fall, in part, as a consequence of decisions based on expectations of media coverage, focus group and survey data. Promotional skill-sets are increasingly valued within organizations. Individuals, whose primary occupation is not promotion, regularly undergo promotional skills training. It is now common for public figures, be they politicians, CEOs or heads of charities, to have media relations training. Marketing knowledge is now highly desirable for those wishing to move into professions such as financial management or fashion design.

On a personal level, people in mature capitalist democracies both move in promotion-rich environments and have themselves absorbed the practices and cultures of promotion. Everywhere we look and travel we are besieged by promotional images. According to estimates, individuals are bombarded with over 3,000 adverts a day (Twitchell, 1996). These are on billboards, television channels, films, websites, radio stations, public transport and sports stadia. Many everyday objects contain the logos and imagery of their producers. Gap T-shirts, Levi jeans, Apple phones and Chanel perfumes scream out at their consumer-owners with each use. Sponsorship deals and product placements pop up in Hollywood films and television shows. Fast food comes in packaging sporting the latest Disney or Pixar characters.

At the same time, individuals have internalized the practices of self-promotion. Many service companies exploit the ‘emotional labour’ of their employees. How workers dress, their mannerisms, behaviour and scripted speeches are all regarded as key promotional elements of the firm (Hochschild, 1983). Self-promotion continues outside of work too. As Bauman (2007) notes, in order to operate in today’s consumer society, people turn themselves into promotional commodities. Choices of clothes and goods promote the ‘commodity-self’ to others, whether at work or in leisure. CVs, blogs and social networking sites are also used more consciously to present the individual self to a wider audience.

Thus, slowly, and often imperceptibly, promotion has seeped into all areas of society, at the organizational, social and individual levels. In the twenty-first century, promotion has become ubiquitous. It appears everywhere and, at the same time, we no longer notice its presence. Products and product lines have shifted. Organizational structures, budgets and the balance of personnel employed have changed. Ideas, norms and values have altered, influencing elite and wider public understanding and decision-making. Mainstream public media and popular culture have been reshaped.

Investigating the nature and significance of such individual, social and organizational changes is what directs discussion in most of the chapters that follow. These never assume that promotion is an autonomous all-powerful force that ‘determines’ or ‘performs’ all it touches. In fact, the book’s approach involves exploring just how promotion interacts with individuals, organizations and other influences in a more co-determining or dialectical way. Promotion combines and interacts with social, economic, technical and other forces.

Most of the chapters convey a sense of modern history and change in which promotion plays a part. Chapters 2 and 3 look at the histories of the promotional industries as well as evolving patterns of consumption in history. Other chapters delve into the histories of film, fashion, television, electrical goods, celebrity, journalism, political parties, interest groups, the trade union movement and financial markets. In some cases, the history leaps erratically through the twentieth century. In others, it dwells very much on the last three decades, a time when Anglo-American, extreme forms of free-market capitalism have been in the ascendancy. At such a time of market ‘disembeddedness’ (Polanyi, 1944), it is unsurprising that promotional industries and practices have flourished. Much of the time, the focus is on an evolving market, political or cultural field. Biographies, historical overviews and news pieces often combine with academic accounts to fill out these histories. In that respect, a large proportion of the texts cited are not concerned primarily with promotional culture per se but, in diverse ways, still offer insights on its presence and influences.

Under such circumstances, many of the sector studies locate the influences of promotional culture within the general evolution of those fields. It soon becomes clear that the promotional intermediaries employed, and the means by which promotion interacts with a sector, vary considerably. For example, in consumer electronics markets, one crucial aspect of promotion is driven by companies lobbying one another and regulators in an attempt to establish their preferred industry standards and platforms (chapter 5). In the music and film industries, personal agents and company image managers are key to the promotion of new music releases and movies through their stars (chapters 6 and 7). In financial markets, investor relations specialists are vital for finessing company reports and accounting data in order to impress big institutional investors (chapter 10). In politics and civil society (chapters 8 and 9), the need to manage public news media has reshaped organizational campaign strategies and policy preferences. In party politics (chapter 8), film and network television (chapter 6), and the clothing industry (chapter 5), where fashions are volatile, marketing managers are a powerful day-to-day force. But, in all cases, one or more types of promotional intermediary and forms of promotional practice have directly or subtly altered a sector.

At the same time, one can also locate promotional similarities and patterns emerging across the quite diverse occupational fields discussed. For example, Hollywood big budget films and haute couture fashion both share a similar promotional market dynamic with Wedgwood’s eighteenth-century top ceramic ranges. This involves producing high-profile, loss-making products which serve to promote high-volume sales of cheaper, associated goods. Similarly, individual showmanship can be found in many occupational fields. Great economists, such as John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, spread their new economic orthodoxies as much through popular media as through academic papers. John Paul Gaultier, Steve Jobs and David Cameron have all put great emphasis on impressive media launches, building on personal presentation, to promote their ‘products’. From another promotional perspective, financial products, such as complex derivatives, have much in common with film stars, dotcom companies and modern art. All have become ‘sign-saturated’ goods which generate financial value out of the ‘symbolic value’ (Baudrillard, 1988b) that promotional activity produces. Each may be packaged up to encourage large investment, creating high economic valuations out of myths, narratives and speculation. Clearly, the practices of P. T. Barnum are still alive, and snake-oil salesmen come in many guises.

Before continuing, it is necessary to put down a few provisos and acknowledge some failings. First, although the promotional professions are often discussed as one, they are separate occupations that can operate in very different ways. They share many similar and overlapping functions, but one cannot assume they are the same. Some of the more general points made may be more applicable to certain promotional industries than others. Likewise, some chapters focus more on certain promotional professions than others. Second, this is not a text for budding spin doctors and advertising executives. Industry perspectives are presented and there are lots of useful examples, figures and case studies. However, it is not a how-to-do book that explains the core principles of the promotional disciplines and lays out clear advice on best practice. Nor is it an uncritical, pro-industry account. Third, it is not possible to cover every promotional topic adequately in such a text. Several subjects, such as media effects, agents and publicists, or web-based promotion and social media, could have had a whole chapter but, instead, are dealt with within other discussions. There will also be many key industry figures and scholars who are mentioned only fleetingly or not included at all. Similar gaps and omissions will be apparent in the various sector studies, from fashion and finance to politics and popular culture. Such is the consequence of attempting to cover a wide range of professions and disparate subject matters. I am happy to admit all these faults but hope these will be balanced up by the book’s larger argument and broad subject coverage.

Chapter outline and wider themes

The main argument and approach outlined above runs through the chapters that follow. Each chapter, while contributing to the larger argument, also offers a self-contained review of a subject that can be read alone and often contains alternative interpretive frameworks for understanding and evaluating promotional culture. The first part, Producers, Consumers and Texts, focuses very much on the promotional industries themselves and their outputs as well as consumer responses to promotion. It is in this part that several of the classic texts on promotional culture are presented and juxtaposed.

Chapter 2 looks at conflicting histories of promotional culture, pitting industry accounts against (post-)Marxist and other critiques. Practitioners view their industries as developing from ad hoc and self-serving occupations into respectable ‘professions’ that now serve organizations and their publics equally. Industry histories also ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• TitlePage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Producers, Consumers and Texts
• Part II: Commodities, Media and Celebrity
• Part III: Politics, Markets and Society
• 11 Conclusions
• References
• Index