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Douglas Holt and James Twitchell

the breakfast table
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from: Douglas Holt

Branding the Blues

Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2001, at 7:32 PM ET

Jim,

Sorry about the long hiatus. I hope you were able to keep the lack of closure on the Times ads from throwing a wrench into your short game.

I did finally acquire a Times. Yes, those ads. Well, here's where I think the postmodernists are right. You don't want to move far below the surface. The simple beauty shots of product offered by Tiffany, Cartier, Salvatore et. al seem to be all about the reciprocal knowing wink exchanged between the Times and purveyors of luxe goods: You know that I know that you belong here. The invasive page layout works beautifully for the advertisers. The heavyweight "news of the day" from the Times does more cultural work selling understated cosmopolitan luxury than any ad copy could ever do. Today you've got Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, ostensibly quoted because he's trying to salvage the ABM treaty. But looks to me like he's also shilling for Bergdorf Goodman.

Scanning the page, one of these things is not like the other. (Sesame Street readily transfers to branding.) What the heck is Rockport doing on this page? Seems like an imposter, no?

Anyway, Elsie the Cow. Lots of brands die of neglect. I imagine that's the story with Borden's. The brand bounces around between too many conglomerates, liberties are taken with the ad budget to make the balance sheet look brighter, and ... glue. But many other brands are ruined by bad marketing. The late Oldsmobile is a prime example. Milk is branded where I come from (check out the Times Magazine story from May 20, locating Horizon brand milk's place in the organic-industrial complex). But it's tricky since the experiences we seek in milk get located in images of the family farm and pastures full of smelly grass. Hard to pull off with a mass market brand (though B&J is an excellent counter-example).

I came across another story in the Washington Post, about the dire straits of Gerri's Palm Tavern, a bar on Chicago's South Side. (I used to live two blocks from the Palm and was peripherally involved in the goings-on.) The Palm was the center of the jazz and black-intelligentsia scene when the neighborhood, then called Bronzeville, was along with Harlem the center of segregated black cultural life. Everybody hung there: Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, on and on. Then Daley Sr. decided to build the largest concentration of public housing in the country. So the rest of the old jazz district is gone, but the Palm has been scratching by for decades.

The twist is that now, decades later, a number of powerful developers and the city have been plotting to demo all of the bombed-out structures on 47th street and build a spanking new "blues district." "The Home of the Blues" is critical to Chicago's branding for conventions and tourism (particularly after Michael Jordan's retirement). And recently, floods of mostly European and Japanese tourists have been making pilgrimages to the South Side to see the real deal, blues and jazz spots that ooze history. It's the strangest site: a vanload of Germans poking around a barren True-Value hardware store selling talking trout. Now Bronzeville (as it is once again being called) is gentrifying. And the McCormick Place Convention Center sits conveniently about 10 blocks away. Finally City Hall clued in. And what did it decide to do? Tear everything down and build an "authentic" blues district from scratch, with the name-brand blues clubs that they think tourists will respond to--plus posters and curatorial cues to the glory days of Bronzeville to take care of any Disneyland vertigo that might kick in. Officially, the Palm is scheduled for demolition because it would cost too much to fix. My feeling is that they have to demo the Palm because it presence would call the bluff on the Disney version of a segregated blues and jazz district that is needed to move tourist dollars.

Buried beneath the story of the Palm is a story about branding. And the story that demonstrates that these seemingly trivial matters, in which marketers play with meanings to move products, have some strange and unpredicted consequences.

I guess we've moved from coffee to scotch with this one. Sleep tight.

Doug

the breakfast table
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from: Douglas Holt

Branding the Blues

Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2001, at 7:32 PM ET
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James Twitchell is supposed to be teaching English literature but is more interested in the marketing of stuff. He has written books on advertising (Adcult USA, Twenty Ads That Shook the World) and has a mild defense of luxury consumption coming out next year (Living It Up: Why We Love Luxury). Douglas Holt is a professor at Harvard Business School.
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: Let's talk about coffee. Joseph Britt., below, was just one of many--follow the thread, and consider the question of tipping the barista. He still had time to discuss milk, here, too. And Brendan Herlihy took on ice-cream here. Neill Hamilton is looking for more "dissent, anger, blood feuds... I want the people writing in the Breakfast Table to open up life long vendettas" here (he always is, he's the Breakfast Table's official trouble-maker), but Richard Walrath enjoyed the banter: "it's almost like being there with the third cup of coffee."]


We're really talking about two different things here, aren't we? Coffee, and then all the froofy coffee-influenced liquid dessert-style beverages that take up most of the space on coffee house menus. I have nothing against the latter (because making fun of them is always a good time), but coffee is a really serious subject. If you're going to drink something nearly every day, it might as well be good. This is why I've never understood all the sneering condescension directed at Starbucks. Pre-Starbucks, most coffee served in public places was awful--you were ahead of the game if you ordered came out hot, caffeinated and with no taste at all. OK, most coffee served in public places is still awful, but with Starbucks you at least have the choice of having a good cup of coffee.

I confess I think Starbucks is slipping, based on extensive research I've done at the Minneapolis Airport. They used to offer a rotation of different coffees--Sumatra, Mocha Java, even New Guinea--but now seem to mostly serve up a couple of blends with names like "European" and "Christmas." Talk about your brand marketing. Also they routinely serve the coffee so hot you wonder if there is something wrong with the water they're using.

--Joseph Britt

(To reply, click here.)


 Maybe the students in Mr. Twitchell's anecdote couldn't tell good poetry from bad without guidance, but this doesn't strike me as being universally true. Poetry isn't my thing, but music is, and I have no trouble separating the good from the bad using only my own ears. If there wasn't something intrinsic in good art, we wouldn't, over time, have come to a general agreement about the relative worth of, say, Mozart vs. Salieri.

--Chloe Pajerek

(To reply, click here.)

 (5/30)

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