The Emotion Economy
I ended the previous post by quoting from the I.T.V. drama ‘Mr Bates Versus the Post Office.’ It turned out that all the false statements made by Post Office executives, the unwarranted threats and the prosecutions that ruined so many lives, all of it was done to ‘protect the brand.’
Many people wondered how a T.V. series managed to spur the Government into action, where years of campaigning and repeated representations to Ministers had failed.
Over the years, the controversy had been covered in the media more than once. There were newspaper articles, a Radio 4 series ‘The Great Post Office Trial;’ a Panorama documentary and one on ITV preceding the drama series. But none of these prompted questions in the House or a public outcry for justice. Again, why not?
The answer is obvious and instructive at the same time.
All the previous accounts of the scandal were documentaries. And while the I.T.V. dramatisation stuck closely to the facts, it played like a classic narrative of good versus evil. On one side you had the innocent victims: honest, hard-working, public-spirited members of their communities. On the other were the villains: greedy and duplicitous corporate executives, lying to save their skins and not caring whose lives they destroyed in the process.
It was a rare public example of the first rule of public relations: it’s not the lie that gets you, it’s the cover-up. Had the management followed this simple rule, there would have been no story.
Even so, Mrs. Vennells and her predecessors were particularly unlucky for a major broadcaster to become involved. To this point the battle for public opinion had been reassuringly unequal, as always when whistle-blowers or other aggrieved individuals come up against million-pound corporate P.R. budgets. Now, all of a sudden, the postmasters had a well-resourced ally incentivised to publicise their betrayal in as dramatic and emotive a way as possible. The more inflammatory the better. This was what decided the Corporation’s fate.
In marketing terms, the Post Office was betting it could maintain dissonant emotional utility: that how the public felt about the brand, based on its historical reputation and its important role in community life, could be artificially sustained regardless of the way they were abusing their employees. No matter how dutifully journalists reported the facts, the perceptual gap could only be closed by an emotively negative portrayal of this reality. And how likely was that? Until ITV got hold of the story and repositioned the brand.
Why is this instructive?
Firstly, it reminds us, that in order to build and maintain brand equity you need to win hearts not minds. This is where the battle for public opinion and sales growth takes place. We really shouldn’t need reminding of this, but the confusion around the failure of the factual reporting of the scandal to move the dial shows this aspect of human motivation remains counter-intuitive.
One reason for this is that these damage-limitation exercises are usually conducted behind closed doors, which is also what made the scandal so significant. Marketing strategy in the categories we have been concerned with is necessarily an exercise in ‘protecting the brand’ against, among other things, the unwelcome consequences of overconsumption. But unlike the hapless Post Office executives, those who manage major dissonant brands are careful never to be associated with this uncomfortable reality, let alone take responsibility for it.
Bearing this in mind, the position of brands in the retail categories we have been examining is even more perilous than the Post Office’s. This is the last and most important lesson of the Post Office debacle. Processed food brands, to take an obvious example, are fundamentally dissonant in the current environment. The disparity between perception and reality is not based on a misunderstanding or some secret malfeasance, the public already know that the joyously positive way these brands are promoted is disingenuous given their horrible impact on public health.
What’s missing is a public-spirited and well-resourced body to fulfil the function of ITV. An antagonist capable of dramatising the harm these brands are doing in a way that sticks in the throats of audiences and undermines the ability of advertisers to defend their emotionally dissonant brand equity.
Rare as they may be, we can look at a couple of examples of this kind of negative repositioning to see how it is achieved.
Hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking,’ has always been a controversial method of gas extraction. But horror stories of earth tremors, leaks of methane and pollution of water sources failed to mobilise widespread opposition to the growth of the industry in the U.S. until the airing of an HBO documentary. ‘Gasland’ had a similar effect to ‘Mr Bates Versus the Post Office’ in that it provoked anger about the practice far beyond the communities directly affected. One image in particular captured the public’s imagination: a housewife in a home near a drilling site lighting a match, turning on a tap and setting fire to the water.
When large deposits of shale gas were discovered in the north of England, this image immediately went viral helping to provoke large-scale protests that made the extraction of the reserves politically troublesome. To get to the gas entailed drilling through aquifers – raising the prospect of faucets on fire in the bathrooms of Blackpool. The management of the company concerned, Cuadrilla, repeatedly pointed out these fears were unfounded. The aquifers in the Fylde peninsula were saline – entirely irrelevant to the water supply – but the image was nevertheless so powerful that no amount of reasoning could dispel the fears it provoked.
The thought of taps on fire created negative emotional dissonance for fracking in the UK: the public had a visceral reaction against it that may have been unwarranted in relation to the domestic water supply, but still made getting to the gas politically impracticable.
Or take the case of ‘Crystal Pepsi.’
In the early nineties PepsiCo launched a clear cola called ‘Crystal Pepsi’ to capitalise on demand for so-called ‘New Age’ products seen to be ‘lighter,’ more natural, less processed and less calorific.
By any measure the launch was a success, resulting in sales of nearly half a billion dollars in the first year alone, but barely 12 months later the new brand was discontinued – why?
Almost immediately Coca-Cola brought out its own colourless variant: ‘Tab Clear.’ Unlike ‘Crystal Pepsi,’ which had a low-calorie image but contained only slightly fewer calories than full-fat ‘Pepsi,’ ‘Tab Clear’ was a genuine diet drink. By launching it in competition with ‘Crystal Pepsi,’ ‘Tab Clear’ repositioned ‘Crystal Pepsi’ in a category it didn’t belong in and in which it couldn’t compete. In short order both brands died.
These case studies suggest two things about what we might term the emotion economy.
Firstly, both outcomes though designed are, in a sense, unfair. Whatever the wider consequences of fracking on local communities, and however much activists might argue that the ends justified the means, the fears fomented by ‘Gasland’ were entirely inapplicable to the geology of the UK.
Crystal Pepsi never claimed to be a diet drink, so its forced repositioning was similarly unjustified.
In other words, just as causes or brands can benefit from falsely positive emotional equity, they can suffer from negative dissonance also.
But the most devastating conclusion from all this is where it leaves the libertarian case against regulation in the name of market freedom and customer sovereignty. Far from being a marginal activity capable only of working with the weave of existing consumer preferences, in practice marketing has the capacity to crush otherwise popular brands and to artificially sustain whole categories that would have been subject to creative destruction in a genuinely free market.
I first began commenting on these trends over a quarter of a century ago. I hoped that pointing out the growing emotional dissonance present in dysfunctional markets would prompt brand managers to temper the emotional register of their advertising, or alter the composition of their production. Not out of a sudden bout of public-spiritedness - I wasn’t that naïve - but because continuing on this path left them vulnerable to repositioning by new products better suited to the age.
But if they were in danger twenty-five years ago, how much more precarious is their position today?
Almost as surprising as the persistent denial of responsibility by brand owners, is the selective ignorance of the advertising regulator. Don’t they read marketing text-books? Aren’t they aware of case studies like ‘Tab Clear’ or ‘Fruitopia,’ (another spoiler brand created by Coca-Cola to ‘kill the category’ after the successful launch of a fruit drink called ‘Snapple?’)[i]
Even more lacking in curiosity than the advertising regulator is the right-wing press.
Just this week we saw the synchronised outrage that greeted the passage of a bill designed to prohibit the sale of cigarettes, as though this represented the destruction of a vital public good.
Here is a typical example from ‘The Spectator.’ In an article titled ‘Liberty is Dying Under the Conservatives’ the economics editor quoted the Party’s former chairman as saying: ‘I want to live in a free society, where people are free to make good and bad decisions’ before concluding that: ‘the right to offend, to drink, to eat badly, to smoke – this must be defended in a free society.’
We heard this again and again. It may be regrettable that consumers choose to smoke themselves into an early grave… Personally I wouldn’t live off a diet of processed foods… but we must defend the right of others to do so in the name of individual liberty.
In this view, the decisions of consumers to act even in this consciously self-defeating way must be deemed entirely uninflected. Only this exact status quo can be the product of their free will. Any factors exhorting them, for instance, to desist from killing themselves must sadly be ruled out in the higher cause of preserving a free society, while any voices enthusiastically spurring them on must be given free rein, er, also in the name of a free society?
This nonsensical argument would be suspect expressed by a disinterested observer, but remember its proponents depend upon it being true for their livelihoods. More than ever in the age of free to use media, news organisations are dependent on advertising revenue and on selling the data of their consumers. They are being bribed to hold their audiences down while their paymasters beat them up. The regulator is on look-out duty.
[i] Both examples are covered in Mr Zyman’s classic memoir: ‘The End of Marketing as We Know It’