Now Pepsi discovers perils of ‘sellebrity’
The flipside of social media-driven branding is that a label can suddenly plunge from hero to zero
Marx’s only accurate prediction was “all that is solid melts into air”. Item: Pepsi-Cola once ran a simple, successful business selling soft drinks in bottles and cans to thirsty people. Now that business rises or declines on the fortunes of Kendall Jenner, a model-actress type who is a member of the iffy Kardashian family, famous merely for being famous. Jenner’s millions of social media followers give her ineffable commercial pistonnage. She is a brand as much as Pepsi.
Of course, advertising has long used celebrity endorsement to suggest allure. Rolex has been recruiting yachtsmen, opera singers, architects and tennis players for over half a century. You want to be a little bit like Roger Federer? Then buy a gold Datejust. Nowadays, Nespresso cannot be separated in most people’s minds from George Clooney. It’s what George Lois, model for Mad Men’s Don Draper, called “sellebrity”.
What has changed in the last few years is that all of life has become a matter of branding. I am not a writer, but a branded content provider. Tiny Tesla is now worth more than vast Ford. Never mind that Nikola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current, was a delusional psychotic who kept pigeons in his New York hotel room, Tesla means Elon Musk, with his carefully honed reputation for bright eyes and bold, successful visions. Musk is a cool brand.
The evolution of brands has tracked the history of modern business. Once the product itself was essential; now the image has exceeded it in value. Throbbing smokestack industries have been replaced by the cool pulse of electrons. There is a simple demonstration of this: work out the market capitalisation of, say, CocaCola and then subtract its assets.
The gap in between is the brand value and it’s in billions and billions. You could do the same exercise for Porsche or Louis Vuitton. The Harvard Business Review recently estimated that 40 years ago the contribution of brand value to the S&P 500 Index was less than 20 per cent of the total. Now it is over 80 per cent.
Ask the man at Audi and he will tell you it’s no longer about engines, but about “a promise”. Victoria Beckham, no engineer, is a creative consultant to Land-Rover. FC Barcelona sees futbol only as the beginning of its business. It now sells branded wine.
Karl Marx, you should be with us now. All that is solid melts into Airbnb. This is the biggest hospitality company in the world and owns no hotels. We are all dematerialised. Meanwhile, Uber owns no taxis. Its biggest asset is Travis Kalanick, its aggressive founder.
How has this happened? Social media. Increasingly, advertisers prefer the instantaneous global reach of Facebook to 30-second television slots or roadside poster sites. But social media emphasise brainless narcissism, so brainless social-media celebrities become valuable advertising media. And, in a beautiful virtuous circle, filthy rich as well.
This, depending on your point of view, may be the saddest or most exhilarating testament to our modern condition: making money out of nothing. Consider Millie Mackintosh, of the chocolate family, a Made in Chelsea starlet, taking photographs of her bottom for internet distribution. This is what’s known as “attention farming”. So many people want to look at Ms Mackintosh’s quality bottom that her endorsement of any product is a precious business tool.
Is this smut, voodoo or folklore? All of them. Brands are the symbolic glue binding us in collective yearnings, providing narrative charm in a volatile world. Significantly, the individual who created “brand management” in 1931 was Neil McElroy, of Procter & Gamble, who became Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defence in 1957. That year, the United States was humiliated by the Soviet Union beating it into space with the Sputnik brand. The next year, McElroy created Nasa’s Advanced Research Projects Agency which later developed the internet. The connection between brands and social media is historic. It’s about reaching for intangibles.
But there are dangers here: products may be good or bad, but brands can be contaminated. Things can turn toxic, celebrities can fail, as Kendall Jenner and Pepsi discovered this week. Celebrity, as John Updike knew, is a mask that eats the face.