December 1, 2005 – The Emperor’s New Suit

December 1, 2005 – The Emperor’s New Suit

The marketing guy inside of me has a fascination with the fairy tale entitled “The Emperor’s New Suit,” written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837. You’ve not doubt heard the tale of the vain ruler who had a fascination with clothes, a unique suit each day, always looking for the newest thing to wear, anxious to show off his latest garment to his subjects. Two swindlers arrive in the Emperor’s town and claim to be able to create a garment so grand that those unfit for their office or unpardonably stupid could not see it. The king knowing he was fit for his office and certainly not stupid insisted the two charlatans make such a garment for him, for he was eager to show his subjects himself attired in this exquisite apparel. The con artists pretend to weave this imaginary suit and in an elaborate charade dress the emperor’s nude body in it. The emperor pretends to see the non-existent garment the thieves have contrived fearing to appear stupid and below his office.

Now intent to model this finest of fashion, the Emperor parades stark naked through the streets of his kingdom to the admiration of his subjects, who also do not wish to appear stupid because they cannot see but the Emperor’s naked self. The story ends when a young boy too naïve to know that the Emperor has anything on but his bare naked skin declares aloud that the king is without his clothes, to which all the Emperor’s subjects agree in whispers fearful of incurring the monarch’s wrath. Upon hearing the child’s declaration, the Emperor too realizes his bare nakedness but cannot but continue the ridiculous charade.

The story has all the elements of a good marketing primer. First, you have to convince an opinion maker; Time Magazine, CBS News, Wall Street Journal, the President of the United States, or in the case of the Andersen’s tale, the Emperor; of the veracity of your claim. They, in turn, begin to promote the authenticity of your message to a much larger group. Members within that group—local media outlets and opinion makers—promote your idea to their smaller groups and suddenly something like “weapons of mass destruction” in the Iraq desert gets enough credence that a nation sanctions a war to seek out and neutralize those weapons. The history of every great nation is filled with such stories. William Randolph Hearst’s effort to sell newspapers in the winter of 1898 provoked the Spanish American War after the battleship U.S.S. Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor.

In Great Britain at about the same time, Alfred Harmsworth (now there’s an appropriate name) Lord Northcliffe, the Hearst of the British Empire was busily publishing stories by G. W. Steevens, a sixteen-part series entitled “Under the Iron Heel,” He also employed the writer William Le Queux—Ian Fleming patterned James Bond after Le Queux’s main character Duckworth Drew (another name to conjure with). Le Queux was publishing novels in Harmsworth’s Daily Mail newspaper with titles like “The Great War in England in 1897,” “The Invasion of 1910,” among others that told lurid tales of Germans invading England and subjugating citizenry. The fear mongering these widely read publications engendered in no small measure contributed to the atmosphere ripe for the outbreak of the First World War. The editor of Harmsworth’s rival The Star newspaper claimed, “next to the Kaiser, Lord Northcliffe has done more than any living man to bring about the war.”

Humans love good stories regardless if they are credible or not. In today’s world of instant access and information on demand, marketing is likewise evolving, like a virus morphing into new forms that are even more powerful than their previous incarnation. No where is this more obvious than in the movies, television programming, web productions, music videos, etc that deluge us daily. Within all the media we consume continually during our waking hours, marketing messages abound, a great many we’re not even aware we’re receiving. The BMW Gisele Bundchen drove in “Taxi”, as well as those driven by Pierce Brosnan in most of the latter James Bond movies are the most obvious, but the less obvious are the countless brands inconspicuously placed in movies, videos, etc that we’ve come to take for granted—Coke, Pepsi, Tylenol, Marlboro, not to mention Apple, Sony, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, and the list goes on.

As a teen, the Marlboro brand was the one that insinuated itself into my psyche completely. When I started smoking at 16—I quit five years later and have not smoked since, I would only smoke Marlboros and those times I had to settle for Winstons or Camels or some other brand, the experience was completely unsatisfying. Marlboro made me feel different when I smoked them—a pack a day. It was my security blanket, the surrogate thumb of my babyhood come back to comfort me in the unfamiliar world of near-adulthood.

You can draw the same parallel with news brands. My nearly 90 year old mother is addicted to the Fox News Channel. My conservative Republican friend LM is likewise hooked on CNN, though he subscribes to the more liberal New York Times—of which he continually complains but cannot bring himself to stop reading. Both these publication provide not merely a news source but some since of comfort and security in a mad world.

I started this discourse off talking about the Emperor’s New Suit and marketing in its guise of the two charlatans who convinced the Emperor that their imaginary woven clothes were the height of fashion and something he could not live without. The great brands of our time have the same level of influence over those who are their followers. Everyone’s sense of self is tied up in a multitude of brands. We live in zip codes or telephone area codes that are considered chic for our socio-economic sense of self—something clever real estate developers and sales agents have taken pains to create. We drive cars, own homes, and every other material possession that testifies to our status within the world. We’re defined by our consumption even down to what we wear.

Humans have a need to be told what is “in” and what is “out.” Without these signals, how is it that we distinguish ourselves in a world that is so downright predictably dull and boring—the sun rises and falls each day. Winter follows autumn, which follows summer which follows spring. How is a thinking rational being suppose to cope with this continuous monotony? The way we do so is to create a world as we would envision it to be. The role of marketing is to help give birth to your every seminal notion.

And that is not a bad thing. Creating a world of consumerism has given order to the enormous energy welled up in humankind, directing all that force toward consumption. Without marketing to convince us we have to rise every day and drive our Mercedes, BMWs, Lexas SUVs, etc. to work so we can afford the Gucci, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana apparel, dinner at Elaine’s in Manhattan, The Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, Michael’s in Santa Monica, yearly trips to London with stays at the Dorchester, The Lanesborough, The Berkeley, etc. In reality, you could live without all of this, but you have to admit, life would be pretty boring if you did. So the true moral of the story about the Emperor new suit is that we all should be smarter consumers.