Branding Politics: Emotion, Authenticity, and the Marketing Culture of American Political Communication

Branding politics: Emotion, authenticity, and the marketing culture of American political communication Author: Michael Serazio Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107484 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Post-print version of an article published in Journal of Consumer Culture : doi:10.1177/1469540515586868. These materials are made available for use in research, teaching and private study, pursuant to U.S. Copyright Law. The user must assume full responsibility for any use of the materials, including but not limited to, infringement of copyright and publication rights of reproduced materials. Any materials used for academic research or otherwise should be fully credited with the source. The publisher or original authors may retain copyright to the materials. Running Head: BRANDING POLITICS Branding politics: Emotion, authenticity, and the marketing culture of American political communication Abstract This paper examines and critiques the logic and practices of branding that inform contemporary American political campaigns within the context of ethical surplus, sign value versus use value, emotion and reason, and the tension of authenticity and cynicism. The original research is based upon 38 one-on-one, in-depth interviews with political consultants, including media strategists, communication directors, and advertising producers who are involved in the encoding and cultural production of political discourse. The qualitative findings illuminate a professional ideology among these elite practitioners that obfuscates the pursuit of power by strategizing texts that involve emotional evocation rather than rational deliberation and embed candidates within signifiers of and proxies for authenticity. These efforts are intended to strike a disinterested, non-instrumental pose on behalf of the “branded candidates” they represent. Keywords Branding, political advertising, emotion, authenticity, consultants Branding Politics 1 The best political commercials are similar to Rorschach patterns. They do not tell the viewer anything. They surface his feelings and provide a context for him to express those feelings. Commercials that attempt to tell the listener something are inherently not as effective as those that attach to something that is already in him. – Tony Schwarz, media consultant and creator of Lyndon Johnson’s infamous “Daisy” advertisement (McNair, 2011: 94) In the aftermath of deregulated campaign financing, as ever-greater sums of donor cash flood into candidates’ coffers in the United States, political consultants are exerting more power over the conduct of those campaigns (Vogel, 2014). Simultaneously, some scholars fear that “leading political actors think about the media not only when campaigning, but also when governing and in the policy-making process” (Stromback, 2008: 239). This article inquires into how those consultants inform that thinking – specifically, how the logic of branding guides contemporary American political communication texts and practices. Drawing upon dozens of interviews with these elite operatives, the research examines how they construct and encode the “sign value” of a politician at the potential expense of his or her “use value;” how they engineer ethical surplus and opportunities for audience identification on behalf of those candidates; and how they co-opt “real” people and places to bolster their claims to credibility. The study concludes by offering a cautionary critique of this professional ideology (summarized by Schwarz above) that sets itself against rational deliberation and informed democratic participation. Throughout this look at political branding, a portrait emerges of a delicate approach to power – one that self-effaces its own intentions by opting for emotional implication Branding Politics 2 rather than policy explication and foregrounds disinterested pretenses and authenticating symbols. Literature Review Influential marketing practitioners like Kevin Roberts and Marc Gobe have long advocated an “emotional” rather than “attribute-driven” approach to commercial branding to elicit true consumer passion (Thompson et al., 2006). Simultaneously, management theorists stress the need for multinational corporations to think of themselves primarily as cultivators of image and myth – not simply as manufacturers of products (Klein, 2000). The aims of brand culture, therefore, reside in “building an affective, authentic relationship with a consumer, one based – just like a relationship between two people – on the accumulation of memories, emotions, personal narratives, and expectations” (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 8). For this reason, Adam Arvidsson (2005) theorizes branding as an open-ended, two-way process, dependent on consumers taking an active role in the generation of “ethical surplus” (“a social relation, a shared meaning, an emotional investment”) and co-creating through their voluntary labor the cultural worth that, in turn, represents the source of brand equity and economic value (237). Some, thus, decry a landscape of promotional culture that evades forthright salesmanship in favor of subtle persuasion through symbolic affiliations and evocative images (Wernick, 1991). One emblematic study, for example, charted the apparent trend over the course of the 20th century away from “rational” and “utility-oriented” advertising copy and marketing strategies (Leiss et al., 2005). Against this backdrop, Jean Baudrillard (1988) theorizes the ascendance of the “sign value” of objects over their “use value,” wherein the symbolic dimension (what it means), untethered from its material Branding Politics 3 referent (what it does), represents the essential, desired component and propels commercial exchange. These signs can accommodate a consumer’s identity project more flexibly than traditional, ascribed social structures; moreover, because the cultural positioning of goods now perhaps matters more than their functional worth, the design of such codes increasingly organizes and dominates the production process (Slater, 1997).1 Such patterns find parallel in politics. For instance, the demagogic force of feeling – defined as “affect,” “emotion,” or “passion” – has long been conceived as distinct from, lesser to, and intruding upon the sober wisdom of reason – defined as “thinking or cognizing” (Marcus, 2003: 187). Research has shown that an emotional soft-sell approach in political advertising by and large dominates, as images and music can be exploited for their powerful, yet subtle, influence (Brader, 2006). For critics like Jurgen Habermas (1989), who stresses a rational, informed citizenry as the precondition for democracy, advertising’s influence on that public sphere degrades political communication from fact-based reasoning to affective manipulation. This political critique has its commercial analogue in the writing of Benjamin Barber (2007), who laments how consumer culture encourages “infantilization,” wherein the task for marketers is “to immerse products and services in a nonspecific sentimental miasma from which ‘emotional decisions’ can ‘naturally’ arise (natural as a creation of artifice, and emotional decisions as irrational and nondeliberative and hence scarcely decisions at all)” (184). This research will therefore inquire how American political consultants construct the “sign value” and generate “ethical surplus” on behalf of clients. Centrally related to this discussion of emotional branding is the interplay of and tension between authenticity and cynicism, for the pursuit of corporate profit has always Branding Politics 4 coexisted uneasily with consumers’ affective attachment to marketed goods and services (Banet-Weiser, 2012). Departing from a premise that much of advertising already assumes a reflexively cynical viewer, Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson define authenticity as “the search for individuated space outside the commodity form and outside the spectacle” (142). Brands that “successfully shroud themselves in the cloak of authenticity are able to convey desirable consumer meanings of inner directedness, lack of pretense, and genuine commitment to brand-related activities” (Thompson et al., 2006: 53). To achieve this authenticity, in other words, the brand has to seem “disinterested” in the “commercial intent” that is its ultimate reason for existence and furnish itself, rather, as the resource needed to enable production of the consumer’s self (Holt, 2002: 83). That authenticity can be fortified by, as explored in wine marketing, reinforcing heritage, making links to specific geographic place, and virtuously embracing cause over commerce (Beverland, 2006). This research will map these ambitions in a campaign communication context – seeking to understand how consultants manage the challenge of authenticity in mediating a politician’s brand. The increasing centrality of branding logic, authenticity schemes, and emotional angles within strategic communication is occurring at a time of significant change as new models of networked, digital politics emerge. At a juncture of democratic malaise across the Western world – with declines in voter turnout, party identification, and institutional trust – campaigns are increasingly professionalized through spin doctoring and symbolic politics, as leaders and elites become further removed, socially, from the general public (Davis, 2010). To some, governing has itself morphed into a “permanent” marketing campaign (Newman, 1999); to others, the global rise of personality-centered

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