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"The : Good at Marketing but Not Good for Their Market" 2/9/09 11:30 AM

"The Spice Girls: Good at Marketing but Not Good for Their Market"

by Pat Inglenook, a student

The following essay, by student writer Pat Inglenook, evaluates the Spice Girl Phenomenon of the late . At the time this essay was written, Ginger Spice had just left the band. Critics predicted a quick decline of Spice Girl popularity. Inglenook chooses to evaluate the Spice Girls not as musicians or entertainers but as marketers of an image.

When my eight-year-old sister asked for a Baby Spice talking doll (it plays Baby Spice's voice saying "In my bed I've got two teddies, a rabbit, two dollies" and "Fantastic. I love it"), and my eleven-year-old sister and her friends seemed to be dancing to Spice Girl CDs all the time, I started to wonder about this strange relationship between capitalism and culture in the late 1990s. What is it about the Spice Girls—Ginger Spice, Posh Spice, Baby Spice, Scary Spice, and Sporty Spice— that has attracted mobs of screaming, hysterical girls, aged seven to fourteen, and created for the Spice Girls a multi-million-dollar industry almost overnight? Clearly, my two sisters and their friends with their three-inch Spice Girl figurines ($3.99 each) and their seven-inch Spice Girl dolls ($7.99 each) and their Spice Girl Hair Play set, Nail Salon set, and Tattoo Graphix set ($9.97 each), to say nothing of the CDs ($ 16.85 each), have helped to support this industry. But why? As I have watched my sisters I have wondered, What is the fascination here? The Spice Girls do wear hip, hot-looking outfits, but the group's music is bubblegum for the brain. One critic says that the Spice Girl music is an "ideal hollow-commodity for a world increasingly obsessed with 'low': low-fat, low-sodium, low-calorie, low-IQ" (Crumley). Neither do they fare well in the category "actresses," where they won the anti-Oscar "Golden Raspberry Award" as "Worst Actress" for 1998. According to the judge, "They have the talent of one bad actress between them" ("Shiteworld").

So if we place the Spice Girls in the categories "musician" or "actress," they fail miserably. But if we evaluate them in the category "marketers," they obviously excel. They are excellent marketers because, in targeting a specific audience of preteen girls, they have shrewdly created an image that appeals to that audience's interests and psychological desires.

Their first mark of excellence is that they understand girl psychology, which wants sexy fashion without sex. As any good marketer knows, the younger part of the Spice Girls' target audience values Barbie dolls, and so the Spice Girls created a Barbie image of decolletage and fashion without any -like interest in real sex. In their film "Spice World," the girls look music-video sexy, but they aren't seeking sex. When one of the directors tries to put some buff male dancers on the

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stage, the girls do an "Ick, Boys" routine and mock them. No real boyfriends intrude on this Barbie doll world.

Instead of sex, the Spice Girls value an endless slumber party where giggling girls share secrets. In Spice World, they bond together like fun-seeking little girls on vacation from the grown-up world of responsibility represented by their manager. In this intimate little girl world, they look out for each other like Care Bears. They are even willing to miss their con¬cert date to stay with their friend who is having a baby.

Another example of their marketing shrewdness is the way that the Spice Girls appeal to individualism and the belief that any self has many sides. Just as it was a calculatingly clever marketing move for the Barbie people to create an astronaut Barbie, a teacher Barbie,

[end page 211]

and a doctor Barbie, so was it brilliant to give each Spice Girl a different personality type and a different style of hot, sexy clothes. On any given day, your typical ten- year-old girl can live out her baby side, her posh side, her sporty side, her scary side, and her fun-loving Ginger side.

But their shrewdest marketing move is to create an illusion that a girl can be both a sex object and a liberated woman. today pummels young girls with two contradictory messages. First, it tells girls to make themselves objects of sexual desire by being consumers of beauty and glamour products and purchasers of fashion magazines. Conversely, it tells girls to be liberated women, fully equal to men, with men's freedom and power and array of career choices. The Spice Girls, with their "" logos on midriff T's worn over micro-skirts, send both messages simultaneously. Their girl-power side is acted out in Spice World by their defiance of the male authority figures. For instance, they "steal" a boat and go for a frolicking excursion on a speedboat. Later in the movie, their "heroic" bus ride (a parody of James Bond pursuit scenes) shows the girls having another adventure and taking control of their lives. Even their rise from poverty to fame in a music culture dominated by men demonstrates "girl power." Their object-of-sexual-desire side is portrayed constantly by their sexy clothes and dance routines. The effect is to urge young girls to become capitalist consumers of beauty products while believing they possess power as girls. Girls get the same illusion when they comb the hair of their astronaut Barbies.

Despite the overwhelming marketing success of the Spice Girls, I question whether monetary gain should be the main measure of this cultural product. Furthermore, although the Spice Girls sell themselves as models for young girls and appear to succeed, are they promoting models that can and should be imitated?

Some people would say that combining sexuality and girl power is good and beneficial. Critics of often complain that hard-line feminists want women to give up beauty and sex appeal. These critics don't like that desexed view of women.

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They think a truly liberated woman should be able to use all her powers, and some of this power comes from her being a sex object. This view would say that beauty pageant contestants, topless dancers, and even prostitutes can be liberated women if they use their sexuality to get what they want and if they feel good about themselves. From this perspective, the Spice Girls use their sexuality in the name of liberation. This view perhaps led the to send (the former Ginger Spice) to be an ambassador of goodwill for the United Nations Population Fund to promote contraceptives in Third World countries ("Church Attacks").

But to me this argument doesn't work. I think the Spice Girls are confusing, even bad, models for helping young girls integrate sexuality and liberation. The sex is voyeuristic only. The Spice Girls flaunt their sexuality but don't show any signs of establishing healthy adult relationships. The projected scene of married life in Spice World shows fat or pregnant housewives bored out of their skulls—no love, no husbands, no families. Equally strange is the childbirth scene where the Spice Girls seem to know nothing about female bodies. It is closer to a stork delivery than the real thing: no messy water, blood, and umbilical cords. The cherubic, powdered baby pops out like toast from a toaster.

[end page 212]

The Spice Girl image sends all kinds of mixed messages, urging preteens to become sex objects while remaining little girls. I'm surprised that parents aren't up in arms (but they are the ones, of course, who supply the money that drives the Spice enterprise). In a review of Spice World from Screen It: Entertainment Reviews for Parents, the reviewers rated the movie "mild" for sex/nudity (parents were cautioned primarily about naked male butts in one scene), and under the criterion "topics to talk about" they found almost nothing in the movie that needs discussion with one's children. On the lookout for things like visible nipples, sex scenes, and violence, parents have failed to see the unhealthy, fragmented, and warped view of womanhood the Spice Girls project to their young audience. Their strange clashing mixture of sexuality and liberation promotes confusion, not health.

Near the end of Spice World the girls are stopped by a cop who aims to give them a ticket for reckless driving. Undaunted, they turn to Baby Spice, who gives Daddy Policeman her best I'm-a-sorry-little-girl smile, and his heart melts. Rather than face the consequences of choice-making in an adult world, Baby Spice knows just the right daddy-pleasing gesture to make all their troubles go away. I grant that the Spice Girls are great at marketing themselves, but I don't think their product is good for their market. Maybe soon all the Spice Girl dolls and CDs in my house will be given away like other outgrown, faddish toys. I hope the next pop cultural sensation aimed at preteen girls has more whole¬some substance than this mixture of illusory independence, sexiness, and lollipops.

Works Cited

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"Church Attacks Ex-Spice Girl's Sex-Education Tour." Seattle Times 15 June 1999: A18.

Crumley, Bruce. "Spice Invaders." Culture Kiosque 12 June 1997. Paris. 23 Aug. 1999 < http://www.culturekiosque.com/nouveau/comment/rhespice.htm >.

Rev. of Spice World, dir. . Screen It! Entertainment Reviews for Parents 12 Jan. 1998. 24 Aug. 1999 < http:/www.screenit.com/movies/1998/spice_world.html >.

"Shiteworld: The Movies." New Musical Express Online. 23 Aug. 1999 < http://nme.com/newsdesk/19990222143334news.html >.

** from John D. Ramage, John C. Bean, and June Johnson's Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Readings, Concise Edition, 2nd edition (New York: Pearson Longman, 2001), pp 211-213.

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