“Happiness is Hyundai” boldly declares an ad for Hyundai. Toyota pipes in with its instantly recognisable jingle “Oh what a feeling, Toyota!” accompanied by a picture of a jubilant Toyota owner jumping in the air for joy. Not to miss out, love gets its turn with the “love that car” ad by Mitsubishi.
Even if not intended as true statements, these declarations of happiness and love are designed to create an association of something highly valued and desired, such as ‘happiness’ and ‘love’, to brand names of cars. The hope is that the desirability that people attribute to those values will be passed on to the brands themselves.
Other highly prized values such as ‘friendship’, ‘truth’, ‘romance’, ‘grace’, ‘elegance’, ‘carefree’, ‘freedom’, ‘independence’, ‘beauty’ and ‘loveable’, to name but a few, have also been regularly associated with various consumer brands. For example: ‘friendship’ with bourbon in the Jim Beam ad, “Real friends. Real bourbon.”; ‘truth’ with the Calvin Klein perfume “Truth”; ‘amazing grace’ with a woman’s watch in an ad by Pulsar; ‘romance’ with the perfume “Romance” by Ralph Lauren; ‘elegance’ with a watch in an ad by Longines; ‘carefree’ with a brand name for tampons; ‘a declaration of independence’ with an ad for the perfume “Tommy Girl”; and not least, ‘lovable’ with “Lovable” a brand for women’s lingerie.
Philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom, no less, has not been spared. ‘Philosophy’ is also the brand-name for ladies handbags. Is there nothing sacred? Advertisers seem to think not. Plato’s famous complaint against the poets in Books 2 and 3 of his Republic offers an illuminating critique of the practice of associating brands with values. In those passages Socrates finds fault with two of the greatest poets of the time, Homer and Hesiod.
The thrust of his complaint is that these and other poets, “who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind”, lie. In short, they lie about the true nature of the gods and heroes. They misrepresent the gods by depicting them as cunning, dissembling, profligate, quarrelsome, lascivious, hot-tempered, self-seeking and self-serving, vain individuals who are morally no better, and sometimes worse, than ordinary men and women. They equally misrepresent the heroes by depicting them as grabbing, selfish, arrogant, greedy and callous egotists who, like Achilles, would only fight for ransom and gifts from the Greeks after his slave girl is taken from him by Agamemnon. He acts like a thug when, after killing Hector, he desecrates his body by tying it to his chariot dragging it around the walls of Troy. Is such a depiction of Achilles, the greatest of all heroes, a true representation of what a hero is or at least ought to be? And what of the harmful effect that such a depiction might have on the impressionable minds of children and the young who as Socrates claims “the young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous”.
Plato’s complaint against the poets is a fundamental and deep concern for moral education and how false depictions of gods and heroes in the poetry of his time can have a detrimental effect on the character of children and impressionable young persons. The choice of brands like Adidas taken by young looters in the recent UK riots is a sobering example. Brands become valuable as ‘identity statements’ in the minds of impressionable young people who feel they have no identity other than the brands they wear or worse, the ones they can’t afford.
Just as the poets in Plato’s time ascribed characteristics to gods and heroes that were inconsistent with their true nature, so too advertisers ascribe marketing characteristics to values that are inconsistent with those values: characteristics, like manufacturability, consumption, expendability, replacement, exchangeability, tradability, exhaustion, depreciation and price. Unlike consumable products that one trades for a price ,our societal values are non-consumable, non-expendable, non-replaceable, non-exchangeable, non-tradable, non-exhaustible, non-depreciable and ultimately, priceless.
Ironically, MasterCard, in a successful ad campaign, uses the term “priceless” to show that values such as friendship and love cannot be bought even with a credit card simply because they are “priceless”. In Plato’s time poets degraded both gods and heroes through exaggerations and misstatements. The advertising ‘poets’ of our time not dissimilarly, blatantly degrade our values by miss-associating them to brands. Sad is the day when our values become no more than brands. Perhaps the time has come to throw out the advertisers from the sacred temples of our values.
Dr Edward H. Spence is a senior lecturer of philosophy and ethics School in the Department of Communication and Creative Industries at Charles Sturt University.