Archive for March, 2012

How Would You Sell The Tea Party?

Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, Movies, National Politics, PPC on March 22nd, 2012

Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, I got to his essay, “True Colors: Hair Dye and the Hidden History of Postwar America.” He argues that the difference between Clairol’s “Does She or Doesn’t She?” and L’Oreal’s “Because I’m Worth It,” is the difference between 1950s and 1970s feminism. Moreover, even when the two product’s pitches had essentially merged (Gladwell was writing in 1999), their buyer’s different self-images lingered on. Smart ad men know they’re selling more than a product, they’re selling an experience, or an image. Sometimes, that image or dream ties into a larger social change or movement, and that that’s both a reflection and an agent of that change:

This notion of household products as psychological furniture is, when you think about it, a radical idea. When we give an account of how we got to where we are, we’re inclined to credit the philosophical over the physical, and the products of art over the products of commerce…

“Because I’m worth it,” and “Does she or doesn’t she?” were powerful, then, precisely because they were commercials, for commercials come with products attached, and products offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation.

Far from trivializing a political, social, or economic movement, commercialization can help make it personal and accessible, and therefore less threatening and more familiar.

We’ve seen a couple of Tea Party movies, one explicitly so, (Atlas Shrugged), and one implicitly (Robin Hood). Thus far, I’m aware of only one commercial that implies a Tea Party presence, the Starbucks commercial with the angry old loner who yells at town halls, which would be a bit like L’Oreal selling “Because I’m worth it” using Nurse Ratchet or Gloria Steinem, who quickly became a caricature of herself.

It may be that we have to wait until the Tea Party sees more success, in winning hearts and minds if not yet national elections, before companies are willing to bet their products’ success on its messaging. But just as feminism succeeded in making the political personal (and more destructively, the personal political), and as environmentalism succeeded in making small actions and then products green, the Tea Party might get farther by doing something similar for its own themes.

It’s not wise to choose your political message based on the products it might sell, but certain themes will sell better than others. We can search forever in the tall grass of social history to discover how much of feminism’s public appeal was based on opportunity, and how much drew from raging against The Patriarchy, but there’s no question that positive sells. Ilon Specht may have been angry when she wrote, “Because I’m worth it,” but the slogan expresses liberation, not anger.

To be sure, it faces some hurdles in doing this. If the theme is fiscal responsibility, most families already need to spend less than they make. If it’s personal liberty, the government’s probably a tougher customer to disobeying rules, tougher than most companies. And to the extent that it dwells on what used to be, rather than what might be, its message is nostalgia, and the only products it will sell are baseball and Coca-Cola. You want to get people to invite your ideas into their homes, you need to be relevant to how they’re living their lives today, and want to be living them tomorrow.

So, what products do you see as being right for capturing the Tea Party ethos, and allowing people to internalize it? Which themes are best suited to commercialization? And what messages should go in their commercials? How would you write such a commercial?

Atlas Shrugged, Malcolm Gladwell, Robin Hood, Starbucks, Tea Party

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Baptism By Firewall?

Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on March 11th, 2012

The Times of Israel is reporting that Mormon leaders are blocking access to the names of Holocaust victims in their genealogical database. The church has promised not to posthumously baptize these people, and the firewall is an attempt to prevent those church members who might not have gotten the word – or not have gotten it strongly enough – from getting their hands on the names.

The move comes amid criticism that the Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hasn’t done enough to live up to commitments to stop its members worldwide from performing the baptism ritual on Holocaust victims and other notable Jews.

The new system will immediately block church members’ access should they try to seek out names of Holocaust victims or other notable figures that have been flagged as not suitable for proxy baptisms. The church said the move is aimed at ending the practice.

But critics say it merely serves to block anyone from monitoring whether the posthumous baptisms continue.

The last sentence there indicates a distrust which I think is unfounded, if past experience is any guide. The Mormon church has a history of altering practice in the face of stiff criticism or legal action, and then sticking to the change. Banning polygamy and the treatment of blacks are two examples. Another example, more immediately relevant to Jews, is the Mormon research center is Jerusalem. It gained permission to open only on condition that it wouldn’t take advantage of the target-rich environment for missionary activities (walk-in business is another matter, of course; Israel remains a free society with freedom of conscience), and there is every evidence that they have strictly kept that promise.

I admit that I’ve never been particularly bothered by the practice in the first place. In Judaism, there are ways of affecting the soul of loved ones after death; it is believed that a child who recites Kaddish for a parent for a year after the parent’s death, for instance, acts to ameliorate judgment on the parent’s soul. There are fears of missionaries affecting the behavior of Jews in this world, by encouraging them to convert. This is to say nothing of those who would hasten the passage of living Jews into posthumousness.

But as a Jew, I don’t believe that posthumous baptisms affect the souls of my dead relatives, the practices of living Jews, or the course of their lives. (I am particularly baffled by those who would use it as an excuse to vote against Mitt Romney, especially when his opponent, the sitting president, has at least a two-degree of separation distance from characters with far more unsavory relationships to Jews. Not to mention his close relationship to many Jewish converts to Marxism.)

Being lied to would bother me a lot more, but in this instance, there’s no real reason to think that’s going on, beyond those who have a generalized mistrust of the Mormon Church and Mormons to begin with.

Mormonism, Posthumous Baptisms, Religion

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