DATELINE: SEATTLE : Some companies find bashing Californians is good business
A grumpy newspaper columnist popularized the idea: Blame Californians for Seattle’s growing pains.
Faster and more vigorously than anyone could have guessed, the thought penetrated the local psyche and became part of the background noise of life in the booming city of Seattle. Whether it was traffic, pollution, runaway housing prices, gangs, rudeness or even greed, what came to mind was: Damn Californians. Grumble, grumble, grumble.
Sometimes the complaints were strident, sometimes witty. But they were real enough so that new arrivals knew to ditch their California license plates as fast as they could and to dread the Seattle native’s first question: “So, where did you go to high school?”
Now big business is capitalizing on the anti-California mood in the pop culture of advertising.
One television commercial now airing says, “If you bank with (Los Angeles-based) Security Pacific Bank, some of your money could end up here. But if you bank with Puget Sound Bank, your money stays here working to make this a better place.”
Radio versions of the ad campaign have an extra barb. They note that Southern California is where McDonnell Douglas makes airliners, but most people fly in Seattle-built Boeing planes. So there, L.A.
Puget Sound Bank is sensitive, however, about being lumped in with the California bashers.
“We don’t feel it’s anti-California in any way. We just think the money ought to stay here,” said JoAnne Coy, advertising director of the bank. She notes that two variants of the ad wag a finger at banks owned by New Yorkers and Oregonians, neither of whom, by the way, are thought of as all that different from Californians.
According to the bank, the campaign has done more to increase accounts at its 91 Washington state branches than any advertising campaign in 35 years.
Local ownership is not an issue in Rainier Brewery’s advertising, because it is owned by a Wisconsin firm. It’s a matter of local marketing.
“Californians just don’t get it,” said last-summer’s billboards featuring a bottle of Rainier Beer. Indeed, Rainier Beer is not marketed in California.
The billboards have come down during the rainy season. Still, the brewery has remained with the theme in a pointed us-vs.-them broadcast campaign that is now under way for Rainier Light.
These commercials take a poke at various California stereotypes, from highly groomed society dogs to petite restaurant helpings to Beverly Hills women in Spandex lame.
The narration contrasts such images--”their” California style, pets, food--with more homey and appealing vignettes of what is described as “our” Northwest style, pets, food, etc. “Theirs” is a goofy poodle; “ours” is lovable husky, and so forth.
Gene Clark, marketing VP for Rainier, calls it tongue-in-cheek fun with “some vastly overdone cliches.” The campaign is to “build up the Northwest lifestyle.”
When random consumers were shown the ads in controlled focus groups, Rainier found that transplanted Californians “laughed along with them.” The only strong objections, Clark said, came from “native Washingtonians who thought it was California bashing.”
And therein is the pickle for the people of Seattle.
At the heart of their lament about California is the threat that rapid growth poses to their traditional feeling of hometown civility, their sense of order, their everyday consensus values. They fear they have become another jostling, anonymous urban center along Interstates 5 and 405.
But, to single out Californians individually, to fight back when someone cuts them off driving, to be strident, angry, loud or aggressive . . . well, that would be a sign of defeat. That would be doing it “their” way.
Then who would there be to blame?
