Institutions of higher yearning

In “Branded Nation,” James B. Twitchell argues that religion, higher education and the museum, three institutions normally thought to be above the marketing fray, have had no choice but to capitulate to the cycle of desiring, getting and spending that governs contemporary life. Derived from the Old English word biernan, “branding” originally meant the process of tempering something by high heat and eventually came to designate the searing of animal flesh to show ownership. For Twitchell, branding is “the application of a story to a product or service,” a kind of rhetorical marking that seeks to differentiate a product or service from others in the same niche. When the market is awash with a surplus of fungible goods, when the consumer has countless varieties of beer from which to choose, it falls to the advertising agency to develop customer affiliation and loyalty by way of a brand fiction. If you choose Coors, so the story goes, you will ride the silver bullet to sexual success in a raucous bar filled with gorgeous, available 20-year-olds; if you opt for Budweiser, you will enjoy all that is great about America. It makes no difference that Coors and Budweiser are entirely undistinguished brews.

What the consumer gets from branding is the sense of participating in a community of like-minded folk who enjoy the same things, a “certification of membership in a branded community,” access to a lifestyle that is itself “an emblematic display of coherent brands.” Of Evian mineral water, a pricey beverage that has a cloyingly alkaline, plastic taste to this reviewer’s palate, Twitchell brilliantly remarks, “We want the story. The story retails for $1.49; the water is free.” The clear plastic bottle with the pink label and red text signifies that the consumer is health-conscious and goes to the gym as often as work allows. The brand advertises not just the product but the individual, and so is indispensable in the theater of modern life, in which we define ourselves by what we consume. In Twitchell’s account, Brands R Us.

To view the varieties of religion in the United States as so many brands is to court controversy, but “Branded Nation” is convincing. Twitchell, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Florida and author of the 2001 book “Twenty Ads That Shook the World,” shows how flourishing contemporary mega-churches use publicity and consumer surveys to galvanize a new generation of believers in an increasingly competitive marketplace. He cheekily refers to the Roman Catholic Church as “a $7 billion brand in distress,” arguing that Rome has failed to adapt its offerings to contemporary America and is on the defensive in the wake of sexual abuse scandals. Meanwhile, in George W. Bush’s America, newer brands of born-again Christianity are on the rise because they have tailored themselves to our consumer culture. Successful mega-churches such as Willow Creek in Chicago offer spectacular services to thousands, complete with Christian rock music, endless parking lots, flat-screen televisions and food courts for refreshment after the uplifting Sunday sermon. Though Willow Creek pastor Bill Hybels says, “You can’t market Jesus,” it is clear his church is doing just that, on the order of $22 million in revenue and countless satisfied Christian customers. Toward the end of his discussion, Twitchell asks whether the new American mega-churches are more intolerant than they might appear to be, but he does not press the question, which is unfortunate.

If the church must deliver customer satisfaction in the form of “a sensation of epiphany, the promise of forgiveness and ... the promise of a life beyond this one,” the university must deliver satisfaction in the form of “edutainment.” Educational institutions have had to accommodate the demands for luxury that come with an increasingly sophisticated and indulged client base. Many offer all the gymnasiums, spas, upscale food services and high-speed Internet services that today’s pampered suburbanite could possibly demand, and this is most often at the expense of hiring essential faculty, professors being the university’s most expensive and least marketable resource, at least as far as admissions departments are concerned. In a marvelous aphorism, Twitchell suggests, “Grade inflation is the tribute [universities] pay to the concept of a happy customer,” for failing marks do not contribute to consumer contentment.

There is much to agree with here, and Twitchell’s prose moves along in an engagingly bouncy fashion, but his endearingly cynical argument about the university is somewhat reductive, as he paints every college student with the same brush. Though many undergraduates go to college for prestige or merely to mark time on their parents’ dime, there are plenty who truly wish to learn the various disciplines, who seek out mentor professors and whose noses are more in books than in beer steins. These students go to college not merely as consumers but to become producers of knowledge, to forge a sense of self in tandem with their exposure to great ideas. Twitchell’s claim that no one cares what happens in “grades 13-16” comes across as willfully contrarian. Is this the lament of one who has spent too much time trying to rouse the denizens of our swampiest state out of their late adolescent stupor?

On branding museums, Twitchell is more convincing. He shows how the museum was originally a repository for relics, each with a particular story, not unlike the ones that branding tries to attach to commodities. The difference, of course, is that a commodity is endlessly reproducible, whereas a relic is ostensibly unique. The “Hair of the Beard of the Prophet” encased in a vitrine in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace is a link to the transcendent as long as one believes that the strand of black keratin attached to golden holders comes from the chin of Muhammad. Romantic art played with this idea of originality and traded on the notion of genius, itself a kind of earthly link to the divine. Yet even as the Romantics were claiming art to be an end in itself, the modern art market was beginning to explode, as Twitchell shows with cunning dialectical precision. The modern museum strives to inculcate a sense of awe about an artist’s original vision, yet Twitchell places a bit too much emphasis on museum goers’ passivity. What of the budding artist who makes an artwork in response to what she has seen? What of the gestation of critical sensibility? No doubt the Metropolitan Museum of Art must brand itself to stay afloat in the market, but not all Met visitors are empty consuming vessels.

“Branded Nation” is an engaging account of the surprising ubiquity of branding in the ostensibly disinterested world of high culture, and Twitchell deploys sociological theories and statistical research in an admirably breezy fashion. Still, by reducing everything to consumption and market share, he sells his incisive premise short. After all, he is more than just a consumer: He is a producer of ideas, a fecund critic who has never been as passive as the hordes he describes. He should give himself and others more credit, for even in a nation as relentlessly branded as our own, individuals are not fungible goods. *