Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [182]
27. Michael Lev, “Store of Future: It Also Sells Shoes,” The New York Times, June 17, 1991, p. D 1. According to P. K. Anderson, editor of Visual Merchandizing and Store Design, “There is less leisure time today so people need to have fun. You have to use every trick in the book to keep those shoppers lingering longer.”
In addition to its Portland store, Nike plans to build fourteen similar Nike Towns by the end of the decade. It has also installed ten mini—Nike Towns—“presentation stores”—in America, and plans eighty more worldwide. Nike recently opened a Vienna office with a view to East European sales possibilities. Ken Hamburg, “Nike Planning Lay-offs Globally,” The Oregonian, September 21, 1993, p. B 18.
28. “There is a crisis in America right now,” says CEO Knight, and Nike wants to help. Reebok has its own version of P.L.A.Y. called The Reebok Foundation, which sponsors a Human Rights Awards Program that aspires to “make a difference in the larger world.” (Paul Fireman, Reebok CEO, in the Reebok 1992 Annual Report.)
Corporate philanthropy by moguls who have sucked markets dry is of course an old American tradition. Today’s efforts are novel only in the causes to which they are devoted—ideally both politically correct and aimed at creating new consumers for their products (women, kids). Carnegie built libraries, he did not subsidize new generations of steel buyers.
29. PepsiCo’s new 1993 ad campaign dumped “Gotta have it!” in favor of “Be young, have fun, drink Pepsi,” presumably because visionary executives believe consumers will reverse the order of words and the logic words convey in their soft-drink-softened brains and drink Pepsi in order to have fun and become young. “We want to keep the notion alive that Pepsi is for people who want to feel and be young,” says Phil Dusenberry, the advertising executive responsible for the new campaign. Patricia Winters, “Pepsi Harkens Back to Youth,” Advertising Age, June 25, 1993, pp. 3, 43.
30. Coca-Cola 1992 Annual Report.
Earl Shorris discusses the general impact of advertising on culture in A Nation of Salesmen: The Tyranny of the Market and the Subversion of Culture (New York: Norton, 1994).
31. As Mark Pendergrast tells the story in his For God, Country and Coca-Cola (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), Coke has been doing whatever it takes to penetrate markets ever since accommodating the Nazis (who were claiming Coke was a Jewish-American company because it sold Kosher-stamped bottles) by passing out samples at Hitler Youth rallies, and accommodating Stalin by decaramelizing “White Coke” and shipping fifty cases in clear bottles with red-star-embossed white caps for his approval. Coke was also there recently when the Berlin Wall came down, handing out six-packs. Pendergrast sums it up unsentimentally: “In World War II, Coke was an American imperialist symbol, a kosher food, a fake Communist beverage and the drink of Hitler Youth. Most people thought the war was about good, evil, competing ideologies and so on, but for Coca-Cola the issue was simpler: more Coke or less Coke.” See Mark Pendergrast, ibid., and his short piece “A Brief History of Coca-Colonization,” in The New York Times, August 5, 1993, p. F 13.
32. Take an example from another consumer area: are microwave ovens “necessities”? In the United States, 44 percent of the population think so; in Mexico, only 19 percent think so. If another 25 percent of Mexicans can be persuaded that they “need” microwaves, the market for American microwaves—especially in the era of NAFTA—is dramatically enhanced. Figures from Anthony de Palma, “Mexico’s Hunger for U.S. Goods Is Helping to Sell the Trade Pact,” The New York Times, Week in Review, November 7, 1993. Section 4, pp. 1–2.
33. In the 1992 Coca-Cola Companys Annual Report entitled appropriately to our theme here “Worlds of Opportunity.”
34. The New York Times Magazine, December 25, 1994, pp. 36–37. It is perhaps in the name of the