Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [46]
In the new McWorld of global sales, the trademark has surpassed the sales item and the image has overtaken the product as the key to earned income. Michael Jordan himself, until his temporary retirement into a mediocre minor league baseball career, earned $3 million a year for playing basketball and $36 million a year selling his name.25 In a section titled simply “The Nike Image,” Nike’s corporate report notes that while “early advertising and promotional efforts focused on the shoe, its features and benefits … in the years since, corporate communication has broadened to make Nike one of the few global leaders with an actual personality.” The new virtual reality corporation, even as it sheds its traditional character as a concrete corporate person, acquires an “actual” personality.26 Nike wants customers not simply to buy its goods but to believe in Nike; not only to assess the quality of the products but to believe in the “motivations” of the producers. This rhetoric suggests the corporation is acting more like a civil state or a state religion than like a shoe company. It aspires to “the development of strong Pan-European, Asian and Latin American media channels” that will “allow Nike to communicate its message and personality to consumers in every corner of the world—an integral part of ensuring a consistent global brand image.”
In communicating messages and conveying a personality, Nike is shaping the affective and behavioral contours of McWorld. Attesting to the sincerity of its globalism, the Nike chairman’s letter in the Annual Report in which these excerpts are found is presented in Japanese, French, German, and Spanish where those prized “emotional ties already in place” appear multilingually as “les liens émotionnels … déjà en-place” and “die gefühlsmässige Bindung … bereits vorhanden” and “los lazos sentimentales … en el lugar apropiado.” The Japanese version I will leave to the reader’s imagination. Nike’s new virtual reality defined by information and communication cyberspace, a full remove from any reality you and I know, is reified and brought back to earth in new stores like its multiplying “Nike Towns,” the template for which in suburban Beaver-ton (Portland), Oregon, has been described as “part Disneyland, part MTV,” outfitted with video screens, exotic fish, flute choruses, and the dum-dum-dum sounds of an epiphanal dribbling basketball. The Nike Towns have become tourist attractions that draw overflow crowds looking not for shoes but for “fun.”27 These stores stand to traditional stores as the new marketing of images stands to the traditional selling of products. They are sneaker theme parks in which sports (winning? exercising? just doing it?) suffuse reality. That reality, corporate public affairs officials being quick studies, is as well attuned to fashionable political attitudes as to fashionable footwear. Nike has thus acquired a conscience. Having marketed shoes to inner city kids whose tough urban image is crucial to international sales but who are themselves unlikely to be able to buy the shoes, Nike is pushing a volunteer program called P.L.A.Y. (Participation in the Lives of American Youth). It hopes a little of its own money will leverage a lot of customer effort on behalf of urban kids, some of whom are robbing and killing one another to secure a pair of Nike’s pricey high-tops.28
Nike is perhaps the most aggressive promoter of itself as a brand rather than a product in this consumer sector, but Reebok is not far behind. Its corporate self-definition portrays it as a “leading worldwide designer, marketer and distributor of sports, fitness and lifestyle products, including footwear and apparel” and its advertising features “Planet Reebok” (which it apparently cohabits with Ralph Lauren) where there are also “no boundaries.” In the late eighties, after successfully exploiting the American domestic market, both Nike and Reebok went after the European market, dominated by the German firms Adidas and Puma, and have recently moved aggressively into other world markets.
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