The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [62]
In part, this approach to politics is on the rise for the same reason the filter bubble is: Personalized outreach gives better bang for the political buck. But it’s also a natural outcome of a well-documented shift in how people in industrialized countries think about what’s important. When people don’t have to worry about having their basic needs met, they care a lot more about having products and leaders that represent who they are.
Professor Ron Inglehart calls this trend postmaterialism, and it’s a result of the basic premise, he writes, that “you place the greatest subjective value on the things in short supply.” In surveys spanning forty years and eighty countries, people who were raised in affluence—who never had to worry about their physical survival—behaved in ways strikingly different from those of their hungry parents. “We can even specify,” Inglehart writes in Modernization and Postmodernization, “with far better than random success, what issues are likely to be most salient in the politics of the respective types of societies.”
While there are still significant differences from country to country, postmaterialists share some important traits. They’re less reverent about authority and traditional institutions—the appeal of authoritarian strongmen appears to be connected to a basic fear for survival. They’re more tolerant of difference: One especially striking chart shows a strong correlation between level of life satisfaction and comfort with living next door to someone who’s gay. And while earlier generations emphasize financial achievement and order, postmaterialists value self-expression and “being yourself.”
Somewhat confusingly, postmaterialism doesn’t mean anticonsumption. Actually, the phenomenon is at the bedrock of our current consumer culture: Whereas we once bought things because we needed them to survive, now we mostly buy things as a means of self-expression. And the same dynamics hold for political leadership: Increasingly, voters evaluate candidates on whether they represent an aspirational version of themselves.
The result is what marketers call brand fragmentation. When brands were primarily about validating the quality of a product—“Dove soap is pure and made of the best ingredients”—advertisements focused more on the basic value proposition. But when brands became vehicles for expressing identity, they needed to speak more intimately to different groups of people with divergent identities they wanted express. And as a result, they started to splinter. Which is why what’s happened to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer is a good way of understanding the challenges faced by Barack Obama.
In the early 2000s, Pabst was struggling financially. It had maxed out among the white rural population that formed the core of its customer base, and it was selling less than 1 million barrels of beer a year, down from 20 million in 1970. If Pabst wanted to sell more beer, it had to look elsewhere, and Neal Stewart, a midlevel marketing manager, did. Stewart went to Postland, Oregon, where Pabst numbers were surprisingly strong and an ironic nostalgia for white working-class culture (remember trucker hats?) was widespread. If Pabst couldn’t get people to drink its watery brew sincerely, Stewart figured, maybe they could get people to drink it ironically. Pabst began to sponsor hipster events—gallery openings, bike messenger races, snowboarding competitions, and the like. Within a year, sales were way up—which is why, if you walk into a bar in certain Brooklyn neighborhoods, Pabst is more likely to be available than other low-end American beers.
That’s not the only excursion in reinvention that Pabst did. In China, where it is branded a “world-famous spirit,” Pabst has made itself into a luxury beverage for the cosmopolitan elite. Advertisements compare it to “Scotch whisky, French brandy, Bordeaux wine,” and present it in a fluted champagne glass atop a wooden cask. A bottle runs about $44 in U.S. currency.
What’s interesting about the Pabst story is that it’s not rebranding of the typical sort, in which a