Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close--Episode 27

       THE ONE WORLD OF MTV KNOWS : "COKE IS BEST"

   In his Atlantic Monthly article in praise of economic integration, Akio Morita identified distinctive local cultures as a trade barrier. The need to respect local tastes and cultural differences as a 
condition of gaining consumer acceptance greatly complicates 
global marketing campaigns. The dream of corporate marketers is a globalized consumer culture united around brand-name loyalties that will allow a company to sell its products with the same 
advertising copy in Bangkok as in Paris or New York. It is happening. In the words of Robert C. Goizueta, a chairman of Coca-Cola Company, "people around the world are today connected by brand-name consumer products as much as by anything else." Coca-Cola's success in making itself a global
 symbol has served as an inspiration for corporate executives 
everywhere. 
   Few media provide greater potential for realizing this advertisers' dream than MTV, the rock music television channel. Its near-
universal appeal to  teenagers and preteens around the world makes it an ideal instrument for the globalization of the consumer culture. 

By 1993, MTV's popular rock-and-roll programming, with its 
kaleidoscope of brief, disconnected images, was available on a daily basis to 210 million households in seventy-one countries. According to Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, the MTV entertainment network, which specializes in pop videos and serves 
as a continuous commercial for a wide array of commercial products, "may be the most influential educator of young people on five continents." They continue : 


The performances and the ads merge to create a mood of longing --- for someone to love, for something to happen, for an end to loneliness, and for things to buy --- a record, a ticket to a rock 
concert, a T-shirt, a Thunderbird. The advertising is all the more effective because it is not acknowledged as such. . . All across the planet, people are using the same electronic devices to watch or to listen to the same commercially produced songs and stories. 


   Sarah Ferguson believes that the commercialization of youth culture, especially the music that was once a primary instrument of
 expressive rebellion for adolescents, keeps youth from owning even their own rebellion and actively inhibits the development of a counterculture. She writes, "The loop taken by a new musical style from the underground to the mainstream is now so compressed that
 there's no moment of freedom and chaos when a counterculture can take root.
   Among the most aggressive efforts to universalize the consumer culture is that of the Avon beauty products company. On August 2, 
1994 the TV show Nation documented the campaign by Avon to win new customers among dirt-poor campesinas in the Amazon basin of Brazil, where 70,000 Avon saleswomen take the Avon message to every rural doorstep. Ademar Serodio, president of Avon Brazil, explained, "Instead of asking people to buy more from us, we start discovering people who never bought from us before." As revealed in footage of Avon saleswomen making door-to-door house calls in the remote village of Santarem, many of these new customers are thin, aging, wrinkled women living with their barefoot children shacks with dirt floors. Most people in Santarem don't read or write, and the average household income is $3 per day.
   Hundreds of Avon saleswomen were fielded in Santarem to follow up on TV advertising showing romantic scenes of sensuous, young, light-skinned women with dashingly handsome young men. They tell the aged women, broken by childbearing and toil in the sun, that they can be beautiful if they use Avon products. A major promotion centers on a skin-renewal product called Renew --- costing $40 a jar --- which works by burning off the top layer of the user's skin. A TV ad uses special effects to create the image of a woman peeling away years of aging from her face to appear magically younger. According to Rosa Alegria, communications director for Avon Brazil, "Women do everything to buy it. They stop buying things like clothes, like shoes. If they feel good with their skin they prefer to stop buying clothes and buy something that is on the television. People think it is a real miracle."