White Coat, Black Hat by Carl Elliott

Author:Carl Elliott [Elliott, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6143-5
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2010-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

The Flacks

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I was sitting in my office at the University of Minnesota trying to avoid work when I got an unusual phone call. It came from an international advertising agency. The woman on the phone said she had read my book Better than Well and wondered if I would talk about it at a meeting in Boston. I had no idea what to make of her invitation. It was hard for me to imagine why anyone in an advertising agency would want to hear about my book, which was not exactly enthusiastic about the marketing business; besides, this company did not even seem to market drugs. They advertised consumer products such as cars, bourbon whiskey, and golf balls. Out of curiosity, I agreed to go.1

The meeting was for the company’s strategic planners, who had been flown to Boston from various international locations. Strategic planners, I learned, are hip young people who dress in black and wear small, stylish glasses. In the advertising world, their job description appears to fall somewhere between “ethnographer” and “evil genius.” Unlike the “creatives,” who were not present at the meeting but who were often invoked, like mysterious spirits, strategic planners do not actually create ads. They are the intellectuals behind the operation. It is part of their job to hit the streets, sniff the air, and figure out what can be exploited for capitalism. These strategic planners had gathered in Boston to brainstorm about their various marketing campaigns, one of which concerned a new Volkswagen.

The Volkswagen campaign was tricky. Volkswagen was producing a luxury car called the Phaeton, which it planned to price at over $70,000 (and which actually wound up costing much more). Volkswagen envisioned the Phaeton as an elite, high-end competitor to Jaguar, BMW, and Mercedes. For the strategic planners, the problem with the Phaeton was the Volkswagen brand. Volkswagens are not exactly branded for luxury. If anything, they are branded with a kind of hip nostalgia for the 1960s counterculture. So the strategic planners had a dilemma. To sell a luxury car like the Phaeton, they had to reach luxury-car buyers. But they did not want to alienate the Volkswagen brand loyalists. How do you sell luxury Volkswagens without looking like a sellout to all those guys in denim jackets and gray ponytails who associate Volkswagens with the smell of weed and the sound of the Grateful Dead?

After months of research, the strategic planners had constructed a detailed approach. To sell luxury Volkswagens, they believed, you need to find a particular kind of customer. Ideally, these customers are creative, environmentally sensitive liberals who are concerned about social justice. They are the sort of people who read the New York Times, listen to National Public Radio, and shop at Whole Foods. They spend a lot of time in coffee shops and bookstores, and they are closely involved with their neighborhood organizations and their children’s schools. And of course, their stock portfolios are impressive enough for them to drop $70,000 on a luxury car.

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