Monday, February 2, 2009
On my weekly Target run, I found some intriguing items: hairdryers and plates with Hannah Montana’s face plastered on them, and a children’s book called (seriously) “Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope.” That item might be topped only by the Yes-We-Can-Opener featured last December on “Jay Leno.”
Maybe I pulled a Rip Van Winkle and have been asleep for years, waking to find out Hannah Montana discovered the cure for cancer, and Obama single-handedly saved the economy. Or maybe I misread the Bible and Obama really is the Messiah.
Why else would their faces be on every inanimate object?
The answer is over-marketing.
Last time I checked, Hannah Montana is a television character and “singer,” and Obama has been in office for two weeks. What does it show about our society when we put certain celebrities on a pedestal? If we do believe in change, why didn’t we slap Mother Teresa’s face on coffee mugs? Where is the I-Have-a-Dream Catcher?
Too many products make us forget about the person. Marketing is about money. But money is not why these people do what they do (or so they say). Obama cares about fixing the nation. Ms. Montana wants to make music and be a normal teenager (if any teenager can be normal; if one is, he or she should be studied immediately).
In addition to diminishing what the person is trying to accomplish, over-marketing makes us forget that the person is a person. We expect the over-marketed individual to be superhuman, and are disappointed when everything he or she touches does not magically turn into gold.
How weird would it be if every 11-year-old had my face decorating his or her room? It would probably make me miss my Facebook stalker.
We do the same with books as well as celebrities. The “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” series have kids running to the aisles to buy costumes and action figures. Have the kids missed the meaning of the books? Are they so obsessed with trying to recreate the magical worlds that they forget to live in the real world? They don’t realize that they can use the lessons the characters learn and apply them to reality without waving fake wands and wearing Hermione Granger wigs.
Over-hyping can also turn off audiences. A lot of students, for example, like the underground and Indie music scenes because the bands are not over-marketed and controlled by money-hungry producers.
The musicians have the freedom to make and focus on their music instead of turning themselves into icons. They still advertise their music, but they try to sell their music, not their bodies. If Beyonce were a boy, as she sings about in her current single, I bet she wouldn’t sell half the CDs she does.
The trick is finding the fine line between advertising and selling one’s craft without compromising who one is and what one is trying to accomplish with one’s work. And a children’s book about a two-week-old presidency is definitely crossing that line.
Letting Ty Inc. make beanie dolls that have the same names as and look exactly like Obama’s daughters, however, is not over-marketing. It is pure coincidence.
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