The Theory
Juliet Schor is professor of sociology at Boston College. She is interested in consumerism and its effects on children. Writing about marketing to children she notes: ‘At age one, she’s watching Teletubbies and eating the food of its “promo partners”, Burger King and McDonald’s. Kids can recognise logos by 18 months, and before reaching their second birthday they’re asking for products by brand name. By three or three and a half, experts say, children start to believe that brands communicate their personal qualities. Upon arrival at the schoolhouse steps, the typical first grader can evoke 200 brands.’ (Juliet Schor When childhood gets commercialised can children be protected?)
Young people are subjected to over 3,000 marketing messages per day, per person. Advertising works best when it creates an, often subtle, insecurity about something and then offers a solution at a price. Young people are a prime market for advertisers because on entering puberty, insecurities run riot. Having the right phone, fashion, footwear, taste in music and body shape feels like it can help young people define who they are and how they fit in.
The Experiment
Steve Blower is a youth specialist minister in Birmingham: ‘I guess my main work is with young people who identify with hiphop and b-boy culture. Image is a big part of that culture. Adidas is a really important brand in hip-hop culture. I am also into that culture and so own a fair amount of Adidas clothing myself. However, I was made aware that Adidas didn’t have a good reputation in terms of its ethical practices and that clashed with my values.’ The website ethicalconsumer.org can inform you of the practices of most major companies.’
We live in a consumerist society that tells us, ‘you are what you own’. Young people, particularly early teens, are questioning themselves, their identity and how they fit in the world around them. Consumerism’s answer is, ‘buy, own’. The obvious downside to this is that young people build their identity on what brand they identify with and the stuff they can accumulate. These beliefs can easily overshadow the values of developing their own identity through relationships and experiences. Consumer research shows that a young person’s level of materialism is directly connected to their self-esteem. As young people enter into adolescence, their selfesteem drops and their materialism peaks.
As youth move away from the family unit and try to find a new way to exist in the world, fitting in becomes very important. This is why branding is also significant to those who market products to young people: branding is about finding a group and a tribe to identify with.
The downside to belonging and identification through brands is that it can encourage the disapproval of anything different. I was wearing my Adidas ZX500s in suede, when that young person yelled, ‘What are those?’ They are not an unknown brand but because they didn’t fit with her very narrow selection of what her and her peers thought were acceptable, these shoes were mocked. This disapproval of difference, combined with young people’s tendencies towards black-and-white-thinking leads to increased individualistic attitudes.
It could be argued that even the earliest Christians were into branding. In the early days of the church, Christians were at great risk of persecution. The symbol of the fish was used as a secret code, letting others know in a discrete way that they were Christian. Fish in Greek, Ichthyus, is an acrostic: I?sous, Christos, Theou, Yios, S?t?r which translates into English as Jesus Christ, God’s son, Saviour. This symbol, that would have kept the safety of the early church among those in the know, is now a popular car sticker.
Steve: ‘I felt that I had to do something that challenged the ethics of Adidas and its space in the culture of young people I work with. I didn’t want to throw all of my clothes away and contribute to landfill and I also didn’t want to give them to a charity shop to have someone else wear the label that I felt was unjust. Instead, I covered up the Adidas logo on all my clothes. I wanted people to still recognise the clothes but see them as contributing to a broken world. I chose hessian fabric as a covering as it has a link to the Old Testament’s wearing of sackcloth as a form of repentance. The young people’s reaction was initially to laugh and make fun of me in a friendly joking way. However, some of the young people would repeat the story behind what I was wearing to newcomers, with a sense of pride. I didn’t want the young people to see me as self-righteous but I did want to challenge the young people on how they saw the world around them. As a b-boy crew, the young people designed t-shirts for the group and part of the conversation around the t-shirts was that they should be ethically sourced.
Experiment Yourself
Looking at branding and its impact on young people in your context, there are two roles we can play as youth workers.
A role for Prophets
In The Prophetic imagination, Walter Brueggemann suggests that a prophetic ministry is characterised by two actions, critique and energising. Critique is not simply shouting down something that we disagree with, it is engaging the dominant powers of the day, declaring them unable to provide what they claim to provide. We can see the situations and relationships as they are in this fallen world and yet in the same glance, we see what they could be in a restored world under Christ. The energising part is imagining that new world and courageously inviting others to live in that future together.
A role for storytellers
While young people may feel they have a relationship with a particular brand, youth workers know that teenagers will find more depth to understanding who they are through relationships with people and God. Branding is about telling and selling a story; marketeers don’t sell the product on its merits alone, but by selling the story behind the product. We need to become the storytellers that flip the world on its head. Jesus communicated through parables that left the disciples and those who had come to hear him with more questions. In the parables, the kingdom of God sits at odds with the world’s way of doing things. We need to become storytellers who say that another world is possible.
Get young people to write down all the brands that they are wearing or have on them. Use the website ethicalconsumer.org to rank the brands. Young people often have a strong sense of justice, so work with them to engage in a response that might bring about a better world.
Get hold of a brand’s marketing campaign, magazine ads, social media output and anything else you can find. Help the young people analyse the story and messages behind them. What story or lifestyle are they are trying to sell? Who are they selling it to? What does it make you feel like if don’t have the product and then if you do have it? Ask how this marketing sits with the stories of what the kingdom of God is like? Maybe try contrasting it with an appropriate parable.
