Guilty Pleasures, Branding, and the Cultural Self

Comparative and Historical Analysis in Cultural Context

Comparative and historical analysis describes the practice of examining events within their historical context by comparing them with other events that have occurred in the past. Events that occur today do not occur in a vacuum — they always carry context. A useful illustration is the confusion in Britain when it was revealed that a suicide bomb attack had been carried out by Anglo-Jamaicans. The context made little sense, as this social group was not known for anything close to terrorism. The attackers, however, had converted to radical Islam — unusual perhaps for that group, but this conversion shifted the context of those attacks entirely. Historically and comparatively, the attacks made far more sense, since radical Islamist movements have employed suicide bombings and have been associated with terrorist attacks more broadly.

Advertising, Desire, and the Commodity Self

Envy, desire, and belonging are powerful emotions, and they are frequently exploited in advertising. This works in two parts. The first is that the advertiser creates these emotions; the second is that the advertiser promotes their product as the solution to the problem. Lifestyle advertising is one way this is accomplished, where a product is promoted as part of a lifestyle — one that is usually impossible to achieve. The idea is that if you buy this product, you are demonstrating your aspiration to that lifestyle. This can play not only on envy but also create a sense of belonging to a larger group, a cooler group, or at least a group with common purchasing habits. Advertisers want to create desire, so they play on existing desires in order to sell products they promote as satisfying those desires.

Branding, identity, and the commodity self all play into this as well. A brand is more than just a logo and a name — it is a set of ideas that accompany that name and logo. The brand therefore represents more than just a product; it carries an identity. That brand identity is part of what is being sold to consumers. A consumer wants to define himself or herself in terms of a set of attributes, and uses brands to display those attributes to themselves and to others. Advertisers work hard to create brand associations with attributes that consumers find desirable, so that consumers will seek out products bearing that brand as a means of self-expression. This is what is known as the commodity self — the idea that one's sense of self is defined in terms of what one purchases.

Use Value, Exchange Value, and Consumer Decisions

Use value and exchange value are related economic concepts. Every good has two values. Use value is what the good can be used for; exchange value is what the good can be exchanged for. The relationship between these two values is important in consumer purchasing decisions. If you want something perishable — a cup of coffee, for example — you have a price you are willing to pay for that commodity. That is the use value. Exchange value reflects the point at which you would rather have the money instead.

The clearest example is a car, because there are many secondary markets for cars. Suppose you have a car you use only for vacations because you can walk to work. At some point, that car is worth more to you converted to cash (exchange value) than it is as a vacation vehicle (use value), and you would probably sell it. But if you need that car to commute, its use value will exceed its exchange value and you will keep it. The same principle applies to other goods: we all weigh, for each purchase, whether something has more value as cash or more value as a good we actually use.

Sternburgh's Argument: Removing Guilt from Consumption

Sternburgh's main argument is that economic transactions should be just that — transactions — and not expressions of emotions. He uses the guilty pleasure as his foil, because guilt is an overtly emotional concept and the phrase itself is extremely common. Guilty pleasures are things we purchase and enjoy but over which we feel some measure of guilt. Some guilt is warranted — as when we purchase a product we know to be unethical or harmful — but in many cases we feel guilt over purchases seemingly for no rational reason. Sternburgh notes that guilty pleasures reflect a mixture of "self-consciousness and self-reflection." The self-consciousness corresponds to the guilt, while the self-reflection corresponds to the satisfaction: you have determined that a product's use value is superior to its price and you buy it because it makes sense to you, economically, at the time.

What is appealing about this argument is its call to remove negative emotions from purchasing and consumption. Rojek notes that popular culture is designed in part to drive consumption, and advertising makes frequent and liberal use of emotional manipulation. Purchases driven by advertising are, in many cases, driven by manipulation intended to make us feel bad about ourselves in some way, with the product offered as a solution. The guilty pleasure is a kind of reverse embodiment of this: the purchaser feels bad after the purchase rather than before. Marketers can exploit this by treating their products as indulgences — we are told throughout our lives that we have few indulgences and that we deserve them, with the result that we are constantly indulging.

Yet there is a weakness in Sternburgh's argument. The guilt we attach to a guilty pleasure is ultimately self-generated — our own emotions driving that sense of guilt. He is right that we should take ownership over our emotional state with respect to purchasing, but we tend to feel this guilt when our compulsion to purchase outweighs our rational self. The rational self knows we cannot afford those shoes, but we buy them anyway and feel guilt later. The rational self knows we are already overweight and that another doughnut is not in our health interest, but we buy it anyway — and then feel bad about it. We feel bad, in a sense, because we sense we have been maneuvered into doing something against our own self-interest. A guilty pleasure can therefore be understood as an emotional reaction against the way we have been conditioned by advertising. The feeling of guilt is natural — it is our sensible self trying to assert itself in the face of compulsive buying behavior.

The deeper problem is that so much of our consumption is conditioned and therefore reflexive rather than rational. Our culture has been shaped by advertising to a degree we scarcely appreciate. Williams notes that the milieu in which we place ourselves defines a large part of our culture, in addition to the culture into which we are born. From the outset, our consumption patterns determine who we are — or at least how we are perceived by others — and often how we perceive ourselves as well. We need commodities to define ourselves, and there are times when the rational mind recognizes the inherent problems with this, expressing itself as guilt. In that sense, eliminating guilt from purchasing feels more like the suppression of rationality than a liberation of the true self. Guilt is unpleasant, but it exists for a reason.

References

Hall, S. (1998). Notes on deconstructing the popular. Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Rojek, C. (no date). Cultural studies. Policy Short Introduction Series.

Sternburgh, A. (2014). All of the pleasure. None of the guilt. New York Times Magazine. Retrieved March 5, 2015, from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/magazine/all-of-the-pleasure-none-of-the-guilt.html?_r=1

Williams, R. (no date). Culture is ordinary.