What do you endorse?
I watched the Truman Show again last night. There are a thousand things to blog about this movie, but I’ll focus on the least-mentioned: product placement. “Everything on the show is for sale. The actor’s wardrobe, food products, to the very homes they live in.” (Christof) “And of course all of it is available in the Truman catalogue.” (interviewer)
Look around your desk right now, or wherever you do your blog reading. What’s there? I have:
- a Wendy’s Biggie cup with Minute Maid Lite Lemonade in it
- a Scotch brand tape dispenser
- a Kleenex brand tissue box
- Simply Basic (Wal-Mart) brand scented lotion
- Tatung brand monitor (what the crap is Tatung?)
- Intrex brand computer (don’t ask)
- Dell brand speakers
- a Boston brand stapler (because someone stole my red Swingline)
- a Sharpie
- a Glad brand container with Food Lion-bought white grapes in it (along with the grape bag that warns us away from suffocating our children and little penguins with it).
Those are just the items that are labeled in such a way that I can see the brand from where I’m sitting.
Brands really win when they become colloquialisms. You don’t research something; you google it. I almost said I had a Kleenex brand box of kleenex and a Glad brand tupperware container. And Sharpie…everyone knows that Sharpie is the thing that if your kid gets a hold of it, your walls are screwed. And everything else that gets in its path.
There’s no doubt about it: we are all brainwashed. We believe what the television tells us about how great something is, and we fail to research it. I might as well have said I endorse child slavery, solid waste pollution, terrorism, air pollution, deforestation, global warming (ack! global warming! we’re all gonna diiiiieeeee!!!!), inflation, embezzling, oil spills, species extinction, animal torture, and every other inconceivable evil on the planet.
The moral of this blog is, vote with your dollar. Buy local. Do your homework. Some products really are better than others. Figure out what’s important to you and stick to it. We can’t fix everything, and if we boycotted something every time the parent corporation screwed up, we’d all starve, freeze, AND suffocate to death. But we can have a voice. We can influence corporate America.
Put your money where your heart is.