The friendliness of packaging

Now this may seem like a strange and insignificant subject for a blog post, but I have to confess it has been preying on my mind for a while...


Advertising and marketing are not normally subjects we want to give much thought to. The most common, perhaps one could say the "correct" attitude to take to them is to ignore them; we would prefer others to think we are not watching or, at least not responding to ad breaks on TV, for instance. Where we break this rule it tends to be in the direction of certain responses - ridicule, for something pretentious; mild amusement, where a joke is permitted to work; light nostalgia for past advertising (remembered jingles, or quaint old Edwardian posters for chocolate recycled as postcards or fridge magnets). On rare occasions an ad is actually impressive (as some of the Guinness or Honda ones are). Otherwise, advertising seems - rarely enough for an area of popular culture - to fall below our critical response-threshold: we compare favourite TV shows, we argue about bands, we berate footballers, we adore or (more usually) deplore celebrities, we even talk about ringtones (well, kids do) - but we couldn't give the proverbial monkeys about the enormous amount of commercially designed material we are involuntarily exposed to every day.

This is because we tend to think all of this stuff is, without any particular distinction, "manipulative": it's designed with our tastes and responses in mind, but its real purpose is commercial, to get us to that point of handing over our cash for the product, after which the advertiser could not care less what happened to the product or us. True enough: but the tools of manipulation do make a difference. The sorts of ideas and references advertisers use are not purely commercial or confined to claims about the product (one often thinks: if only they were!), but play off all sorts of complex trends in popular culture as a whole. This was true even for old-fashioned, 50s-style adverts, as Roland Barthes showed in his Mythologies. How much truer it must be for the bewildering complexity of modern advertising, in which the "brand" has become a kind of subcultural unit in itself, is something we need to analyse. It is also something we need to discuss critically, just as we would any social trend, without jumping straight away to the Marxist conclusion that anything "co-opted" by the capitalists must be a bad thing. (Is it so awful if companies are keen to display their green credentials, for instance?)

In fact, the tendency I'm going to examine here is something I haven't fully made my mind up about yet, although I won't be able to hide how intensely annoying I find it in most cases. It's what I detect as a growing familiarity in the "tone of voice" adopted by certain companies, not only in their adverts but on their packaging, in their stores (if they have them), and as part of their general brand concept. The best examples I've found so far are in coffee shops and food and drink manufacturing. Of these by far the most irritating is the coffee chain Puccino's. Their website ("Hi, how's it hanging...Puccino's - yeah, really special...all delivered to the customer with a massive smile (not fake)" gives only a hint of how fabulously satisfied they are with this wink-wink, familiar-ironic style they've just adopted. It goes all the way down to the signs they hang in their shops. The one on the door reads "completely open/shut happens"; over the till there are explanations of how to order a drink ("1. place your order 2. loiter 3. pick up your order 4. waddle off self-consciously"); and one saying "no knee-bobbing" over the counter where you perch to drink your coffee.

A slightly better-known case is Pret A Manger. I don't know whether they've always had the brand style they have now, but it's an unmistakeable part of the same trend. According to their customer enquiries page, which invites you to hassle their MD because he "hasn't got much to do" (like hell he hasn't), they hand out a solid silver Tiffany star to every employee who gets positive feedback from the public. They are positively bending over backwards to tell you what a wonderful happy company they are. (One little feature I can't forebear comment on: the use of inverted commas everywhere, as in 'Just Made' sandwiches. Have they just been made or haven't they?! Or is "just" the kind of word you can stretch a bit? I think that's the implication - "you won't mind us saying this if we put it in quotation marks, will you - we're nice people really!". In academic prose one refers to "scare quotes" to mean phrases the writer uses unwillingly. I suppose these must be "friendly quotes".) Ditto with Innocent smoothies: it must be their innovation to have put fake ingredients on their packaging for a joke (...one banana, 6 grapes, and one family-size hatchback). All the links on their web-page dance up and down going "look at me, aren't I cute", and they can't stop organising events, competitions, and "village fetes" in the middle of Regent's Park. Ben and Jerry's have a similar aesthetic - punning product names and Holstein cows in hammocks with speech bubbles. Another random example: I ate at a sandwich joint on Charlotte Street the other day that went by the charming name Squat and Gobble: on the receipt every item was listed as "Grub" and at the bottom was the motto "Keep gobbling!". The next day I went to one of my usual non-branded places to escape the whole business, only to accidentally pick up an "exquisitely trivial" cake made by Mr Bunbury, whose "secret life" I was encouraged to discover on his eponymous website.

There genuinely is no getting away from this "cute" kind of branding. Is it really a bad thing? After all, it's all creative, some of it is quite funny, and a lot of it seems to come from young companies that want to be a positive and ethically responsible force in the marketplace, not just a faceless money-making machine. Anyone of the Naomi Klein generation, however, with the cry No Logo! still echoing somewhere in the back of their minds, is bound to be suspicious of the whole brand phenomenon from the start; and even if Innocent are clearly not subcontracting their smoothies to Vietnamese sweatshops, you still wonder why this new branding strategy has become so popular. It's not just someone's bright idea: it means something in social terms. I've wondered whether it might be connected to the enormous popularity of comedy in the media, or to greater familiarity in public life (Europeans are more aware of this than Brits, as they watch the old formal modes of address - vous, Lei, and Sie - gradually give way to an automatic, familiar du or tu).

But one thing that can't be overlooked is that this tone makes no real communicative sense: packaging cannot actually be friendly in the way that people can be. And if you say that it isn't the packaging but the company/brand that's being friendly, I'm not sure that's a logical improvement, since - as with personally-addressed junk mail, which is another branch of the same marketing strategy - there isn't any interaction going on here. (It's the same in the public sector with recorded apologies at train stations: you can only say sorry - and mean it - "live".) If there were, then for all the homogenous cheeriness that Pret (e.g.) imposes on its staff, such interaction would still (again) be with people. A company can be friendly in the sense of providing a nice working environment for its employees, but - however much they might want to make us feel included in that environment, and it's significant that they desperately do want to give us that sense - we aren't any part of it: we're customers, and we stand outside.

And is there anything wrong with that? Is there anything wrong with distance, formality, and anonymity when they're what's appropriate? I'm probably being hopelessly British, but I don't think there is. It can be dull, but at least it's not fake: it reflects the real, that is to say impersonal, relationship between a company or any public organisation and those it serves. That does not mean that every individual interaction between that organisation's representatives and the public has to be impersonal, of course. But the delight when it isn't - when spontaneous care, humour, or vivaciousness spring up - is because that person acts out of their expected role, using a commercial encounter as a simply human opportunity. That requires us to recognise in the first place that "roles" or personae have a role of their own in social behaviour, both when we inhabit them and, just as importantly, when we exchange or abandon them - a point eloquently made by Erving Goffmann in his classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. We can't function in modern urban society in a constantly friendly mode (like Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee, arriving in New York and trying to introduce himself to everyone on the street). Of course, it can be wonderful to see people try, but there's no hypocrisy in using several behavioural styles depending on what is appropriate. The hypocrisy here is that of marketeers pretending that a brand can act out any style it likes. They can feign it, of course, but I hope they don't expect us to believe that they've just made a new set of friends. They'll have to get a real life for that.