Part 2 (2/2)

In the three years before he retired, Jordan was easing away from his persona as Nike incarnate and turning himself into what his agent, David Falk, calls a ”superbrand.” He refused to go along when Nike entered the sportsagent business, telling the company that it would have to compensate him for millions of dollars in lost revenue. Instead of letting Nike manage his endors.e.m.e.nt portfolio, he tried to build synergy deals between his various sponsors, including a bizarre attempt to persuade Nike to switch phone companies when he became a celebrity spokesperson for WorldCom.32 Other highlights of what Falk terms ”Michael Jordan's Corporate Partners.h.i.+p Program” include a WorldCom commercial in which the actors are decked out in Oakley sungla.s.ses and Wilson sports gear, both Jordan-endorsed products. And, of course, the movie Other highlights of what Falk terms ”Michael Jordan's Corporate Partners.h.i.+p Program” include a WorldCom commercial in which the actors are decked out in Oakley sungla.s.ses and Wilson sports gear, both Jordan-endorsed products. And, of course, the movie s.p.a.ce Jam s.p.a.ce Jam-in which the basketball player starred and which Falk executive-produced-was Jordan's coming-out party as his own brand. The movie incorporated plugs for each of Jordan's sponsors (choice dialogue includes ”Michael, it's show time. Get your Hanes on, lace up your Nikes, grab your Wheaties and Gatorade and we'll pick up a Big Mac on the way!”), and McDonald's promoted the event with s.p.a.ce Jam s.p.a.ce Jam toys and Happy Meals. toys and Happy Meals.

Nike had been playing up Jordan's business ambitions in its ”CEO Jordan” commercials, which show him changing into a suit and racing to his office at halftime. But behind the scenes, the company has always resented Jordan's extra-Nike activities. Donald Katz writes that as early as 1992, ”Knight believed that Michael Jordan was no longer, in sports-marketing nomenclature, 'clean.'”33 Significantly, Nike boycotted the co-branding bonanza that surrounded Significantly, Nike boycotted the co-branding bonanza that surrounded s.p.a.ce Jam s.p.a.ce Jam. Unlike McDonald's, it didn't use the movie in tie-in commercials, despite the fact that s.p.a.ce Jam s.p.a.ce Jam is based on a series of Nike commercials featuring Jordan and Bugs Bunny. When Falk told is based on a series of Nike commercials featuring Jordan and Bugs Bunny. When Falk told Advertising Age Advertising Age that ”Nike had some reservations about the implementation of the movie,” that ”Nike had some reservations about the implementation of the movie,”34 he was exercising considerable restraint. Jim Riswold, the longtime Nike adman who first conceived of pairing Jordan with Bugs Bunny in the shoe commercials, complained to he was exercising considerable restraint. Jim Riswold, the longtime Nike adman who first conceived of pairing Jordan with Bugs Bunny in the shoe commercials, complained to The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal that that s.p.a.ce Jam s.p.a.ce Jam ”is a merchandising bonanza first and a movie second. The idea is to sell lots of product.” ”is a merchandising bonanza first and a movie second. The idea is to sell lots of product.”35 It was a historic moment in the branding of culture, completely inverting the traditionally fraught relations.h.i.+p between art and commerce: a shoe company and an ad agency huffing and puffing that a Hollywood movie would sully the purity of their commercials. It was a historic moment in the branding of culture, completely inverting the traditionally fraught relations.h.i.+p between art and commerce: a shoe company and an ad agency huffing and puffing that a Hollywood movie would sully the purity of their commercials.

For the time being at least, a peace has descended between the warring superbrands. Nike has given Jordan more leeway to develop his own apparel brand, still within the Nike empire but with greater independence. In the same week that he retired from basketball, Jordan announced that he would be extending the JORDAN clothing line from basketball gear into lifestyle wear, competing directly with Polo, Hilfiger and Nautica. Settling into his role as CEO-as opposed to celebrity endorser-he signed up other pro athletes to endorse the JORDAN brand: Derek Jeter, a shortstop for the New York Yankees and boxer Roy Jones Jr. And, as of May 1999, the full JORDAN brand is showcased in its own ”retail concept shops”-two in New York and one in Chicago, with plans for up to fifty outlets by the end of the year 2000. Jordan finally had his wish: to be his own free-standing brand, complete with celebrity endorsers.

The Age of the Brandasaurus On the surface, the power plays between millionaire athletes and billion-dollar companies would seem to have little to do with the loss of unmarketed s.p.a.ce that is the subject of this section. Jordan and Nike, however, are only the most broad strokes, manifestations of the way in which the branding imperative changes the way we imagine both sponsor and sponsored to the extent that the idea of unbranded s.p.a.ce-music that is distinct from khakis, festivals that are not extensions of beer brands, athletic achievement that is celebrated in and of itself-becomes almost unthinkable. Jordan and Nike are emblematic of a new paradigm that eliminates all barriers between branding and culture, leaving no room whatsoever for unmarketed s.p.a.ce.

An understanding is beginning to emerge that fas.h.i.+on designers, running-shoe companies, media outlets, cartoon characters and celebrities of all kinds are all more or less in the same business: the business of marketing their brands. That's why in the early nineties, Creative Artists Agency, the most powerful celebrity agency in Hollywood, began to represent not just celebrity people, but celebrity brands: c.o.ke, Apple and even an alliance with Nike. That's why Benetton, Microsoft and Starbucks have leapfrogged over the ”magalog” trend and have gone full force into the magazine publis.h.i.+ng business: Benetton with Colors Colors, Microsoft with the on-line zine Slate Slate and Starbucks with and Starbucks with Joe Joe, a joint venture with Time Inc. That's why teen sensation Britney Spears and sitcom character Ally McBeal each have their own line of designer clothing; why Tommy Hilfiger has helped launch a record label; and rapper Master P has his own sports agency business. It's also why Ralph Lauren has a line of designer household paints, Brooks Brothers has a line of wines, Nike is set to launch a swooshed cruise s.h.i.+p, and auto-parts giant Magna is opening up an amus.e.m.e.nt park. It is also why market consultant Faith Popcorn has launched her own brand of leather Coc.o.o.ning armchairs, named after the trend she coined of the same name, and Fas.h.i.+on Licensing of America Inc. is marketing a line of Ernest Hemingway furniture, designed to capture the ”brand personality” of the late writer.36 As manufacturers and entertainers swap roles and move together toward the creation of branded lifestyle bubbles, Nike executives predict that their ”compet.i.tion in the future [will] be Disney, not Reebok.”37 And it seems only fitting that just as Nike enters the entertainment business, the entertainment giants have decided to try their hand at the sneaker industry. In October 1997, Warner Brothers launched a low-end basketball shoe, endorsed by Shaquille O'Neal. ”It's an extension of what we do at retail,” explained Dan Romanelli of Warner Consumer products. And it seems only fitting that just as Nike enters the entertainment business, the entertainment giants have decided to try their hand at the sneaker industry. In October 1997, Warner Brothers launched a low-end basketball shoe, endorsed by Shaquille O'Neal. ”It's an extension of what we do at retail,” explained Dan Romanelli of Warner Consumer products.

It seems that wherever individual brands began-in shoes, sports, retail, food, music or cartoons-the most successful among them have all landed in the same place: the stratosphere of the superbrand. That is where Mick Jagger struts in Tommy Hilfiger, Steven Spielberg and c.o.ke have the same agent, Shaq wants to be ”like Mickey Mouse,” and everyone has his or her own branded restaurant-from Jordan to Disney to Demi Moore to Puffy Combs and the supermodels.

It was Michael Ovitz, of course, who came up with the blueprint for the highest temple of branding so far, one that would do for music, sports and fas.h.i.+on what Walt Disney long ago did for kids' cartoons: turn the slick world of television into a real-world branded environment. After leaving Creative Artists Agency in August 1995 and being driven out as president of Disney shortly after, Ovitz took his unprecedented $87 million golden handshake and launched a new venture: entertainment- and sports-themed megamalls, a synthesis of pro sports, Hollywood celebrity and shopping. His vision is of an unholy mixture of Nike Town, Planet Hollywood and the NBA's marketing wing-all leading straight to the cash register. The first venture, a 1.5-million-square-foot theme mall in Columbus, Ohio, is scheduled to open in the year 2000. If Ovitz gets his way, another mall, planned for the Los Angeles area, will include an NFL football stadium.

As these edifices of the future suggest, corporate sponsors and the culture they brand have fused together to create a third culture: a self-enclosed universe of brand-name people, brand-name products and brand-name media. Interestingly, a 1995 study conducted by University of Missouri professor Roy F. Fox shows that many kids grasp the unique ambiguities of this sphere intuitively. The study found that a majority of Missouri high-school students who watched Channel One's mix of news and ads in their cla.s.srooms thought that sports stars paid shoe companies to be in their commercials. ”I don't know why athletes do that-pay all that money for all them ignorant commercials for themselves. Guess it makes everyone like 'em more and like their teams more.”38 So opined Debbie, a ninth-grader and one of the two hundred students who partic.i.p.ated in the study. For Fox, the comment demonstrates a disturbing lack of media literacy, proof positive that kids can't critically evaluate the advertising they see on television. But perhaps these findings show that kids understand something most of us still refuse to grasp. Maybe they know that sponsors.h.i.+p is a far more complicated process than the buyer/seller dichotomy that existed in previous decades and that to talk of who sold out or bought in has become impossibly anachronistic. In an era in which people are brands and brands are culture, what Nike and Michael Jordan do is more akin to co-branding than straight-up s.h.i.+lling, and while the Spice Girls may be doing Pepsi today, they could easily launch their own Spice Cola tomorrow.

It makes a good deal of sense that high-school kids would have a more realistic grasp of the absurdities of branded life. They, after all, are the ones who grew up sold.

Virgin's Richard Branson, the rock-and-roll CEO. Revolution Soda Co.'s consumable Che.

Chapter Three.

Alt. Everything The Youth Market and the Marketing of Cool It's terrible to say, very often the most exciting outfits are from the poorest people.

-Designer Christian Lacroix in Vogue Vogue, April 1994 In our final year of high school, my best friend, Lan Ying, and I pa.s.sed the time with morbid discussions about the meaninglessness of life when everything had already been done. The world stretched out before us not as a slate of possibility, but as a maze of well-worn grooves like the ridges burrowed by insects in hardwood. Step off the straight and narrow career-and-materialism groove and you just end up on another one-the groove for people who step off the main groove. And that groove was worn indeed (some of the grooving done by our own parents). Want to go traveling? Be a modern-day Kerouac? Hop on the Let's Go Europe groove. How about a rebel? An avant-garde artist? Go buy your alterna-groove at the secondhand bookstore, dusty and moth-eaten and done to death. Everywhere we imagined ourselves standing turned into a cliche beneath our feet-the stuff of Jeep ad copy and sketch comedy. To us it seemed as though the archetypes were all hackneyed by the time our turn came to graduate, including that of the black-clad deflated intellectual, which we were trying on at that very moment. Crowded by the ideas and styles of the past, we felt there was no open s.p.a.ce anywhere.

Of course it's a cla.s.sic symptom of teenage narcissism to believe that the end of history coincides exactly with your arrival on earth. Almost every angst-ridden, Camus-reading seventeen-year-old girl finds her own groove eventually. Still, there is a part of my high-school globo-claustrophobia that has never left me, and in some ways only seems to intensify as time creeps along. What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal s.p.a.ce so much as a deep craving for metaphorical s.p.a.ce: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.

All my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper. That was enough escape for them. The ocean, the night sky, some acoustic guitar...what more could you ask? Well, actually, you could ask to go soaring off the side of a mountain on a s...o...b..ard, feeling as if, for one moment, you are riding the clouds instead of the snow. You could scour Southeast Asia, like the world-weary twenty-somethings in Alex Garland's novel The Beach The Beach, looking for the one corner of the globe uncharted by the Lonely Planet to start your own private utopia. You could, for that matter, join a New Age cult and dream of alien abduction. From the occult to raves to riots to extreme sports, it seems that the eternal urge for escape has never enjoyed such niche marketing.

In the absence of s.p.a.ce travel and confined by the laws of gravity, however, most of us take our open s.p.a.ce where we can get it, sneaking it like cigarettes, outside hulking enclosures. The streets may be lined with billboards and franchise signs, but kids still make do, throwing up a couple of nets and pa.s.sing the puck or soccer ball between the cars. There is release, too, at England's free music festivals, and in conversions of untended private property into collective s.p.a.ce: abandoned factories turned into squats by street kids or ramped entrances to office towers transformed into skateboarding courses on Sunday afternoons.

But as privatization slithers into every crevice of public life, even these intervals of freedom and back alleys of unsponsored s.p.a.ce are slipping away. The indie skateboarders and s...o...b..arders all have Vans sneaker contracts, road hockey is fodder for beer commercials, inner-city redevelopment projects are sponsored by Wells Fargo, and the free festivals have all been banned, replaced with the annual Tribal Gathering, an electronic music festival that bills itself as a ”strike back against the establishment and clubland's evil empire of mediocrity, commercialism, and the creeping corporate capitalism of our cosmic counter-culture”1 and where the organizers regularly confiscate bottled water that has not been purchased on the premises, despite the fact that the number-one cause of death at raves is dehydration. and where the organizers regularly confiscate bottled water that has not been purchased on the premises, despite the fact that the number-one cause of death at raves is dehydration.

I remember the moment when it hit me that my frustrated craving for s.p.a.ce wasn't simply a result of the inevitable march of history, but of the fact that commercial co-optation was proceeding at a speed that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. I was watching the television coverage of the controversy surrounding Woodstock '94, the twenty-fifth-anniversary festival of the original Woodstock event. The baby-boomer pundits and aging rock stars postured about how the $2 cans of Woodstock Memorial Pepsi, festival key chains and on-site cash machines betrayed the anticommercial spirit of the original event and, incredibly, whined that the $3 commemorative condoms marked the end of ”free love” (as if AIDS had been cooked up as a malicious affront to their nostalgia).

What struck me most was that the debate revolved entirely around the sanct.i.ty of the past, with no recognition of present-tense cultural challenges. Despite the fact that the anniversary festival was primarily marketed to teenagers and college students and showcased then-up-and-coming bands like Green Day, not a single commentator explored what this youth-culture ”commodification” might mean to the young people who would actually be attending the event. Never mind about the offense to hippies decades after the fact; how does it feel to have your culture ”sold out” now, as you are living it? The only mention that a new generation of young people even existed came when the organizers, confronted with charges from ex-hippies that they had engineered Greedstock or Woodshlock, explained that if the event wasn't shrink-wrapped and synergized, the kids today would mutiny. Woodstock promoter John Roberts explained that today's youth are ”used to sponsors.h.i.+p. If a kid went to a concert and there wasn't merchandise to buy, he'd probably go out of his mind.”2 Roberts isn't the only one who holds this view. Advertising Age Advertising Age reporter Jeff Jensen goes so far as to make the claim that for today's young people, ”Selling out is not only accepted, it's considered hip.” reporter Jeff Jensen goes so far as to make the claim that for today's young people, ”Selling out is not only accepted, it's considered hip.”3 To object would be, well, unhip. There is no need to further romanticize the original Woodstock. Among (many) other things, it was also a big-label-backed rock festival, designed to turn a profit. Still, the myth of Woodstock as a sovereign youth-culture state was part of a vast project of generational self-definition-a concept that would have been wholly foreign to those in attendance at Woodstock '94, for whom generational ident.i.ty had largely been a prepackaged good and for whom the search for self had always been shaped by marketing hype, whether or not they believed it or defined themselves against it. This is a side effect of brand expansion that is far more difficult to track and quantify than the branding of culture and city s.p.a.ces. This loss of s.p.a.ce happens inside the individual; it is a colonization not of physical s.p.a.ce but of mental s.p.a.ce. To object would be, well, unhip. There is no need to further romanticize the original Woodstock. Among (many) other things, it was also a big-label-backed rock festival, designed to turn a profit. Still, the myth of Woodstock as a sovereign youth-culture state was part of a vast project of generational self-definition-a concept that would have been wholly foreign to those in attendance at Woodstock '94, for whom generational ident.i.ty had largely been a prepackaged good and for whom the search for self had always been shaped by marketing hype, whether or not they believed it or defined themselves against it. This is a side effect of brand expansion that is far more difficult to track and quantify than the branding of culture and city s.p.a.ces. This loss of s.p.a.ce happens inside the individual; it is a colonization not of physical s.p.a.ce but of mental s.p.a.ce.

In a climate of youth-marketing feeding frenzy, all culture begins to be created with the frenzy in mind. Much of youth culture becomes suspended in what sociologists Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson call ”arrested development,” noting that ”we have, after all, no idea of what punk or grunge or hip hop as social and cultural movements might look like if they were not mined for their gold...”4 This ”mining” has not gone unnoticed or unopposed. Both the anticorporate cultural journal This ”mining” has not gone unnoticed or unopposed. Both the anticorporate cultural journal The Baffler The Baffler and the now-defunct and the now-defunct Might Might magazine brilliantly lampooned the desperation and striving of the youth-culture industry in the mid-nineties. Dozens, if not hundreds, of zines and Web sites have been launched and have played no small part in setting the mood for the kind of brand-based attacks that I chronicle in Part IV of this book. For the most part, however, branding's insatiable cultural thirst just creates more marketing. Marketing that thinks it is culture. magazine brilliantly lampooned the desperation and striving of the youth-culture industry in the mid-nineties. Dozens, if not hundreds, of zines and Web sites have been launched and have played no small part in setting the mood for the kind of brand-based attacks that I chronicle in Part IV of this book. For the most part, however, branding's insatiable cultural thirst just creates more marketing. Marketing that thinks it is culture.

To understand how youth culture became such a sought-after market in the early nineties, it helps to go back briefly to the recession era ”brand crisis” that took root immediately preceding this frenzy-a crisis that, with so many consumers failing to live up to corporate expectations, created a clear and pressing need for a new cla.s.s of shoppers to step in and take over.

During the two decades before the brand crisis, the major cultural industries were still drinking deeply from the river of baby-boomer buying power, and the youth demographic found itself on the periphery, upstaged by the awesome power of cla.s.sic rock and reunion tours. Of course actual young consumers remained a concern for the industries that narrowly market to teens, but youth culture itself was regarded as a rather shallow and tepid well of inspiration by the entertainment and advertising industries. Sure, there were plenty of young people who considered their culture ”alternative” or ”underground” in the seventies and eighties. Every urban center maintained its bohemian pockets, where the faithful wrapped themselves in black, listened to the Grateful Dead or punk (or the more digestible New Wave), and shopped at secondhand clothing stores and in dank record stores. If they lived outside urban centers, tapes and accessories of the cool lifestyle could be ordered from the backs of magazines like Maximum Rock 'n' Roll Maximum Rock 'n' Roll, or swapped through networks of friends or purchased at concerts.

While this is a gross caricature of the youth subcultures that rose and fell during these decades, the relevant distinction is that these scenes were only halfheartedly sought after as markets. In part this was because seventies punk was at its peak at the same time as the infinitely more ma.s.s-marketable disco and heavy metal, and the gold mine of high-end preppy style. And while rap music was topping the charts by the mid-to late eighties, arriving complete with a fully articulated style and code, white America was not about to declare the arrival of a new youth culture. That day would have to wait a few years until the styles and sounds of urban black youth were fully co-opted by white suburbia.

Where I'm from there wasn't no scene I got my information reading Highlights Highlights magazine magazine-Princess Superstar, ”I'm White,” Strictly Platinum So there was no ma.s.s-marketing machine behind these subcultures: there was no Internet, no traveling alternative-culture shopping malls like Lollapalooza or Lilith Fair, and there certainly weren't slick catalogs like Delia and Airshop, which now deliver body glitter, plastic pants and big-city att.i.tude like pizzas to kids stuck in the suburbs. The industries that drove Western consumerism were still catering to the citizens of Woodstock Nation, now morphed into consumption-crazed yuppies. Most of their kids, too, could be counted on as yuppies-in-training, so keeping track of the trends and tastes favored by style-setting youth wasn't worth the effort.

The Youth Market Saves the Day All that changed in the early nineties when the baby boomers dropped their end of the consumer chain and the brands underwent their ident.i.ty crisis. At about the time of Marlboro Friday, Wall Street took a closer look at the brands that had flourished through the recession, and noticed something interesting. Among the industries that were holding steady or taking off were beer, soft drinks, fast food and sneakers sneakers-not to mention chewing gum and Barbie dolls. There was something else: 1992 was the first year since 1975 that the number of teenagers in America increased. Gradually, an idea began to dawn on many in the manufacturing sector and entertainment industries: maybe their sales were slumping not because consumers were ”brand-blind,” but because these companies had their eyes fixed on the wrong demographic prize. This was not a time for selling Tide and Snuggle to housewives-it was a time for beaming MTV, Nike, Hilfiger, Microsoft, Netscape and Wired Wired to global teens and their overgrown imitators. Their parents might have gone bargain bas.e.m.e.nt, but kids, it turned out, were still willing to pay up to fit in. Through this process, peer pressure emerged as a powerful market force, making the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses consumerism of their suburban parents pale by comparison. As clothing retailer Elise Decoteau said of her teen shoppers, ”They run in packs. If you sell to one, you sell to everyone in their cla.s.s and everyone in their school.” to global teens and their overgrown imitators. Their parents might have gone bargain bas.e.m.e.nt, but kids, it turned out, were still willing to pay up to fit in. Through this process, peer pressure emerged as a powerful market force, making the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses consumerism of their suburban parents pale by comparison. As clothing retailer Elise Decoteau said of her teen shoppers, ”They run in packs. If you sell to one, you sell to everyone in their cla.s.s and everyone in their school.”5 There was just one catch. As the success of branding superstars like Nike had shown, it was not going to be sufficient for companies simply to market their same products to a younger demographic; they needed to fas.h.i.+on brand ident.i.ties that would resonate with this new culture. If they were going to turn their lackl.u.s.ter products into transcendent meaning machines-as the dictates of branding demanded-they would need to remake themselves in the image of nineties cool: its music, styles and politics.

Cool Envy: The Brands Go Back to School Fueled by the dual promises of branding and the youth market, the corporate sector experienced a burst of creative energy. Cool, alternative, young, hip-whatever you want to call it-was the perfect ident.i.ty for product-driven companies looking to become transcendent image-based brands. Advertisers, brand managers, music, film and television producers raced back to high school, sucking up to the in-crowd in a frantic effort to isolate and reproduce in TV commercials the precise ”att.i.tude” teens and twenty-somethings were driven to consume with their snack foods and pop tunes. And as in high schools everywhere, ”Am I cool?” became the deeply dull and all-consuming question of every moment, echoing not only through cla.s.s and locker rooms, but through the high-powered meetings and conference calls of Corporate High.

The quest for cool is by nature riddled with self-doubt (”Is this cool?” one can hear the legions of teen shoppers nervously quizzing each other. ”Do you think this is lame?”) Except now the harrowing doubts of adolescence are the billion-dollar questions of our age. The insecurities go round and round the boardroom table, turning ad writers, art directors and CEOs into turbo-powered teenagers, circling in front of their bedroom mirrors trying to look blase. Do the kids think we're cool? they want to know. Are we trying too hard to be cool, or are we really cool? Do we have att.i.tude? The right right att.i.tude? att.i.tude?

The Wall Street Journal regularly runs serious articles about how the trend toward wide-legged jeans or miniature backpacks is affecting the stock market. IBM, out-cooled in the eighties by Apple, Microsoft and pretty well everybody, has become fixated on trying to impress the cool kids, or, in the company's lingo, the ”People in Black.” ”We used to call them the ponytail brigade, the black turtleneck brigade,” says IBM's David Gee, whose job it is to make Big Blue cool. ”Now they're the PIBs-People in Black. We have to be relevant to the PIBs.” regularly runs serious articles about how the trend toward wide-legged jeans or miniature backpacks is affecting the stock market. IBM, out-cooled in the eighties by Apple, Microsoft and pretty well everybody, has become fixated on trying to impress the cool kids, or, in the company's lingo, the ”People in Black.” ”We used to call them the ponytail brigade, the black turtleneck brigade,” says IBM's David Gee, whose job it is to make Big Blue cool. ”Now they're the PIBs-People in Black. We have to be relevant to the PIBs.”6 For Pepe Jeans, the goal, articulated by marketing director Phil Spur, is this: ”They [the cool kids] have to look at your jeans, look at your brand image and say 'that's cool...' At the moment we're ensuring that Pepe is seen in the right places and on the right people.” For Pepe Jeans, the goal, articulated by marketing director Phil Spur, is this: ”They [the cool kids] have to look at your jeans, look at your brand image and say 'that's cool...' At the moment we're ensuring that Pepe is seen in the right places and on the right people.”7 The companies that are left out of the crowd of successfully hip brands-their sneakers too small, their pant-legs too tapered, their edgy ads insufficiently ironic-now skulk on the margins of society: the corporate nerds. ”Coolness is still elusive for us,” says Bill Benford, president of L.A. Gear athletic wear,8 and one half expects him to slash his wrists like some anxious fifteen-year-old unable to face schoolyard exile for another term. No one is safe from this brutal ostracism, as Levi Strauss learned in 1998. The verdict was merciless: Levi's didn't have superstores like Disney, it didn't have cool ads like the Gap, it didn't have hip-hop credibility like Hilfiger and no one wanted to tattoo its logo on their navel, like Nike. In short, it wasn't cool. It had failed to understand, as its new brand developer Sean Dee diagnosed, that ”loose jeans is not a fad, it's a paradigm s.h.i.+ft.” and one half expects him to slash his wrists like some anxious fifteen-year-old unable to face schoolyard exile for another term. No one is safe from this brutal ostracism, as Levi Strauss learned in 1998. The verdict was merciless: Levi's didn't have superstores like Disney, it didn't have cool ads like the Gap, it didn't have hip-hop credibility like Hilfiger and no one wanted to tattoo its logo on their navel, like Nike. In short, it wasn't cool. It had failed to understand, as its new brand developer Sean Dee diagnosed, that ”loose jeans is not a fad, it's a paradigm s.h.i.+ft.”9 Cool, it seems, is the make-or-break quality in 1990s branding. It is the ironic sneer-track of ABC sitcoms and late-night talk shows; it is what sells psychedelic Internet servers, extreme sports gear, ironic watches, mind-blowing fruit juices, kitsch-laden jeans, postmodern sneakers and post-gender colognes. Our ”aspirational age,” as they say in marketing studies, is about seventeen. This applies equally to the forty-seven-year-old baby boomers scared of losing their cool and the seven-year-olds kick-boxing to the Backstreet Boys.

As the mission of corporate executives becomes to imbue their companies with deep coolness, one can even foresee a time when the mandate of our elected leaders will be ”Make the Country Cool.” In many ways, that time is already here. Since his election in 1997, England's young prime minister, Tony Blair, has been committed to changing Britain's somewhat dowdy image to ”Cool Britannia.” After attending a summit with Blair in an art-directed conference room in Canary Wharf, French president Jacques Chirac said, ”I'm impressed. It all gives Britain the image of a young, dynamic and modern country.” At the G-8 summit in Birmingham, Blair turned the august gathering into a bas.e.m.e.nt rec room get-together, where the leaders watched All Saints music videos and then were led in a round of ”All You Need Is Love” no Nintendo games were reported. Blair is a world leader as nation stylist-but will his attempt to ”rebrand Brita

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