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What can a business do when its name is ‘criminalised’. Kevin
Braddock at cases such as Audi, Mitsubishi and Ben Sherman
Criminals have increasingly good taste. While companies may not
care who buys their product so long as people do, marketing managers
may have cause for concern that their brands are spending too much
time in bad company.
In Easter Monday 2003, 26-year-old Jason Fearon was shot dead
in the passenger seat of an Audi TT on in Central London, following
a gunfight at the Turnmills club. The car subsequently crashed
and the driver escaped, but the wrecked roadster was captured on
camera and made front page news, symbolising the violence and menace
that dogs London’s club. The singer Lisa Maffia of UK garage
group So Solid Crew had been due to perform at the club that night
but cancelled. Later news reports falsely associated her with the
murder. The TT brand hardly fared better.
So Solid Crew, whose members have stood trial for attempted murder,
gun possession and drug dealing, have made making liberal use of
the TT in promotional material, co-opting the car as badge of aspirational
inner-city cool. Two models were lent By Audi for the group’s
Brit Awards performance, and members were given TTs as gifts when
the signed contract with the record company Independiente.
The associations with So Solid Crew, whose members feature more
regularly in the media for their crimes than their rhymes, have
positioned the TT as motor of choice in murky, violent demimonde
of UK garage culture. For many, the car has assumed a profile very
much at variance with the ‘sporting progressive sophisticated’ ideal
Audi touts for it.
Other brands have suffered from uncontrollable media positioning,
too. Among the most visible examples of Burberry’s distinctive
check, successfully revamped under Rose Marie Bravo, are football
hooligans such as those photographed invading the pitch after England’s
Defeat of Turkey in the Euro 2004 qualifier. The images of lawlessness
and thuggery starkly contrast the fashion house’s aspirational
marketing, which is full of fops, polo matches and country houses.
When brands are debuted into the rarefied of atmosphere of the
style press and society pages but quickly end up ‘owned’ by
the criminal fringes of society, it’s clear that they can
be as socially mobile as humans, able to transcend class barriers
and demographic categories with ease
So how do companies respond when part, if not all of a brand’s
equity is ‘stolen’ - criminalized by association?
‘You get spikes of negativity, something nasty like The
Turnmills shooting,’ says Audi’s head of Public relations
John Zamett. ‘But it hasn’t knocked the trajectory
of the brand. These things go on anyway and we’re not seen
to be endorsing bad behaviour. Whether we’re involved these
people or not, they’re going to buy TTs. You have a product
out there, people will buy it.’
In 1986 US rap group The Beasties Boys set a precedent by literally
stealing Volkswagen badges to wear as pendants. The group’s
huge fanbase duly aped their heroes and swiped badges from parked
Polos and Golfs, causing the manufacturer’s public relations
department a grave headache. They solved this by ordering enough
replacement badges to fill a room four feet wide by eighth feet
deep.
‘VW was cautionary at the time not to do anything that might
support a criminal trend,’ says Paul Buckett. ‘Anyone
who had had their badge stolen could have one to replace it free
of charge. It attacked our customers, but I don’t know that
it affected the brand or that people thought were associated with
vandalism, because it was our products that were being attacked.’
Steps were take subsequently to make badges more difficult to
remove in subsequent. The fad had the effect of criminalizing the
VW badge - bringing to it a value of lawless cool - if not the
VW brand. A spate VW badge theft was reported in Yorkshire as late
as 2000.
A more lasting criminal association hit Mitsubishi in the late-Nineties
when millions of Ecstasy tablets bearing the Corporation’s
three-diamond logo flooded the clubbing market. Hijacking logos
to ‘brand’ ecstasy isn’t new - Calvin Klein,
Motorola, Opel, Disney and Playboy pills have all been illicitly
produced, while Rolex and Armani versions are currently in circulation.
But the consistently high MDMA content and huge supply of ‘Mitsis’ -
dubbed ‘the pill that saved clubbing’ by one magazine
- ensured enormous popularity among clubbers, and generated for
Mitsubishi the kind of contextualisation and viral marketing no
brand manager can hope to control.
‘There’s very little we could do about it and we did
issue a statement at the time,’ says Julie Rogers, corporate
communications manager at Mitsubishi. ‘something like does
cause concern within a company, especially when it’s in the
public domain. But I think the public understand it’s not
related to us in any way. We’re monitoring the situation.’
Brand uptake in communities with a periphery of petty crime, such
as hip hop, garage and club culture, is a science yet to be understood,
let alone controlled. Those subcultures have a yen to do things
their own way. For business, then, the unpredictability is the
principle cause for concern. ‘If companies are looking to
build a subculture into their brand, it’s just too dangerous
at the moment,’ says Sophie Spence, media planner at advertising
agency Mother. ‘These things only happen through cross-cultural
osmosis instead of through contrivance by marketing men. The degree
to which this happens organically is the problem.’
Clubbers have long ‘bootlegged’ squeaky-clean corporate
logos and slogans to reflect their own illegal interests: Coca
Cola’s ‘Enjoy Coke’ logo has appeared on bootleg
T-shirts ‘as ‘Enjoy Cocaine’, and Johnson’s
Baby Powder’s branding as ‘Junky’s Baddie Powder’.
Express Diaries’ ‘Is E part of your day?’ slogan
proved similarly irresistible to T-shirt designers serving the
club market.
Similarly, hip hop’s insatiable appetite for brands can
be a poisoned chalice for marketers soliciting the frisson of ghetto
fabulousness that Busta Rhymes brought to Allied Domecq with his ‘Pass
The Courvoisier’ single. US car manufacturer Lexus has benefited
enormously from ceaseless eulogising in rap, but a current vogue
in the US for flipping the cars’ L-shaped logo 180 degrees
into the shape of pistol, signalling gangster cred, is clearly
of questionable value for the company. The Gucci monogram gained
a huge level of visibility on billboard posters and ads for the
album ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’’ by rapper 50 Cent
- an ex-crack dealer who was shot nine times at close range in
2000.
However, the good news is that the same whims of fashion and youth
culture are likely to move on as quickly as they arrive. Fashion
can solve the problem it creates – even if, in the meantime,
there’s little companies can do about it. ‘It’s
critical that brands disassociate with any negativity and get the
PR machine working to make it clear that this hasn’t been
contrived,’ says Spence. ‘The most important thing
is that companies become aware. Marketing departments are quite
disassociated from what happens at street level and can be blind
to the fact that these thing are going on until they’re so
public they can’t be managed. In terms of active response,
it can be too little to late.’
If it’s questionable how much official third-party endorsements
can counterbalance the damage of criminal association (even, in
Audi’s case, with the spotlessly clean Darcy Bussell), other
examples suggest that an hijacked brand can be ‘stolen back’.
Jaguar, whose cars came to be associated with crime after featuring
as the archetypal getaway motor in Sixties police dramas, has cleansed
itself successfully of the underworld connotations (disregarding
the fact that it was actually the force, rather than the hoods
who drove S-type Jags.)
Menswear brands Ben Sherman and Fred Perry, too, have carefully
distanced themselves from what was formerly their strongest market
- violent skinheads and neo-Nazi bootboys whose wardrobe staples
are classic Ben Sherman button-down shirts and Fred Perry’s
short-sleeved tennis tops.
‘Internationally, we knew that Ben Sherman was thought of
as a right-wing brand,’ says Andy Rigg, the label’s
marketing manager. ‘Retail outlets in France, Germany and
Italy were inclined that way. We walked away from those distribution
channels, which meant walking away from a hell of a lot of business.’
Ben Sherman also sought to remove the aggressive overtones in
advertising and do away with the ethnically-cleansed aesthetic
of earlier ad campaigns.
‘These days, we don’t use white skinheads in advertising,’ says
Rigg. ‘Our brand history is about being British, but new
British, reflecting multiculturalism - for example, we’ve
done a deal with Rio Ferdinand. Plus, we’ve avoided big logos
which is what terrace behaviour prizes most, and the focus of the
range isn’t the button-down shirt any more.’
Ironically, the notion of a ‘criminalized brand’ confirms
that brand-based, rather than product-based marketing can perform
so well as to become a victim of its own success, as Mistubishi
and VW have discovered. Unofficial VW, Bentley, Mercedes and Lexus
logo hip hop pendants are currently all available online for $25
each. The Beastie Boys’ legacy lives on.
© Kevin Braddock 2003
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