Back to the Future, Part II

I went to Cattaraugus County partly to find out what might happen to American attitudes about brands and buying if the recession doesn’t lift any time soon. You can’t generalize from one region to the entire country, but I did find trends that are supported by other studies.

Cattaraugus County has been in economic decline for decades, so much so that the current recession isn’t all that noticeable for them. One woman we interviewed told us, “Some people here have suffered because of this recession. But most of us haven’t really noticed it. We’ve been there for a long time.”

As the boom and bust cycle of more urbanized areas passed them by, the people of rural New York State learned to live by tapping into the resilience and values of the past. As I discussed above, they do things for themselves, buy less, keep fit, and focus on family. In talking to them, I discovered that hard work done well is not just something you have to do, it’s something to be proud of.

We stopped by the side of the road to interview one man who was cutting cords of timber alongside his home, and he happily gave up half an hour to talk to us about what he’s done, how he’s coped with challenges. He told us that he cares for his mother and his sick brother, and recently had to sell his truck when his mother got sick as well; the financial and health stresses are significant and scary. At the same time, he’s proud that he’s found a way to expand his business, despite everything. He’s proud to display his skill, explaining about different types of timber, showing us how he cuts logs into size by hand before he puts them in the splitter, a skill he learned from his father. As we spoke with him, three separate times people driving by shouted hello to him. He has very little; certainly nothing extra, but he deserves and has respect in his world.

Of course, the Cattaraugus example only goes so far: we can’t all magically become rural farmers or woodcutters and live the simple life. Yet, according to a MetLife study, we collectively are shifting priorities in the direction of family, community, and frugality. Helping and receiving help from family members; saving more when you can; and above all making do with less are present realities for a majority of Americans. Community comes into the mix, perhaps because selfishness is understood to be bad math: 68% of respondents said that they’d take a 10% pay cut if it would prevent layoffs, which is sensible if you could be one of those who loses a job.

That sounds more like the Depression-era America my parents grew up in, where neighbors knocked on your front door and asked if you could spare a cup of sugar, or lend them your lawn mower. Helping your neighbors was natural, and you felt free to ask for help in return. Then, being successful was less about being sold to, and more about the life you had built for yourself; you might buy just one house and one car in your entire life. The dream, if it was a dream, was to succeed based on hard work and ingenuity, and the benefits that can bring to your family. It sounds corny, but it’s simply true.

If you’re busy building a life for yourself and your children, why spend energy choosing among hundreds of brands that all basically do the same thing? One example: our hotel room in Salamanca had samples of Breck shampoo. When I was a kid, we always used it, along with almost everyone else who was too old for Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. Their ads showed a mother with a little girl, with the implication that if you used Breck, you could have hair as soft as a child’s. Using it again forty-odd years later, I found it simply clean-smelling, compared with the silk-infused natural plant oil mink fat protein cornsilk dead sea salt stuff they peddle today.

I am a typical consumer, so mea culpa. I try a new shampoo brand every few months, just because I can. It’s kind of nuts, actually. It wouldn’t kill me to just keep on buying Breck my whole life, would it?

The proliferation of products is on one hand a sign of entrepreneurial energy, on the other a sign of market decadence, with products sustained by advertising, not true demand. I also work in advertising, so mea maxima culpa. In my own defense, I have always tried to live by the principle that if a product doesn’t meet a real human need, it isn’t worth selling. Yet I have been as seduced by the power to seduce as anyone in my industry.

This is not the time, fellow marketers. As it turned out, people buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have was not healthy, and right now the wounds are fresh. If the economy continues to lag, here are four trends to keep in mind:

• Pseudo-luxury (i.e., over-priced) brands are already on the consumer’s must-to-avoid list, but growing suspicion will also be directed at brands and stores that sell on price. It may seem counter-intuitive, but if you can only afford to buy one of something you can’t afford to buy something that’s going to break or wear out too soon. Quality will matter more, not less.

• A return to “buy American” is in the cards, with a tip of the hat to the quality of American products. Partly this is anxiety: most people understand that when a neighbor loses a job, they suffer too, with lower home prices and shuttered local businesses. But it’s also a realistic attempt to reassert control over quality given bad news about imported products.

• Servicing cottage businesses that help people to make a little extra money—for example by sewing, making repairs, or going back to the land in some small way--will feed the growth of companies that are smart enough to support and enable small-time entrepreneurs.

• An emphasis on heritage as a value in itself will emerge, as a firm foundation when so many institutions and brands that embodied prosperity let you down. Heritage is a vague concept, sometimes rooted in family, sometimes in institutions or companies; look for it to wear many different masks. In its simplest form, though, it’s about our own past; most of us had grandparents who got their hands dirty. The heritage that matters is the one that’s embodied in real memories.

Some American advertisers are already detecting a swing in these directions, responding to it with varying levels of insight:

Worker-Centered Americana. The POET campaign, which promotes ethanol, has two characteristics that set it apart from what you might expect in the energy category:

• It stars the workers. In general, energy companies use high-gloss campaigns that lecture you from a place of authority (what I call “shouting from the mountain top”). By contrast, POET shows you ethanol industry workers making personal statements on a busy street, among the rest of us small people. They are presented as proud, strong, and perceptive; the way we feel about ourselves when we’re feeling good about ourselves.

• It is brazenly pro-American, with one scientist proclaiming that she wants to let you “tell those middle eastern nations where they can put their tankers.” Indeed.

Home Comforts Americana. The Kraft Foods campaign for its American cheese (sorry, couldn’t find a video) is pure, pandering Americana, with a shot of a very cute kid looking supremely confident in a home-made Superman costume, as well as other scenes of ordinary people doing ordinary things and looking happy about it. They claim that their cheese could only be made in America, making the most of the fact that it would probably be banned in many countries. But in times like these, eating the pasteurized, processed, individually saran-wrapped food of your childhood is comforting. And it does contain at least some milk, very possibly from American cows.

Inspirational Americana. “The things we make, make us.” The best I’ve seen of this trend is the 2011 Jeep Cherokee ad, which has shown in movie theaters. The spot shows old footage of people building railroads and skyscrapers, gravely voiced over by a man touting American values such as craftsmanship and hard work to a sound track of hammers pounding on steel. In this America we go back to making things; there’s no more room for silly celebrities or dysfunctional elites. At the end of the one-minute ad we are told that the whole Jeep Cherokee was thought up and made here in America, where we still make beautiful things. Out of metal.

I have a simple piece of advice for you: think about what makes your customers strong in the face of adversity and fear. If you work for a heritage brand like Jeep or Kraft, rediscover your own roots and talk from there. It’s fine to make ’em laugh, but don’t sell fluff. If you don’t work for a heritage brand, I suggest that you think about what values and concerns your workers have in common with American workers and start from there, like the POET campaign did. What are they, and your business, doing to work through your own struggles? Working longer hours? Trying to make a better product?

These messages resonate now, and they may become a permanent feature of our collective understanding of brands. From what I saw in Cattaraugus County, if we Americans can make things and fix things on our own, we are several miles out from Helplessville.

And that’s a great message to be able to deliver to a stressed-out America.