The Craft Beer "revolution": business as usual

A thread about Brewdog's marketing over on Urban75 caught my eye recently. The original poster is not keen, as you can tell by the thread title: "BrewDog: yet another hip company using 'rebel' language to sell its stuff". It can't be denied that Brewdog's marketing has been very successful though. A link posted on the thread offers some insight into this. It's a long article, so I've copied and pasted some choice quotes that someone culled from it. Despite being written back in the 90s it still seems relevant when it makes the case that the image of the rebel is the mainstream way in which businesses present themselves.

"No social group is more audibly or visibly “radical” than artists, musicians, and writers, and ... capitalism seems to have elevated these malcontents to positions of power and responsibility. And just think of the results: now we are sold cars by an army of earringed, dreadlocked, goateed, tattooed, and guitar-bearing rebels rather than the lab-coated authority figures of the past. But even while we live in times in which ostentatious displays of rebellion are celebrated and admired as much as the building of grandiose imitations of Versailles and the burning of hundred-dollar-bills were once, we are constantly reminded of their meaninglessness, their irrelevance to questions of actual power. For all our radical soda pops, our alternative lifestyles, and the uninhibited howls of our hamburger stands, we seem to have no problem with the fact of business control over every aspect of public expression."

"For consumerism is no longer about “conformity” but about “difference.” Advertising teaches us not in the ways of puritanical self-denial (a bizarre notion on the face of it), but in orgiastic, never-ending self-fulfillment. It counsels not rigid adherence to the tastes of the herd but vigilant and constantly-updated individualism. We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock ‘n’ roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the sixties, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer. This imperative of endless difference, not that dread “conformity,” is the genius at the heart of American capitalism, the eternal fleeing from “sameness” that gives us a thirst for the New and satiates it with such achievements of civilization as the infinite brands of identical cola, the myriad colors and irrepressible variety of the cigarette rack at 7-11."

"As countercultural rebellion becomes corporate ideology, even the beloved Buddhism of the Beats has a place on the executive bookshelf. In The Leader as Martial Artist (1993) Arnold Mindell, “Ph.D.,” advises men of commerce in the wise ways of the Tao, which he compares to “surfing the edge of a turbulent wave.” For the Zen businessman the world is the same wildly chaotic place of opportunity that it is for the followers of Tom Peters, although an enlightened “leader” knows how to discern the “timespirits” at work behind the scenes"

"The problem with cultural dissent in America isn’t that it’s been co-opted, absorbed, or ripped-off. Of course it’s been all of these things. But the reason it has proven so hopelessly susceptible to such assaults is the same as the reason it has become so harmless in the first place, so toothless ... it is no longer any different from the official culture it’s supposed to be subverting. The basic impulses of the countercultural idea, as descended from the holy Beats, are about as threatening to the new breed of antinomian businessmen as Anthony Robbins, selling success and how to achieve it on a late-night infomercial."

"Alongside the hyper-rational, hyper-efficient Organization envisioned by America’s premier managers there also developed an emotional and religious conception of business practice, a cult of Positive Thinking that was even more hostile to cultural memory than was the dominant cult of Efficiency. In the writing of the Positive Thinkers anti-historicism reached a new plateau of sophistication: the annoyances of history and cultural particularity were not just to be over-paved, but levelled, reduced to a convenient flatness where every epoch was exactly like the present as far back as the eye could see. The economic struggle of daily life was and had always been a matter of individual men and God, a question of just how positively each up-and-coming entrepreneur could think, just how blindly he could pursue success."