Ever been to Concord, NC? Dave lives there. You know Dave. He's "fed up with cheap, fast burning smokes..." And you know how that Dave is, "instead of just getting mad, he did something about it. Dave's tobacco company was born." In addition to hand rolling his own cigarettes for himself and friends, "Dave enjoys lots of land, plenty of freedom, and his yellow `57 pickup truck." In the near future Dave hopes that you too will become his friend, and is willing to roll you millions of cigarettes over the course of your smoking lifetime. That's just what friends do. "Dave's home-grown smokes don't mix with the `corporate' cigarettes."
Or so says the press release from Dave's buddy and business partner, the Phillip Morris Company, USA. This may go a long way to explaining how that crazy, shiftless dreamer Dave, who never amounted to a damn thing and still drives that rusty, old, smoke-belching tank of a `57 pickup can suddenly afford billboards all over the highways of Colorado and Wyoming, where Dave's buddy Phillip is test-marketing Dave's cigarettes, as well as that shiny robot-controlled cigarette manufacturing plant in his backyard.
Obviously, Dave just explained his hatred of fast-burning smokes to his friend Phil, who, being a smoker himself, understood instantly. We should all have such understanding friends as Mr. Morris.
Apparently, some of us do. For instance, an idealistic pack of automotive engineers out in Tennessee persuaded their buddy Roger Smith at General Motors that it was high time he gave them their own factory and let them have a shot at building a car for all their buddies in that Generation X. Of course, they wouldn't be caught building just another Impala. They had street cred to keep up, so they convinced Rog not to cramp their style with GM names and logos and that silly two-key business. They chose a hip, now name -- Saturn -- and refused to share parts with their other GM siblings. You're far more likely to find a Chevy engine in a Cadillac than you are to find an Oldsmobile ashtray in a Saturn. Obviously those wild X-ers must have liked the idea of a GM car not from GM, because Saturn is now a top seller.
Why are these captains of industry slumming with ne'er-do-wells from the Appalachians and a good-for nothing like Dave? Well, old Phil Morris actually cares much less about Dave than about Dave's several million friends, young people such as yourself. After all, you'd be damned before you'll line the pockets of some executive big wig, but a regular schmo like Dave, you'd be happy to help him along. And you wouldn't be caught dead driving a GM. After all, they ship American jobs to Mexico, and this is not your father's Oldsmobile.
Of course, the reverse also seems true, Phil Morris isn't exactly proud of Dave either. The only way Phil will have his name on any of Dave's ads is after months of tedious litigation forces him to print it in 4-pt type at the bottom of the page, just under the Surgeon General's warning.
A recent Budweiser ad proclaims that Bud and parent Anheuser-Busch, started out as a microbrewery and just got better . . . and better . . . and better . . . and a little bigger. Thanks for playing, Bud, but by that logic, The Coca-Cola company is just a side project of some long-since-deceased druggist in Atlanta, a project that got a little bigger.
And this side project, the Coca-Cola company is now currently testing one of the most engineered fake-independent products ever: OK Soda. Though nobody outside of Boston, Seattle, or Fargo, ND (its test markets, if Fargo, North Dakota even has a market) seems to know what the stuff tastes like, it has already drawn much attention because of its blatant targeting groups that don't like to be blatantly targeted.
OK Soda's marketing has been an exhaustive two-year study that resulted in what appears to be a can of hep angst you can drink. The can designs are by noted underground comics artist Daniel Clowes, the logo is a generic, Repo-Man -like "OK," and various words on the can, such as `beverage,' are in quotation marks, making it seem like you're with your pals, using unnecessary finger-quotes just for a smile.
They also have a special 1-800 number where they say jaded, sarcastic, and often angry things about their own product, often under the guise of some disengaged-yet-bitter youth calling in. Coke has hired people who have studied the appealing crop of young adults in Generation X to an almost anthropological degree, and who have learned a great deal about how they feel about products, how they are jaded with advertising, how they write articles bemoaning the attempts of companies to target them . . . hey. Hm. They have learned so much that they can no longer see the forest for the trees -- they have created a product so specifically tailored to the disenfranchised 20 somethings, so carefully designed to be something appealing, that it sticks out like a perfect, flawless, textbook thumb. It's too planned and, as a result, it's hypocritical, and anybody can see it a mile away.
OK Soda is a product that tried so hard to remind us that we're not as dumb as they think we are that they forgot that we're not as dumb as they think we are. At least regular Coca-Cola was honest. It was Coke, and that's it. The Coke company wanted you to buy Coke, lots of Coke, no matter who you were. The only targeted group were beings capable of swallowing liquids and had money to spend. Remember those cheery, mid-70s ads for Coke with all those people of varying ethnicities (I think some were even fabricated just for the commercial) singing in a big field about how they'd like to buy the world a Coke, or, better yet, everybody in the world an individual two-liter of Coke?
Well, things are different now. Coca-Cola's marketing strategy is a good analogy to the trend of indie marketing. Previously, Coke was advertising its product to the entire world, all at once. Now, a very specific market is targeted, not even just through advertising, but with a special product developed especially for it. Before, Coke wanted Calihari bushmen to buy the same product that your dentist did, but with OK Soda it now seems that Coke wouldn't give a damn if Dad Jones never bought a can provided that his hip teenage kid quaffs lots of it.
The unsettling nature about fake-independent companies stems from their inherent hypocrisy, but there is something more sinister lurking there, too. It's hard to express in words without seeming like a paranoid goon, but to get the proper idea, think back to the, I believe, 1988 Olympics. As usual, there were innumerable commercials advertising detergents, pancake mix, gloves, all those common goods that keep us moving, but there was something different: at the end of each ad, a logo appeared, and the phrase "We're Beatrice" was spoken. This happened on what seemed like nearly every ad, and it produced a remarkably eerie feeling as it was slowly learned that all of these companies were actually one large company. It was as if all of your friends told you on the same day that they worked for the CIA.
If trends continue, one can forsee a future economy composed entirely of small Mom and Pop stores; perhaps this seems pleasant, until one realizes that there is just one set of Mom and Pop, and they can buy and sell you with chump change. Just like real parents.