A case study of Irish Spring print advertisement
The way we imagine and reprensent the nature to ourselves may vary according to several factors. We may think of nature as wild, dangerous, full of resources, pristine, romantic, etc. But all these visions have a common attribute in the way we project nature as separated from the human world with its constructions and intelligence. It is called the dualistic notion of culture/nature in which culture is superior to nature (Plumwood, 1993). An alternative to it is the idea that human and nature are interconnected. The culture/nature duality is a human concept which has its origin in Antiquity, such as in Ancient Greece and the Old testament, and became widespread during the time of colonization (Plumwood, 1993). The notion suggests that nature exists to be mastered and transformed by the human mind to serve civilizations. It was used by power holders to justify the emergence of capitalism, growing needs of natural resources, dispossession of ‘uncivilized’ people and slavery. Today popular culture keeps the dualistic culture/nature idea very alive with cinema, television, advertizing and more (Christophers, 2006).
For example, this essay observes how a men soap paper advertisement illustrates nature as a fresh land to be explored while perpetuating the supremacy of a white culture above a separate nature. The brand Irish Spring also uses symbols of Irish nature and culture to better appeal a sexually potent male stereotype therefore shaping consumers identities into the duality (Schroeder & Zwick, 2004). Important racial and gender struggles are forgotten by such constructions of nature, starting with historical anti-colonization struggles in Ireland itself and all over the world. Other consequences include the present overexploitation of natural resources for the production of commodities such as men body wash. It is argued here that the study of the visions of nature in an apparently harmless Irish Spring marketing helps to understand how power holders keep naturalizing a non sustainable capitalism and contribute to the social acceptance of the Anglo-Saxon men as a dominant male stereotype. More specifically, the advertisement reframes the Irish identity denying its history of social struggles.
IRISH SPRING’S CULTURE/NATURE
To better understand the meaning making powers of the Irish Spring advertisement, it is important to highlight how the marketing is at work and the images of nature help to sell the product in focus. There are two main elements of nature used in the print, which are the picture of a pristine spring with a mountain backdrop and a clover leaf (see Annex A). Other key aspects that support the selling power of these visions are the texts, the illustration of the product itself, the apparent absence of the consumer, the context in which the print was found and already existing dominant codes (Rose, 2007). By putting all the elements into relation, the advertisement defines how consumers are made to believe they can gain natural qualities like sex appeal from the product and how their identities should conform to certain ideologies about manhood.
Natural qualities for sale
First, the image of pristine nature acts as a sign with natural qualities such as greatness and beauty (see Annex A). When put in relation to the subtexts, qualities of wonder, irresistibility, worthiness, sexual attraction and freshness are added to the image. Such qualities are then directly transferred to the product by the way the nature seems to be aspired in the bottle of body soap and by the use of subtext that refers to the “Freshness of Ireland” being “bottled”. The expression “Smell like you’re worth exploring” acts as a challenge and an invitation for the consumer to take those same qualities offered by the product and indirectly gained from nature. The fact that the consumer is visually absent from the picture, reinforce the viewer’s appeal to fill an empty space and be engaged in the meaning making process (Rose, 2007).
Needed: Courageous white men
In order to be effective in selling a commodity to a large target audience, a marketing strategy is to reinforce already existing ideologies and contribute to its normalization across the public where your commodity is being sold (Schroeder & Zwick, 2004). The Irish Spring print in focus was found in a Rolling Stone magazine, which is a major window for popular culture mainly in English speaking countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Canada. Even though, a great cultural diversity exists in countries of the old British Empire, ideologies about manhood are builted around the sexually potent, courageous, anglo-saxon male. Other types of men are likely to look up to this archetype and consume products that promise to shape them more into it (Feasey, 2009).
Although the Irish Spring’s public target is not explicitly male, the body wash advertisement clearly capitalizes on the masculinity ideology and reinforce it to create its market. A few elements suggest that the targeted buyer should not only be male but conforms to preconceived ideas about manhood. The brand name being in English language even when sold in non-english speaking territories like France, has a connotation Anglo-Saxon power. The clover leaf taps into a dominant Irish identity of joyfull brothers capable of alcohol challenges (Schroeder & Zwick, 2004). Finally, the text “Smell like you’re worth exploring” has a very effective double-meaning. Firstly, it suggests that the male odor should trigger desire from a sexual partner. Secondly, it refers to the courageous explorer myth that is center in the creation of American masculinity (Kosek, 2007).
THE EXPLORER’S CULTURE/NATURE
The masculinity ideology on which Irish Spring relies to market its body wash has its roots in the white explorer’s myth that first occurred during European expansionism (Pratt, 2007) and then during the emergence of the american wilderness movement (Kosek, 2007). Its success was dependant on, and also contributed to the social acceptance of the culture/nature duality concept in history.
Exploring the frontier
In the eighteen century after years of colonialism and navigational explorations, the dominant image of the “global Empire subject” was “European, male, secular, and, lettered [as] his planetary consciousness [was] the product of his contact with print culture”. (Pratt, 2007) The culture/nature duality notion was at work to naturalize the supremacy of intellectual European bourgeois above peasants and subsistence societies in Europe and in colonised territories. The duality became reinforced when the systemazing of nature started to occur all across the world after the publication of a classification system for plants and animals by Linnaeus in 1735. By the study of travel writings, Pratt (2007) identifies these scientific expeditions as “Europe’s proudest and most conspicious instrument of expansion”. Large-scale interior exploration opened the door for a new search of raw materials and commercial opportunities while being normalized by the “objective” scientific research. The explorer became the man of rationality that produces places and order out of chaos in the interest of the general population. He was not only surviving wild nature, he was mastering and reframing it, making it legible for a European bouregoisie elite.
Exploring the wilderness
The systemization of nature eventually applied to human races, further more normalizing the fact that white men considered themselves to be intellectually superior as they had power over science. According to Kosek (2007), in late ninteeth century America, waves of immigration and the closing of the frontier led to growing fears of the pure white american blood being polluted by inferior races. Eugenic ideologies and politics were at work. In this context, preserving pure wilderness areas from unpure degradation became a matter self preservation. Turner argued that the exploration of the frontier is what transformed the “English and German ‘stock’ into a new, fundamentally masculine, American stock” and that “loss of wilderness […] implied the loss of the site in which American masculinity has been produced” (Kosek, 2007). Early environmentalism led to the creation of National Parks and nature soon became a place of purification “where people became white”.
THE OVERLOOKED CULTURE/NATURE
In the last decades, processes of decolonization have shed lights on perceptions and ideologies still present in our lives and allowed for voices that had been silenced to be heard and rediscovered (Pratt, 2007). If the image of pure wilderness that is “worth exploring” promoted by the brand Irish Spring is so closely related to a cultural hegemony, it is essential to outline contemporary issues exacerbated by such marketing for the sake of all people touched by colonization and neocolonization, including Ireland.
Hurtful greed
The nature illustration being sucked into the product (see Annex A) is a very obvious representation of surrexploitive capitalism in which the body wash is rooted. Irish Spring is a brand of Colgate-Palmolive, an american-based company that ranked 348th on the 2010 Forbes 2000 List with a market value of 44 billion $US on December 2011. Its CEO Ian M. Cook ranks 56th in CEO Compensation with about 19 million $US of total compensation in one year. (Forbes, 2011) Colgate-Palmolive owns above 40 brands in oral, personal and home care, and pet nutrition. It also has manufacturing plants and markets on all continents, making it a major influence on consumer habits (Colgate-Palmolive, 2011). But, despite some remarquable efforts to be a more ethical company, its global economic success, based on manufacturing and distributing mostly disposable commodities, has great costs for humanity and the planet.
For example, in 2010 the company withdrew 7.9 billion cubic meters of water from municipal and groundwater sources of which 32% was from Latin America and 24% was from Asia and Africa. Colgate itself acknowledges the fact that access to clean water is an issue in many regions where it operates. In response, it sponsored the installation 20 water pumps in South Africa, while putting great charitable efforts into reaching 650 children in 80 countries with programs that raise awareness in oral care and hand washing, thus creating a market for itself (Colgate Sustainability Report 2010). This suggests a neocolonialism behaviour where a multinational company takes control over local natural resources and imposes its commodities. The company is also indirectly responsible for deforestation in Indonesia through its palm oil consumption (Colgate Sustainability Report 2010) and in the Amazon through Bertin, one of its supplier (Greenpeace, 2009). According to the UK organisation Uncaged (2011), the company “use[s] animal-tested chemicals, or fail[s] to demonstrate that the finished product and the ingredients […] have not been tested on animals”. The Irish Spring Body Wash is also considered a health moderate hazard for its toxic chemicals ingredients suspected to be bioaccumulative and persistent (EWG, 2011).
Whitening green
Reinforcing the white masculinity ideology behind a pure wilderness image of nature, the choice of geographies of Ireland is actually geographies of imperialism. In such geographies, histories of indigenous people’s exploitations and struggles is often overlooked. (Christopher, 2006) The story of the Irish native population is both unique and can be related to all colonization stories. A case study of heritage tourism in Ireland by Nuala C. Johnson (1999) provides insights into how the past is still being retold when influenced by economical interests. “Through advertising, dominant images of place are represented and analyses of tourist brochures suggest that Ireland offers the promise of ‘empty space'—space that is uninhabited—and in this respect they are reminiscent of colonial accounts of overseas territories ripe for European settlement” (Johnson, 1999)
Despite their whiteness, Irish have faced much discriminations from the English colonizers and this still has some impacts today. In Voices from other ears, Bronwen Walter (2008) studies how Irish diaspora in England is still perceived as a racialised ethnic group due to its accent when speaking English. It should be noted that impositions of British rules and the Famine in the nineteen century led to the abandonnement of the Irish language. Irish were afraid of economic disadvantages and death if they would hang to their dialects. Today, an important Irish diaspora exists in the the United States where the Irish identity and accent is celebrated and suggest sexual attractions, which is a key element in the Irish Spring marketing campaign (Petrecca, 2007). But, in the United Kingdom, the Irish accent still has a ‘backwardness’ connotation (Walter, 2008). Marketing representation of rural Ireland is at the same time the using the “backwardness” and framing Irishness into this discriminative identity.
Sources
Colgate-Palmolive. (2011). Colgate Site – MSDS Sheets. [Webpage]. Retrieved on Dec 2011 from http://www.colgatecommercial.com/MSDS-Sheets.aspx
Colgate-Palmolive. (2010). Giving the World Reasons to Smile. Colgate Sustainability Report 2010 [Report]. Retrieved on Dec 2011 from http://www.colgate.com/app/Colgate/US/Corp/LivingOurValues/Sustainability/HomePage.cvsp
EWG’s Skin Deep Cosmetics Database. (2011). Irish Spring Body Wash, Icy Blast [Webpage]. Retrieved on Dec 2011 from http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/product/223531/Irish_Spring_Body_Wash%2C_Icy_Blast/
Feasey, R. (2009). Spray more, get more: masculinity, television advertising and the Lynx effect. Journal of Gender Studies, 18 (4), 357-368.
Forbes.com (2011). #56 Ian M Cook [Webpage]. Retrieved on Dec 2011 from http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-compensation-11_Ian-M-Cook_SVR3.html
Greenpeace. (2009). Slaughtering the Amazon [Report]. Retrieved on Dec 2011 from http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/reports/slaughtering-the-amazon/
Johnson, N. C. (1999). Framing the past: time, space and the politics of heritage tourism in Ireland. Political Geography 18, 187–207.
Kosek, J. (2007). Understories: the political life of forests in Northern New Mexico. (4) 150-161.
Petrecca, L. (2007, March 15). Soap sellers steer men with sexy promises ; Body washes pushed as chick magnets. USA TODAY.
Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. New York: Routeledge. (2) 41-55.
Pratt, M. L. (2007). Imperial Eyes. (Preface, 1, 2).
Rose, G. (2007). Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. (5) 74-107.
Schroeder, J. E. & Zwick, D. (2004). Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images. Consumption Markets & Culture, 7: 1, 21-52.
Uncaged. (2011). Cruelty Free Shopping Guide [Webpage]. Retrieved on Dec 2011 from http://www.uncaged.co.uk/crueltyfree.htm
Walter, B. (2008). Voices in other ears: “accents” and identities of the first- and second-generation Irish in England. Neo-colonial mentalities in contemporary Europe? : Language and discourse in the construction of identities. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
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