Promotional Relexivity Irony, De-fetishisation and Moralization in he Body Shop Promotional Rhetoric Roberta Sassatelli When it comes to advertising, commercial or promotional culture, feminists and critical theorists alike have, by and large, played a similar tune (Bell 1976; Bordo 1993; Marcuse 1964). his might be aptly summarized by the idea that advertising is the antithesis and the enemy of culture: within late capitalist societies dominated by market exchanges and promotional ideologies, consumer culture is often equated with either consumerism or commercial culture. In this perspective, «individual choice and desire triumph over abiding social values and obligations; the whims of the present take precedence over the truth embodied in history, tradition and continuity; needs, values and goods are manufactured and calculated in relation to proit rather than arising from authentic individual or communal life» (Slater 1997: 63). Such criticisms have been rendered through an anti-globalization rhetoric. Ritzer’s popular critique he McDonaldization of Society, for example considers that consumer culture has got a dehumanizing efect due to the rationalization process which it embodies. McDonald is taken as the paradigm case of a relatively new type of business which relies on the practical articulation of four principles: eiciency (i.e. an emphasis on saving time); calculability (i.e. an emphasis on quantiication); predictability (i.e. an emphasis on replicability and standardization; and control) - substitution of non-human for human technology. he shopping mall, the catalogue shopping, drivethrough windows and fast-food restaurants appear as eicient means to a given end; they entail a focus on quantity to the detriment of quality and rely on bureaucratic principles, standardization and technological controls which should enable people to predict what to expect at all times and in all places. he result is a world of consumption which «ofers no surprises» (Ritzer 1993: 99). his process appears to be lead by US companies but, Ritzer notices, it is by no means conined to the States. To illustrate this point he refers to he 230 Body Shop. he Body Shop is «an ecologically sensitive British cosmetics chain» which is briely mentioned in Ritzer’s popular work as a prime example of the fact that «other countries not only have their own McDonaldized institutions, but they have also begun to export them to the United States», so successfully in this case that «American irms are now opening copies of this British Chain» (Ritzer 1993: 3). In this paper I have taken this passing reference seriously and tried to specify to what extent and how he Body Shop (TBS) can be considered as paradigm case of contemporary ethically coded brands. TBS was among the irst cosmetic companies to adopt an «against animal testing» policy and a «fair trade» strategy for its ingredients, its outlets ofer the possibility to join an environmental or human rights campaign, and it is ranked high by ethical consumption guides (see www.ethiscore.org). To be sure, the symbolic and aesthetic fashioning of objects is a matter for systematic calculation about what would maximize sales. Yet, moral values are always implicated in market relations (Zelizer 2004) and are indeed increasingly called forth by producers and consumers alike. Sales promotion does not necessarily mean either a standardized reduction to the minimum common denominator or a dearth of moral values, even though we may be at pains to disentangle instrumental proit-driven calculations from moral or aesthetic ones. Still, in this paper I shall suggest that TBS illustrates that, with its progressive objectiication, promotional culture has become relexive, often directly thematizing the role of advertising and the notion of the commodity, addressing and indeed soliciting consumers’ capacity to appropriate commodities in personalized ways. 1.he Body Shop, Promotional Culture and Brand Transcendence If we wish to pursue Ritzer’s quote, TBS should stand as an example of eiciency, calculability, predictability and control. Yet, even a casual leap in one of the many shops of this chain casts some doubts on such a diagnosis. Let’s briely take a look at the history of this company. he Body Shop is a large toiletries and cosmetic producer and retailer launched in 1976 in Brighton, on the South Coast of England. Anita Roddick, the founder of the company and a self-proclaimed feminist, initially sold 24 naturally-based skin and hair care products with minimal packaging. A quarter of a century later the company has become a globally recognized brand: it now sells over 600 products and 400 accessories, has got over 1700 branches throughout the world and has a multi-million pound turnover (www.thebodyshop.com). Despite 231 the phenomenal growth, the BodyShop is still trading on the early days of the company, advertising mainly through its franchised outlets. hese are wrapped in posters and furnished with lealets and brochures all containing messages that directly question some of the contested aspects of consumer culture from commodity fetishism and massiication to the north-south divide and environmental damage. From time to time, TBS outlets also ofer the possibility to join an environmental or human rights campaign which may be supported by some special publications, such as a book or a magazine distributed together with some national newspaper. To be sure, there are elements of McDonaldization, including quite banally the franchising system as well as the use of price scanners. Yet one may well suggest that these go so deep in all modern forms of organizations that they do not deine the speciicity of TBS at all. In more analytical terms, if at the production side we may imagine that there is a great deal of substitution of non-human for human technology, at the consumption side TBS does as much as it can to re-humanize the product. While it would be important to consider to what extent the Community Trade scheme provides an example of how production and sourcing may be modiied, here concentrate on consumption and promotion. TBS outlets, its promotional and marketing do not appear to be characterized by calculability - the emphasis on quality being as important as quantity; by predictability - consumers can buy a number of diferent aromatic oils and mix them up to their own speciications; by eiciency - people are invited to spend time browsing through lealets inscribed with lengthy descriptions or even to wash up his or her bottles of TBS shampoo and have them reilled. he elicitation of consumers’ inventiveness, of their capacity to appropriate and even “subvert” commodities is oicially celebrated by TBS. For example in Winter 1999 Issue of TBS Magazine Naked Body, we get an article titled You use that where? under the heading “Reality Check”, which illustrates how “imaginative”, indeed “unrivalled”, is he Body Shop customer. Here are some of the imaginative uses reported (1999, 28) A heard of diary cattle in Cheshire was going through a n uptight phase one summer and for weeks milk was scarce and of poor quality. hen the farmer tried encouraging their udders with a daily massage using he Body Shop Aromatherapy Base Bath & Massage Oil and normal low was restored within days […] Got really important interview? Cant ind the shoe polish? A Lanarkshire bank manger suggests reaching for he Body Shop Help Elbow Grease. As well as lubricating your skin’s leathery patches, it apparently does wonders for neglected footwear … 232 In this light TBS seems more aptly described as a response to that need for more intimate, personal spaces which work as a counterbalance to the big supermarkets, discounts and McDonalds of contemporary societies. Two trends which reinforce each other are indeed crucial to understand the contemporary development of the retail system, on the one hand, the spread of shopping malls, precincts and consumer centres with an emphasis on value for money and standardization, and, on the other, the rise of the niche retail outlet or chain of outlets, with a new emphasis on product quality and difference (Lee 1993). All in all, it is not easy to understand TBS phenomenon just through the lenses of McDonalidazion, or indeed through those ofered by the classical critical approach to consumer culture and advertising which stress homogenization and a general cultural drain. If anything TBS is symbolic diference, a diference predicated on the sameness of all other cosmetic commercialization. In this sense, Naomi Klein in her best-selling attack against globalization No Logo perhaps ofers a better line on TBS. Klein (2001: 20) suggests that TBS success in the States since late 1980s was all due to their marketing, unconventional as it might have been: most baling of all to Wall Street, it pulled of the expansion without spending a dime on advertising. Who needed billboards and magazine ads when retail outlets were three-dimensional advertisements for an ethological and ecological approach to cosmetics? he Body Shop was all brand. For Klein this a recent phenomenon, the result of a «seemingly innocuous idea developed by management theorists in the mid-1980s: that successful corporations must primarily produce brands as opposed to products»; while advertising was «about hawking products», today’s branding is «about corporate transcendence» (Klein 2001: 3 and 21). TBS, with its emphasis on a progressive political philosophy about women, ethical business and the environment may stand as a company which sells an idea (about the world and the self ) rather than a set of products. While astute, Klein’s arguments are largely polemical. Branding stretches back to the beginning of modern consumer culture as Andrew Wernick’s work on promotional culture has aptly demonstrated (Wernick 1991). Wernick reconstructs the uses Wedgwood made of the reproduction of the Barberini Vase - a blue-black and white Roman glassware - to show that promotional culture was quite well developed already in the Eighteenth Century, at least in England, at the dawn of industrial capitalism. he vase was re- 233 produced to be more than a consumer good that could command its own market price; it also worked as an ad for the brand, enhancing sales of other goods: «its overall point was to help construct a powerfully positive cultural identity for Wedgwood, his company and its hallmarked produce» (Wernick 1991: 7). Production, advertising and design were already strictly interrelated in the Wedgwood case. It deployed familiar and nonetheless inventive forms of modern marketing - from wholesaling arrangements, to direct retail access including several permanent showrooms where particular care was placed on product display, to a theme park with the name of Etruria, to a system of travelling salesmen armed with a “traveller’s book” providing detailed instructions on costumer approach, to an glossy illustrated catalogue, to special deals with UK embassies and aristocratic societies across Europe. While in Klein’s phrase we are tempted to think that the product does not matter anymore, Wernick rightly points out that products themselves must be designed for the task of branding, that is of communicating in the name of the company. Yet, already in the case of Wedgwood, «through the intermediary of market-oriented design, production and promotion were integrally conjoined. Wherewith, in terms of pre-industrial methods, their order became reversed. Rather than produce then sell, promotional requirements were taken account of before production ever began» (Wernick 1991: 15). Even back then, this certainly meant an instrumental rather than an expressive orientation, i.e. the symbolic and aesthetic fashioning of objects become a matter for systematic calculation about what would maximize sales instead of being embedded in values promotion as such. Yet, we should not think that this necessarily means a reduction to the minimum common denominator. Willingly or not, promotion can be culturally creative. his is the case especially when cultural values are under conditions of instability, dissent and conlict. Yet, precisely following the early Marxian diagnosis, conlict and instability in the sphere of values have been seen as coterminous with modernity and industrial capitalism (Bell 1976, Simmel 1900). hus we may expect that TBS does not simply relects nor subsumes values and ideas which are present in our societies; it also re-organizes them and reinterprets them in its own way. A question then rises almost spontaneous: can we say with Wernick (1991: 45) that such process can only produce «a continual stream of totemic, market unifying, second-order cultural messages ... (which) ... reconciles whatever core values and symbols have currency»?. At a irst glance, reconciliation does not appear to be a key aspect of TBS. TBS has for example relied on campaign such as the one in favour of hemp, which its well with a wider search for ‘cool’ styles - inding inspiration in the countercul- 234 ture in the sixties and seventies (Frank 1997) and, more recently, in black and indie subcultures which are seen as more authentic bearers of values. In these circumstances, does TBS exemplify the extent to which moralization (or valorisation) is a key element of promotional culture? And if so, while TBS messages appeal to values of an oppositional kind, are these somehow becoming diluted by their rhetorical form? From the beginning of industrial capitalism there has been a growth of promotional messages which, converted into ixed forms which could be mass disseminated from a distance, could not be answered back directly, but could be de-codiied and de-commoditized in ways divergent from the intentions of the producer and the sender (see Hebdige 1979; Willis 1978). Indeed, we may consider that this objectiication of promotional discourse entails that it is set free from the immediacies of buying and selling, becoming not only a relatively autonomous force in the cultural construction of commodities, but also a more visible target to be criticized by consumers (as well as a good to be used in its own). Can we therefore consider that TBS illustrates that the interplay between promotional culture and lived consumer cultures has become, to an extent, at least, relexive? hat promotional techniques today may need to thematize the role of advertising, the notion of the commodity, the process of commercialization as well as that of de-commoditization? To try and answer these questions is important to consider a little closer what are TBS peculiarities, its own positioning within the cosmetic industry, and its brand image. 2.Playing Brand, Politics and Responsibility Notwithstanding its global size, TBS is still able to position itself as a downto-hearth, alternative cosmetics company which goes further than merely presenting the consumer with a useful end-product. Its roots - as continually recalled by Roddick - are somehow countercultural and it has managed to safeguard some of this political and ethical aura throughout. TBS has always presented itself as a responsible company which operates in an irresponsible business environment. Here is an exemplary quote from the irst issue of Full Voice, he Body Shop Magazine, issued in 1998: We’re in the business of skin and hair care. Our products care for your skin and your hair. hat’s all. We want you to buy our products because they work. hat’s it. We’re not going to lie. We’re not going to push an 235 ideal. We’re not going to be just another cosmetic company. We don’t want you buying our products thinking they’ll make you look younger, or because we’ve promised to rid you of your wrinkles. We don’t want you feeling bad if you don’t use our products. Worldwide, consumers spend £10 billion a year on toiletries and cosmetics, a signiicant amount of which is spent on moisturizers and cleansers. he Body Shop sells moisturizers, We claim they help prevent loss of moisture. What they don’t do, and what we won’t claim, is that they’ll make you look younger, we’ll even go as far as telling you that nothing can. Getting older is a fact of life and something we should accept and enjoy. (In our shops in California we even go as far as to say you should embrace and celebrate your wrinkles). In fact, the most efective anti-ageing product is a sun hat. 80% of what we think of as ageing of the skin is in fact ‘photo-ageing’ due to the exposure to sunlight. Does this help sell our moisturizers? Probably not. Does it help to put wrinkles in perspective? To give people another view of the ageing process? Hopefully yes. his is what we mean when we say we have a greater obligation to our customers than simply tending to their looks(Full Voice, 1) TBS company proile articulates responsibility into the direction of nature (packaging is minimal and each product is presented as being based on one natural substance, generally plant-based, such as cocoa or butter); of disadvantaged communities (the reliance on a Community Trade programme is stressed); and of employees (TBS prides itself on its ethical business complying with human rights, social welfare and animal protection; transparency of information and active campaigning in favour or social issues). Firstly, the natural character of the products is continuously stressed: each product is presented as being based on one natural substance, generally plant-based, such as cocoa or butter. Furthermore, TBS continues its policy of minimal packaging and wants to minimize the waste from packaging. Costumers are able to return the plastic bottles in which most of the products are purchased and have them reilled, rather than throwing them away. Secondly, TBS reliance on a Community Trade programme is ubiquitously highlighted. On the “Community Trade” lealet which consumers will could typically ind in all outlets in the late 1990s, we may read that In a nutshell, we [TBS] buy accessories and natural ingredients from poor or disadvantaged communities. We get good quality products and they get a sustained source of income which they can invest in improving education or sanitation, building homes, or modernizing farming methods 236 hirdly, TBS prides itself on its ethical business operations. In the company proile A Company with a Diference TBS speciies three levels to its ethical business: Compliance («opening up to deined standards of human rights, social welfare and worker safety, environmental protection and, where relevant, wider ethical issues like animal protection”); Disclosure (“only through public disclosure can a real process of dialogue and discussion with stakeholder be achieved and the right direction charted for the future»); Campaigning («to play an active part in agitating and campaigning for positive change in the way the business world works, with the ultimate aim to making a positive impact on the world at large») (www.thebodyshop.org). On the inside front slip of book Business as Unusual, Roddick (2000) states that «in terms of power and inluence, you can forget church, forget politics. here is no more powerful institution in society than business, which is why I believe it is more important than ever before for business to assume a moral leadership. he business of business should not be about money, it should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed». he book itself is a story of both TBS and Roddick as entrepreneur, of her diiculties in facing «the enormous constraints of a global company» such as TBS has become, and her continuous attempt «to push the limits of business, to change its language, to make it a force for positive change» (Ibid. xi). TBS has been associated with many campaigns which are now grouped under four main headings in its website: Against Animal Testing; Activate SelfEsteem; Defend Human Rights; Protect your Planet. hrough such campaigns TBS self-proclaims itself as a revolutionary company, having «pioneered social activism and helped change the language and practice of big business». In another magazine EveryBody, Roddick states that it is because of these genuine campaigns that consumers and other stakeholders – including some charities - have been able to link to TBS on a deeper level: From the beginning TBS was able to connect with people on an emotional level. We’ve enjoyed a wonderful relationship with millions of men, women and children around the world, who’ve shown their support, not just by buying our products but by joining us in our successful campaigns against animal testing, for the environment and on behalf of human rights. (Everybody, 2000, X) While ethical campaigns are prominent features of TBS image, Roddick’s role in underpinning the company proile as ethical business cannot be forgotten. Her functions were manifold: she acted as spokesperson, a testimoni- 237 al and a brand guarantee. As a spokesperson she allowed for TBS products to ind an imaginary home in the form not only of a brand but more concretely in that of a the life and words of one committed individual. As a brand guarantee, her image and her signature works as to personalize the link between consumers and the products, an old technique which has often been relied upon throughout the history of promotional culture. More curiously she also works as a testimonial - just like a pop-star, an actress or a model. his stresses that promotional culture as the public face of creative business is enjoying an amount of cultural legitimacy as a worthwhile symbolic form as such. Given TBS overall approach, direct advertising may have felt rather dissonant, and what was needed were promotional devices that could reinforce the authenticity of the brand. Most noticeably, as suggested, the shop itself had to become a space where some time could be spent learning about the products and their wider relevance in the context of environmentalist values. While, as suggested, this is not a TBS invention, TBS is also resurrecting techniques such as direct sales. In sum, TBS may be seen has having mounted intense and non-conventional yet topical promotional campaigns which have relied on channels other than the mainstream. TBS promotional strategy has been hailed within marketing circles as a triumph in image building: it has been able to attach «a feel-good factor to cosmetic and personal care products which traditionally have carried a strong aura of self-indulgence» (Peter et als. 1999: 29; see also Todd 2004 ). While other companies have used ads to associate themselves with progressive politics (i.e. Benetton), TBS has been blunt, innovative and efective in terms of market success and cultural inluence in deploying ethical issues and political controversy as a channels to send around its brand image. Also because of this it is not easy to understand TBS phenomenon just through critical approaches to consumer culture which stress homogenization and a general cultural drain. If anything TBS is symbolic diference and an example of a global brand that goes beyond the four pillars of Mcdonaldization. As to its internal organization, TBS has worked to enhance local lexibility within global standards (Kaplan 1995), and to provide an alternative to bureaucratic impersonality among workers, encouraing a ‘bounded’ expression of emotions, with all its diiculties (Martin et als. 1998). his alternative emotion management approach is instrumental to humanize the product when it reaches its customers, and may require the promotion of a selfproclaimed “Corporate Citizenship” among its employees who are asked to actively demonstrate the organizational values. At the point of purchase, TBS appears as one of those market places devised to fulil the desire for personal and intimate spaces which the very spread of global and impersonal 238 retailing has elicited. As such, it occupies the aestheticized pole of contemporary retail sector, embodying an emphasis on quality, authenticity, and ethics as opposed to the McDonaldized pole which relies on standardization and value for money. 3.Relexive Consumerism As suggested, with the consolidation of promotional culture throughout modernity, we have witnessed an objectiication of advertising and promotion. Promotional symbolic forms are thus – to use Baudrillard (1998) phasing «set free from objects», or rather, from the immediacies of buying and selling, becoming not only a relatively autonomous force in the social construction of commodities but a more visible target for criticism on the part of consumers as well as products to be used in their own rights. In other terms, both promotional messages and consumers become relatively disentangled from each other. his does not mean that they are nor connected. While it has become possible for consumers to individuate ads as a speciic form of rhetoric, quite often considering them as cynical constructs, we are increasingly facing new modes of advertising which have incorporated such criticism, being able to play it out for their own purposes. Especially since the contestation years we have witness the emergence of new modes of advertising incorporating criticism for commercial culture (see Frank 1997). TBS’s own promotional strategy builds onto consumers’ diidence for conventional cosmetic ads which sell ‘hope in a jar’ (Peiss 1998). It has counted on three factors dissonant with the meanings that normally characterize cosmetics ads, relying on irony (a tongue-in-cheek attitude which re-frames consumers desires to be beautiful as unserious); on the moralisation of consumption (via a direct attack against more traditional forms of frivolous and misleading advertising and a concern for animal rights, the environment, producers); and on de-fetishisation (through reference to fair-trade, natural ingredients and a mise en scène of he productive process) (Sassatelli 2007). Let’s explore these symbolic factors in some detail. 3.1 Irony It has become accepted that «users make innumerable and ininitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules» (De Certeau 1984:xiiixiv; see also Miller 1987; 1995). In other terms, it does strike as a typically 239 semiotic fallacy1 to consider that «to accept the selling message is to accept the values it presupposes» (Wernick 1991: 23). Irony and what De Certeau calls «being-in-between» - an aristocratic attitude which coincide with the only freedom available to humans, i.e. not transcending one’s own position, but being inside it from a distance - has been hailed as an important characteristic of the modern consumer. While we may say that not even satire or is immune from the mechanism it may seek to destroy through laughter, while irony may have no visible, dramatic consequence on the market, it certainly has been used to deliver a number of promotional messages. For all its commitment TBS, seems to use irony as well as politics. Its messages have increasingly come to deliver their ideological appeals with a tongue-in-cheek attitude or an ironic twist. his is particularly evident in a lealet which deals with products such as self-tanning lotions or colouring which as such appear to contradict the idea of simple naturalness otherwise ofered by this company (see image 1: Fake it, 1997). he voluminous, bulging male under wears portrayed in the ifties style image, with the intensely allusive claim «fake it!» are too overt a joke on male worries not to attract the attention of women. Fun is typically invoked to show that a focus on appearance is all right in so far as it is light and unserious, in so far as it does not imply that one manipulates one’s own body simply to it in the latest fad, as it is relexively take up as a inspiring fun and joyful masquerade. All of this works, in many ways, as a strategy of coping with broader cultural beauty ideals which, as I shall show next, are thereafter harnessed to a vision of the self as «an individual who embodies wellbeing» (Blanks 1998, 11). 3.2 he Moralization of Consumption For all their eforts to consider consumption as a neutral activity, neo-classical economists have never managed to expunge morality and politics from it. While ordinary, consumption - conspicuous or not - has never been a purely idiosyncratic pursuit; indeed consumption has increasingly been deployed to show that the ordinary is deeply moral. We do not have to be fooled by the fact that in contemporary Western culture the early modern emphasis on the corrosive nature of consumption has been dissolved in the ever longer list of dietetics or natural product which guarantee pleasure without excess. Indeed, the development of a market for body maintenance and transforma1 Wernick’s adherence to this fallacy is signalled from the preface of his book, when he describes his approach as emphasizing «the impact of promotion on the objective side of culture, while ignoring consciousness, subjectivity and that whole range of issues having to do with reception» (1991: viii). 240 tion provides excellent examples of how immediate and light gratiications to be drawn from mundane consumer practices may be moralized. he promotional strategies of products as diverse as low-fat foods, organic fabrics or natural cosmetics often rely on immediate enjoyment as much as on longterm narratives of personal welfare and of political and social responsibility (Sassatelli 2001). his is certainly the case in many recent TBS campaigns. Relexivity here takes on a more serious tone: advertising is directly thematized, TBS products and values (which you presumably acquire and demonstrate with the product) being a direct attack against more traditional forms of frivolous and misleading advertising. his was evident in the publication of TBS’s magazine Full Voice which openly criticizes conventional cosmetics advertising use of glamorous images of femininity. he magazine asks consumers not to surrender to the desire to be “beautiful”, believing everything in order to satiate it. hey are rather asked to be wise and realistic, in control of their wants and of the images of the body which advertising is said to have been using to elicit desire. he subsequent billboards and press adverts have emphasized the immediate physical pleasures to be gained from the use of cosmetics. hey have relied on themes such as authenticity and nature which neutralize such pleasures by suggesting that they correspond to a real project of selfrealization. Being overtly opposed to dominant body ideals and proposing beautiied pictures of the leshy and plump body, he Body Shop’s campaign suggests a consumer who is “realistic”. Her lesh is celebrated through images that displace usual images of the female, naked body. In the series of cards which accompany essential aromatic oils, for example, we get a female body reclining in what is classic posture for the western tradition of the Nude as discussed by John Berger in his Ways of Seeing (1972). But we get it the other way around, as seen from the back. he woman is not inviting the viewer (a male, perhaps) to enjoy the view of her body, she is rather visualizing relaxed self-absorption. Her face unavailable, she appears enough detached from social pressures and conscious of herself as to «arouse the senses», get some pleasure while respecting her own authenticity2 (see Image 2: Arouse the senses). Authenticity is also stressed through a celebration of diference. With images of a multiethnic and working body and with the claim that the products on sale are the result of fair trading and ecological awareness, self-realization 2 he commercial uses of authenticity have been studied in the case of, for example, music by Peterson (1997); the development of alternative views of authenticity within commercial music, such as dance music, have been considered in hornton’s work on clubbing subcultures (1997). 241 becomes part of a wider vision of social order and morality. Finally, even TBS handbook he Body Shop Book of Wellbeing (Blanks, ed., 1998), we get a compendium of individual pleasures, political correctedness and green activism. All in all, ethical considerations, nature and authenticity are marshalled for assuring that the immediate pleasures obtained through consumption are part of an overall project of well-being which the self is ultimately engaged to control: «you know yourself pretty well. You are in control. You’re productive, you value yourself. You’re able to love and be loved. And all the time, you are realistic about life»(ibid., 11). 3.3 De-fetishisation and Fair Trade Fetishism, we know, is one of the sins of consumer culture. In traditional adverts attention is placed on the meanings apparently inherent in the product which will somehow be transferred to the consumer. In this view, fetishism may generally be deined as the worship of objects and for many social theorist is a «tool to critique the overvaluation of goods as against their real value as inert, inanimate objects» (Dant 1999: 40). More precisely for Marx the real value of a thing lies in the congealed labour it embodies while a commodity is a fetishist form in that it appears to have an intrinsic value when in fact its value resides in the relations of production which are obliterated by commercialization. In its use relexive forms of rhetoric, TBS seems to address directly the Marxian view of fetishism: instead of concealing how their goods are produced, they appear to highlight these processes. If, according to the classic Marxist deinition of fetishism, within consumer culture, the commodity is supposed to be perceived in a «fantastic form» which mystiies its origin, TBS claims that the value of its products does not lie in the product itself (and its phantasmagoric ability to suggest worlds of happiness connected to sex appeal and success), but in the human labour that has gone into it. his is done in an updated fashion, taking into account the global inequalities of contemporary political economy and even referring to globalization. hus reference to Fair Trade is (like largely customary for Fair Trade products in general) accompanied by images of a working body. he extent to which such working body is actually romanticized may be appreciated in the lealets which accompany the Bergamot Aromatherapy products, whose essence comes from the southern Italian region of Calabria portrayed through the mythology that typically accompanies Anglo-american visions of the Mediterranean (see ig.3: Italian origins). Certainly, the proliferation of the mass manufacturing system, which is accompanied by the division and specialization of the production and the consumption spheres, allows for ambitions to creativity, personalization and 242 control which can take the form of an hope to transcend the boundaries of consumption and production: «in an age of mechanical reproduction people desire human production in the things they surround themselves with» (Jhally 1987: 25). his may take on a markedly political value, in phenomena such as ethical purchase behaviour, green activism or human rights activism which seem to be more and more interested in the often far-away and disperse points of origin of brand-name goods (Sassatelli 2004; 2006). TBS has drawn on those sentiments basing a large amount of its reputation on the Community Trade Scheme. Of all TBS promotional material which is available in the shops the vast majority is about Community Trade. he programme has its own logo, which is easily recognized. With campaign such as “Defend Human Rights” TBS sends out the message that what consumers choose to buy for their own personal satisfaction is directly liked to the producers as well as the conditions of production. A plethora of company literature, in the form of lealets, magazines, posters, etc. highlight this statement. In the promotion of fair trade the need for consumers to «look behind the label» is in the spotlight. TBS Community Trade scheme, it is claimed, gives an opportunity to «raise the awareness of the story behind the label» with consumers, enabling them to «direct their purchasing power where it is really able to make a diference». hey even explicitly state that their intent is to link production and consumption, claiming that «when these stories are told, they help costumers to connect with the producers and to raise awareness of the added beneits of their purchases». 4. Concluding Remarks Which broader themes can we tackle through the case just examined? All in all, we may say that TBS illustrates three aspects - economic, cultural and political - of contemporary promotional culture. From an economic point of view, we have seen that globalization goes hand in hand with localization. he franchising system which has transformed retail is a primary case in point. We get the economic organizational infrastructure of a multinational, the symbolic power of strong cross-nationally objectiied cultural signs and the loyalties of local consumers - be it the relexive de-commoditization work which consumers put in the process of consumption itself (including at the point of purchase), or the labour-work which the shop assistants put in the subtly varied management of their outlets across the world. From a cultural perspective, we have had the opportunity to appreciate what Marx would call the transformational nature of capital and what Simmel would rather prefer 243 to deine as the changing, fast-paced nature of modern, objectiied culture. Culture and economics are united in this process, partly because economics is increasingly about cultural goods, partly because large economic institutions are more instrumentally - and thus visibly - aesthetically elaborated. Finally, we get to the political aspect. What I have tried to do in this paper is to take seriously the rhetorical strategies of TBS. Ultimately I have used them to illustrate what appears to be a signiicant phenomenon in contemporary promotional culture, namely relexivity. My question, was not so much whether TBS directly responds to pressures from environmental, feminist or ethnic groups or whether such measures are turned into a marketing device which helps TBS to maintain high proits through alternative means (Edwards 2000). his question, I dare say, can only be answered by detailed empirical studies of the actual interface between production and consumption, as demand and ofer are in a continuous interaction whose outcome depends on context. Here I was concerned with detailing how relexive promotional strategies may be articulated. We may conceive of commercial relations as places for the translation of cultural values as much as for money transactions. Certainly, this process works as to legitimatise and naturalise some cultural values rather than others. In this sense, the increasing relexivity which characterizes promotional messages may be considered as both a cognitive and a moral necessity: on the one hand, as a response to consumers’ improved reading skills and, on the other hand, as a response to consumers’ increasing demand for producers’ accountability. he view taken in this paper, however, is that such process is fundamentally linked to the possibility of moralizing consumption among those sections of societies who may wish to take a critical stance his view has some advantages on the idea that we could easily read TBS strategies as just another form of market instrumentalism, whereby green values, progressive politics, feminism, etc. are used, and indeed abused, as selling points. As such they risk to be emptied of their original, subversive meanings. Certainly, it might be said that TBS concentrates so much on Community Trade and the origin of the characterizing ingredients in each of its products that it may yet again end up covering the production process. he latter h indeed includes other than organic or fair trade ingredients, as the characterizing ingredient only counts for a small percentage of the inal product and the labour which goes in its (typically agricultural production) is only a tiny fraction in the whole process of (industrial) production. To be sure, other ingredients of TBS products have nothing to do with the Community Trade programme, yet this becomes secondary and consumers are encouraged to forget that the product is a mixture of chemicals formulated 244 in a laboratory and produced in a factory, far away from the communities where the original, characterizing raw material is grown. De-feshization may thus become itself fetishized. We should thereby acknowledge that the emphasis on ethics has been an important marketing tool for TBS. But we can avoid entering a either/ or logic, and consider that this being so, any ethical drive is doomed to be merely instrumental. As ethical business, TBS has become a favourite target of criticism and attention. his is true of environmentalist and consumerist associations who feel it is their right to demand ever greater levels of transparency - TBS has indeed been strongly criticized by Greenpeace3. But also of academics who are torn by questions as to what extent can we expect a genuine moralization of market relations. While some take TBS as an example of the powers of capitalist markets to absorb any value and use it for proit (Brabazon 2001; Heath and Potter 2001), others prefer to make distinctions between commodities and look for criteria on the basis of which evaluate the “green-ness” of a company (Robbins 2001). All in all, even commercially managed relexivity has got limits as much as it may have efects. On the irst account, we should not underestimate people’s capacity to distinguish between lifestyle and politics. Klein (2001:85) herself acknowledges that despite a «clear co-optations of the class struggle, one hardly expects the labor movements of the world to toss their towel in a huf, give up on their demands for decent working conditions and labor standards worldwide because Mao is suddenly the It Body in Milan .... Because not one of the movements being co-opted expressed itself primarily through style or attitude. And so style co-optation ... does not have the power to undo them». On the second account, we should consider the increasing legitimation of ethical issues in commerce (partly) as function of the development of new market relations. While TBS may have a tendency 3 A Greenpeace report for example states that «behind the green and cuddly image lies the reality - he Body Shop’s operations, like those of all multinationals have a detrimental efect on the environment and the world’s poor» (Greenpeace 2001, www.mcspotlight.org). One of the indings of an enquiry conducted by Greenpeace is that the Community Trade programme is not as signiicant as implied by TBS in its literature. TBS promotional lealet on community trade says that it uses community trade products in «about 60 of our products». According to Greenpeace «in fact these are largely a marketing ploy as less than 1% of sales go to ‘Community Trade’ producers, and it has been shown that some of these produces have been sourced from mainstream commercial markets». Also although the organization markets itself heavily on his against animal testing rules, one independent report suggests that these rules are not as comprehensive as are suggested (www.fbresearch.org/bodyshop.html). TBS is said to operate a ive year rolling rule, which means that after ive years, if no further testing has been done, ingredients which have been tested on animals are permitted to use in the products. he rule only applied to what are classed ‘pharmaceuticals’ and certain products, such as vitamin E acetate that was purchased for use in sunscreen can be exempted from the scheme. 245 to display its good deeds as a promotional tool, it is true that once certain ideals are endorsed then they cannot be easily dismissed and once social accountability is publicly presented as the foundation of one’s own corporate philosophy, then one has to try and stick to it, unless one wants to loose one’s own brand aura. Once the veil of the commodity form is removed, the possibility of organizing commodity chains diferently is vented, the opportunity to re-think commercial culture in general and beauty culture in particular is granted, it is diicult to imagine that consumers will stop relect and imagine right there where the companies would like them to, at the border of their maximum surplus. Bibliography Bell, D. 1976, he Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York, Basic Bookds. Berger, J. 1972. Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Blanks, T. et als. 1998, he Body Shop Book of Wellbeing, London, Ebury Press. Bordo, S. 1993, Unbearable Weight. Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, Berkeley, University of California Press. Brabazon, T. 2001, Buf Puing an Empire: he Body Shop and Colonization by Other Means, «Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies», 15, 2, 187-200. Dant, T. 1999, Material Culture in the Social World, Buckingham, Open University Press. De Certeau, M. 1984, he Practice of Every Day Life, Berkeley, University of California Press. Edwards, T. 2000, Contradictions of Consumption, Milton Keynes, OUP. Evans, J.G. and Riyait, S. 1993, Is the message being received? Benetton Analysed, «International Journal of Advertising», 12, 291-301. Frank, T. 1997, he Conquest of Cool, Chicago, he University of Chicago Press. Goldman, R. and Papson, S. 1996, Sign Wars, he Cluttered Landscape of Advertising, New York,he Guildford Press. Jhally, S. 1987, he Codes of Advertising, London, Routledge. Haug, W. 1986, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, Cambridge, Polity. Heath, J. and Potter, A. 2004, he Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed, Toronto, Harper Perennial. Hebdige; D. 1979, Subculture: he Meaning of Style, London, Routledge. 246 Kaplan, C. 1995, A world without boundaries: he Body Shop’s Trans/National Geographics, «Social Text», 43, 45-66. Klein, N. 2001, No Logo, ,Flamingo. Lee, M.J. 1993, Consumer Culture Reborn, London, Routledge. Leiss, W. et als. 1986, Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products and Images of Well-Being, Toronto, Methuen. Lunt, P.K. and Livingstone, S.M. 1992, Mass Consumption and Personal Identity, Buckingham, OU Press. Marcuse, H. 1964, One-dimensional Man, Boston, Beacon Press. Martin, J., Knopfof, K. and Beckman, C. 1998, An Alternative to Bureaucratic Impersonality and Emotional Labor: Bounded Emotionality at the Body Shop, «Administrative Science Quarterly», 43, 2, 429-69. Miller, D. 1987, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford, Blackwell. Miller, D. 1995, Consumption as the Vanguard of History, in D. Miller (ed), Acknowledging Consumption, London, Routledge. Nava, M. et als. (eds) ????, Buy this Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption, London, Routledge. Peiss, K. L. 1998, Hope in a Jar. he Making of America’s Beauty Culture, New York, Metropolitan Books. Peter, J. P., Olsen, J. C. and Grunert, K. G. 1999, Consumer Behaviour and Marketing Strategy, McGraw-Hill, European Edition. Peterson, R.A. 1997, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Autenticity, Chicago, Chicago University Press. Ritzer, G. 1993, he McDonaldization of Society, Newbury Park, Pine Forge Press. Robbins, P. T. 2001, Greening the Corporation. Management Strategy and the Environmental Challenge, Sterling, Earthscan Publications. Roddick, A. 2000, Business as Unusual, London, HarperCollins. Sassatelli, R. 2001, Tamed Hedonism: Choice, Desires and Deviant Pleasures, in A. Warde and J. Gronow (a cura di), Ordinary Consumption, London, Harwood. Sassatelli, R. 2004), he Political Morality of Food. Discourses, contestation and alternative consumption, in M. Harvey, A. McMeeckin, e A.Warde (eds.), Qualities of Food. Alternative heoretical and Empirical Approaches, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Sassatelli R. 2006, Virtue, Responsibility and Consumer Choice. Framing Critical Consumerism. in J. Brewer and F. Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives, Oxford, Berg , pp. 219-50. Sassatelli, R. 2007, Consumer Culture. History, heory, Politics, London, Sage. 247 Todd, A. M. 2004, he Aesthetic Turn in Green Marketing. Environmental Consumer Ethics of Natural Personal Care Products, «Ethics & he Environment», 9, 2, 86-102. Schudson, M. 1986, Advertising: the Uneasy Persuasion, New York, Basic Books. Slater, D. 1997, Consumer Culture and Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press. Wernick, A. 1991, Promotional Culture. Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression, London, Sage. Yiannis, G. et als. 1995, he Unmanageable Consumer, London, Sage.