Case Study: Haagen-Dazs
The
Making of an Advertising Koan
A
woman with stunning, East European features stands
at the edge of a dark, rolling sea. The sky is a stark
white, the mood portentous. A lone cello provides
a sonorous undercurrent of sound. The woman wears
a diaphanous white fabric beneath which the outline
of her body is discernible. A dark-haired man with
chiseled, brooding features approaches, riding bareback
on a large white horse. The man and woman acknowledge
one another with a steady gaze, though their faces
remain expressionless. He extends his hand. The scene
shifts to the woman now mounted on the horse, the
man riding behind her. The horse gains speed, now
galloping vigorously along the shore. The camera cuts
in, and we see only the undulating motion of the man
and woman, the woman's head thrown back, eyes closed,
the man holding her from behind. Cut to a close-up
of the woman's mouth taking in a spoonful of white
ice cream. Fade to white, and the text "Shall
We Haagen-Dazs?" appears on screen with male
narrative voice-over.
THE
THEME AND SLOGAN of the advertising campaign of which the commercial
described above were created one afternoon ten years
ago when a Japanese colleague unexpectedly stepped
into my office at the advertising agency at which
we both worked. He suggested we brainstorm themes
for an upcoming pitch to Haagen-Dazs. Without a moment's
thought, I said, "Shall we Haagen-Dazs?"
He stood for a moment in silence. "Yes, that's
it," he eventually responded, thanked me, and
left. The entire exchange lasted no more than a minute.
But in the years following, the words took on a resilient
and resonant life of their own, the campaign winning
several awards, securing a dominant market share for
the brand, and making "Shall We Haagen-Dazs?"
a household phrase in Japan for the past decade. How
did this strange "advertising koan" take
root and flourish within current postmodern Japan?
Though a bowl of ice
cream can be nice, its transcendental, healing powers
may not immediately spring to mind at a time when
a nation is yearning for respite from massive socioeconomic
change and the collective shock of suddenly finding
itself cast in a leading role on the global stage.
Yet, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Japan
sought the where-with-all to respond to its emergent
role as a dominant economic power, and as the West
increasingly turned to Japan as a model of political,
social and economic success, the phrase "Shall
We Haagen-Dazs?" provided an unexpected palliative
to this moment of social crisis. On the one hand was
gaiatsu, the pressure from external forces to open
the nation more fully to international discourse and
trade, in addition to the genuine if conflicted desire
among Japanese themselves to connect with the larger,
outside world. On the other hand was the fear of stepping
from the comforting shadows of Japan's ancient, circumscribed
cultural context and into a global drama of cacophonous,
confusing dynamics, daunting new complexities, confrontation
and exposure.
Yet it would be less
than accurate to portray Japan as timidly waiting
in the wings, struggling to sum up the courage to
step into the fray of international exchange. At that
time, with the U.S. economy still mired in recession,
American cultural icons such as the Rockefeller Center,
Columbia Pictures, and Pebble Beach were newly vulnerable
to the lure of the yen and Japan's appetite for acquisition.
Indeed, the Japanese appetite for any and all foreign
prestige commodities had become quite infamous by
the early 1980s. Within Japan, too, the hunger for
international intercourse led to the highly selective
importing of desirable language, sex, and other workers
from designated regions of the world. For both Japanese
individuals and corporations, consumption had clearly
become a primary method through which one partook
in the global public sphere.
It was within this
context that the Haagen-Dazs ad campaign first appeared,
and was, I believe, interpreted as reinforcing and
legitimizing this ideology of contact through consumption,
becoming a momentary, artificial means of ameliorating
the social tensions of that specific place and period.
Though details of
the presentation varied, the underlying content and
structure of the advertising campaign media and presentation
remained remarkably consistent for nearly a decade.
One variation on the television and cinema commercial
described above, for instance, presented two lovers
converging beneath the white, silken sheets of an
expansive bed. The folds and undulations of the sheets
were visually blended with the flowing waves of white
liquid cream. This was followed by the close-up of
a mouth and tongue taking in the frozen cream. And,
as always, the only words spoken were "Shall
We Haagen-Dazs?" as narrative voice-over at the
end of the piece. The campaign's most successful print
ad borrowed this image of the two bodies beneath the
exquisite white sheets, with the phrase and logo the
only signifiers presented. Often, the phrase appeared
completely by itself, always against a field of white,
in print media such as menus and promotional materials.
As
with many advertising slogans, the phrase itself contained
an intensely disorienting, koan-like set of internal
contradictions. The heightened language (the use of
"Shall we" rather than "Let's")
would have been immediately recognizable to any audience
member who had been through the mandatory primary
and secondary school English instruction. The brand
name itself must have connoted for some members of
the audience a certain mythology of Germanic grandeur
and ascendancy from the not-so-distant-past. Additionally,
the consistent use of pure white light, pristine white
fabrics, white liquids (and white models), combined
with the virtual absence of language clearly conveyed
a heightened sensibility, sophistication and purity
of expression which lifted the intensely sensual images
to an otherworldly realm of transcendent, elemental
purity beyond or before law or language. The refined,
film-quality cinematography, the classical score,
the selection of the then reigning European super
model Tatania as the female lead, down to the typefaces
and extravagant use of white space, all conveyed a
quality and style viewers had perhaps seen only in
the cinema. And they were being invited to step into
this world, forget their inhibitions, and "Haagen-Dazs"
with the West.
Yet the focused spoken
and typographic signification, the absence of facial
expressions in the models (in one appearance they
are completely covered by sheets), and the elemental
human actions depicted in the advertising, effectively
functioned to minimize the possibility of diverse
interpretations, and reinforced in the audience a
specific illusion of cultural transcendence through
innate human sensuality and unfettered immediacy.
As Edward Hall has argued, Japan's high-context culture
provides for extraordinarily accurate and consistent
constructions of shared meaning (1977). The socio-linguistic
fabric of the society being so finely woven over time
that gaps and inconsistencies in meaning are said
to occur less often and to a lesser degree than between
members of low-context cultures (such as the United
States), whose more loosely constructed cultural grid
might be more closely akin to a net than, say, silk.
At the same time,
the absence of any Japanese language or Japanese characters
created in the advertising the internal tension necessary
to produce the transcendent quality of the audience
experience. The phrase is not Japanese, it is clearly
spoken by a gaijin (outsider), and yet there is no
mistaking the compelling intimacy of the moment. As
with Barthes' vision of the Parisian striptease, the
raw sensuality of these beautiful foreigners and the
open invitation to join in has the effect of signifying
"nakedness as a natural vesture of [man and]
woman, which amounts in the end to a perfectly chaste
state of the flesh" (1983, 87-88). Thus the audience,
too, was able to momentarily shed the "incongruous
and artificial" constrictions of inculcated shame,
to divest themselves of the isolating effects of their
Japaneseness for a brief romp.
In these ways, the
"Shall We Haagen-Dazs?" invitation distilled
a pervasive yearning among Japanese to shed age-old
cultural isolation, language barriers, and anxiety
about direct contact with outsiders for the opportunity
to momentarily enter Utopia. Better yet, the gaiatsu
(external pressure) Japanese sensed from the West
to become more fully engaged in the new international
cosmology became, however briefly, a bewitching sexual
overture. This was an offer the audience was disinclined
to refuse. The Haagen-Dazs experience offered the
promise of shedding the Japanese self and its meticulously
defined behavioral grid by getting intimate. Beyond
this, the advertising koan itself may well have come
to invoke and momentarily legitimize the specious
ideology of contact through consumption when presented
as an external invitation to set aside social conscience.
In it's message to the collective unconscious, the
phrase may have been taken as license to strip away
all conventions and shame, climb beneath the sheets
with the foreign other, and become lost in the intense
imminence and intimacy of the commoditized sensuality.
Here, as previously
noted, the producers themselves may have stumbled
upon the seed of the campaign in what Jung might have
termed a receptive burst of "unconscious Zeitgeist."
And the audience at that particular time, in that
particular social context, was fully prepared to allow
this deception, embrace the illusion, and accept this
utopian solution to the tension of that moment.
As "Shall We
Haagen-Dazs?" became synonymous through the interpretive
act with this transcendent bridge into the pristine,
natural bliss of supra-cultural union, the producer
was thus able to momentarily co-opt the desire for
this unmediated experience of guiltless pleasure and
blissful unity with the gaijin world, the foreign
object. For the producer would, of course, provide
the audience with ready opportunity to relive that
initial moment of release and illusory transcendence.
Since the premium price of Haagen-Dazs ice cream would
require that the buyer overcome her cultural compulsion
to scrimp and save, to open wide the purse strings,
plunge breathlessly into Western bourgeois consumerism,
indulge in a moment of extravagant, alien sensuality,
and shamelessly embrace contact through consumption,
all within the secure comfort of her very own home.
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