Worldbuilding and Consumer Anthropology

In No Logo, Naomi Klein discusses the progression of branding from the act of claiming a place on clothing to claiming a place in the world.  The branding of life – through the sponsoring of events, objects, and locations – in an attempt to associate the positivity of the brand with a lived reality has led to a drive “not to sponsor culture but to be the culture.”  Taken along with John Seabrook’s chapter on Star Wars, the question arises: what occurs when the brand is a world?  The longevity of the Star Wars franchise is largely due not just to its success as a film but to its status as a fictional universe, with its own history, culture, and natural laws.  Marketing executives in The Persuaders frequently spoke of the brand as a space of “meaning making.”  In the case of Star Wars, the real-world sense of belonging that many brands strive to enable in their customers is coupled with an escapist desire to participate in a fictional world. Seabrook describes Star Wars as a world layered “with successive coats of mythic anthropology.”  When the brand is a world, the fan becomes at once a consumer and an anthropologist, or more specifically, an anthropologist by being a consumer.

There is no denying that the Star Wars films were a cultural phenomenon in and of themselves, as the tremendous following that the original films generated at the time of their release remains a legendary standard in the world of film and merchandise marketing.  However, nearly 40 years after the release of A New Hope, I would argue that much of the selling power of the Star Wars franchise has come not strictly from the narrative events of the six films, but through the fictional world in which that narrative is based.  The Star Wars logo calls to mind not just the story of the Skywalker dynasty, but the planets, the ships, the technology, the multitude of species, and space – space to create and consume.  Comic books, novels, and video games capitalized off of the stories left untold in the original trilogy, utilizing its hundreds of characters, locations, organizations, and passing references to give fans expeditions into the “expanded universe” beyond that which was seen in the films.  The fictional world offered not just a plethora of exploratory narrative experiences but a corresponding abundance of opportunities for merchandising.  The initial film may have made George Lucas a millionaire as he predicted, but the world it created and the corresponding profits built him an empire.

While the fictional world built by the Star Wars films can be a primary draw for fans, a world can’t be sold; it has to be a world translated through products.  If I want to traverse the landscape of Tatooine, a video game gives me the opportunity to interact with that world, but the game is ultimately a product as much as it is a gateway.   In 2007, there was a highly successful cross promotion between Fox studios and 7-11, in which a series of convenience stores across America were made into the fictional Kwik-E-Mart stores from The Simpsons, all stocked with fictional products like Buzz Cola and Krusty-Os cereal.  The goal was not just to promote the original product (The Simpsons film), but to give fans the momentary chance to live in the world of The Simpsons (and, of course, buy their fictional products). It is through the act of consuming that the products become the tools of anthropology, allowing the fictional world to become realized.  If, as Naomi Klein suggests, brands attempt to become an integral part of the lived-in world, the goal is perhaps more easily accomplished when the brand itself is a world in which we wished we lived, even if only at the level of fantasy and escapism. While riding to work in a bus painted like a Snickers bar may seem like a Freudian nightmare, for Star Wars fans desiring to experience the brand-as-world, riding to work in the Millennium Falcon would be like a utopian dream.