Thursday, August 19, 2010

Ralph Lauren: Ganging Up on Kids

The inevitable late summer plague has arrived. No, I’m not talking about mosquitoes, or poison ivy, or humidity. I’m talking about the back-to-school fashion frenzy. The buzz this year is about “interactivity." Shopping is now supposed to be ever so much more than interacting with our wallets. Some stores offer shopping sprees to “haulers,” kids who show off their purchases on YouTube. Others encourage them to play disc jockey on life size MP3 players when they walk in. Even clothes themselves have to be interactive. There’s some brand promoting different shaped stick-on patches so that kids can personalize their garments (“But mom, everyone is personalizing this year. If I don’t personalize, I won’t look like everybody else.”)

And then there’s Ralph Lauren. The designer who blessed us with “preppy” in the 1980s has produced a new online book for kids. And guess what? It’s interactive! Little fashionistas can click on the clothes the characters wear—and buy them. An ad on the front page of NYTimes.com called it “The First Shoppable Children’s Storybook.”



The Wall Street Journal touted the brand’s literary debut, The RL Gang, as a threat to Dr. Seuss. Wow. Here’s the plot: Eight kids, cute as hell, arrive at school sporting way cool clothes. A “well-dressed” man enters the room. It’s their teacher, the only visible part of whom is his torso, clad in . . .Ralph Lauren. They kids count to twenty and land in a magical wood, in totally new outfits. They find a little tree that isn’t thriving. They get sad. A kid named River suggests that they water the tree. They do. It transforms instantly into a full grown apple tree bearing fruit. And the kids wear yet another set of outfits. They pick the apples. They count to twenty. They arrive back at school. The room is empty. Their well-dressed teacher’s torso (and presumably the rest of him) is gone. They don’t care. They each give away their apples, but get to keep their trio of first-day-of-school ensembles—for sale in their on-line closets.

The point isn’t, however, that it’s lousy literature. It would be just as problematic if The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins was an online shopping experience. The point is that The RL Gang is another slide down the slippery slope toward seamlessly integrated marketing in children’s lives. David Lauren, Senior Vice President of Advertising, Marketing and Corporate Communications, calls it "merchantainment." Like advergaming, the goal is to make sales by seducing kids into lingering with a product long enough to associate it with fun, or longing, or excitement.

Here’s the problem. We are getting so used to marketers inserting advertising everywhere in children’s lives—in schools, in books, in songs, in games, in the content of movies, that we forget to care. The RL Gang, by itself, is just one little annoyance that most of us can avoid. It’s the aggregate that’s really troubling—a commercialized childhood where everything and everyone is for sale.

12 comments:

  1. Stuff likes this makes me hate marketers so much. They just sit around conference tables trying to devise more ways to infiltrate their brand into peoples' lives. When are people going to fight back? I realize marketers are just trying to earn a living for their families as well, sigh. It's a vicious cycle.

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  2. @Erica: Thanks for your comment. To answer your question about fighting back, that's why we formed CCFC. Our mission is to protect the rights of children to grow up--and parents to raise them--without being undermined by commercial interests. It's not inevitable that marketers be allowed to exploit children. And the reports we get from people in industry are that targeting kids is increasingly stigmatized by the marketers themselves.

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  3. Do you think that this could the future of books? If we're moving toward an e-book format, and the readers have connectivity, will there be links in our novels so we can buy the items the characters use? I miss real books already.

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  4. Tanya, are there not already those links in "our novels?"

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  5. Thanks for this eye-opener, Susan! Our kids don't watch TV, but they do spend time on "kid friendly" web sites, which are becoming more commercial than any TV show!

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  6. What gets me is that so-called smart marketers like Ralph Lauren don't even try to talk to responsible family marketers -- people like Susan and Josh, f'rinstance -- to really reach parents in a way that is welcome and effective.

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  7. It really helps if you don't have a TV in the house at all....
    Also, homeschooling the kids takes off so much pressure. It worked well for us and the kids are both almost grown up now.

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  8. It is sad to see that designers/ marketers are becoming so aggressive in their strategies. Kids are being pressured to wear certain name brands or certain styles (too sexy) that they may not even particularly like or feel comfortable wearing in order to fit in. It is creating low self-esteem in young girls and not equipping them with skills such as assertiveness or power. The media is targeting kids in every avenue possible. I have a one year old daughter and I cannot even believe the clothes and advertising that is targeted towards that age group. Some of the examples are the jean diapers, the suggestive writing on pants which is strategically placed on their behinds, the tube tops; bikinis and I could go on and on...
    Ralph Lauren is one of many and I am not sure where the limitations are for these people? I am feeling very discouraged these days when I see what kids have to live with daily.

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  9. I am a designer, I loathe the consumerist stance of robbing children of their childhoods and sexualising teens....

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  10. OK, I got here by virtue of a link on another blog to which I subscribe. I am approaching your issue with an open mind. Like everyone, I often find advertising intrusive and excessive, but as a libertarian I am also sensitive to the importance of advertising in commercial success, which is after all what drives our free-market economy. So, I am open to being influenced - make your case: why is it inherently negative that children are exposed to advertising?

    David

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