Hiding in an iPhone Out Of Fear
If there is one emotion that impacts upon men more than any other it is fear. Fear of being seen as feminine or womanly, fear of intimacy, fear of being vulnerable, fear of not being powerful enough, fear of not being in control, fear of losing, fear of rejection, fear of not being a real man. And often most powerful of all, fear of being seen as afraid. Male identity is bound up with fear. That politics is so overwhelmingly dominated by men is hardly incidental. Politicians of all persuasions play upon people’s fears. Competing with each other in their portrayals of dangerous ‘others’ threatening ‘decent’ society, they offer solutions based upon threats and punishment.
Pepsi’s new iPhone application, ”Amp up before you score”, to promote their Amp energy drink is drawing media buzz, but whether the bundle of images around the beverage is flat or fizzy is subject to investigation. The Pepsi iPhone app. promises to help men ”score” with two dozen stereotypes of women by giving users pick-up lines and a scoreboard to keep track of their conquests. To men, The attraction of the app. is a form of escape; fleeing a reconciliation with the major fears of failure, rejection, revelation and subjugation. Like most products in this class, its ideal is to become highly addictive reinforcing the act of fleeing and playing on fears of women.
The subject of fear, whether in the form of neurotic anxiety or supernatural terror, is among the most prevalent in modern marketing.Additionally, neurotic fears that may exist as part of the ordinary psychological make-up of everyone in many ways characterize the seductive and manipulative component of modern selling and its transformation into the viral age.The internets frontier menatality and lack of regulation will result in greater articulation of extremes.
This tendency, and the narrative of fright and alienation was clearly expressed in the novels and short stories of Franz Kakfa, works that dramatize an all-consuming anxiety created by the emotional isolation of a bureaucratic and urban age.
”If you have an iPhone, as I do, you’ll know already that people who have iPhones spend all of the time that they’re not looking at their own iPhones looking at other people’s iPhones.When people meet, they show each other whatever wondrous new applications they’ve downloaded. Then they go home and, if they like and respect that other person whose iPhone they understand they’ve been privileged to see, they sit alone in a room and they download the recommended applications.It’s all rather beautiful, actually, and not unromantic.” ( Tabatha Southey, Globe and Mail )
The Pepsi app then takes the coaching concept a step further, encouraging users who “score” to post details such as name, date and comments, for their pals via Facebook and Twitter.Amp—which like most other energy drinks is packed with caffeine, sugar, vitamins and amino acids—in an attempt to be risque with its advertising.
During the Super Bowl 2008, the brand aired a commercial that showed a fat man who, to start a stalled car, attaches jumper cables to his nipples and chugs the drink.PepsiCo, based in Purchase, N.Y., like other consumer products companies, has invested heavily in social media and clearly the style of ”Animal House” humour, and promising web sites like College Humour and Onion have influenced the marketing focus.
PepsiCo, based in Purchase, N.Y., like other consumer products companies, has invested heavily in social media and may have knowingly incited controversy to create visibility. In fact the Amp app. is so antagonistic, it could be viewed as an expression of gay malevolence towards women; the transfer is too obvious it can’t entirely conceal itself under the immunity of ”humour”.
”It’s actually men who should be unhappy with Pepsi. At least Amp supposes that there are 24 types of women. But it assumes there’s only one type of heterosexual man and we’re told, yet again, as is he, that by his very nature, merely by wanting to meet and sleep with women (a reasonable hope in life, actually), he’s a tool. No wonder so many men cop, self-deprecatingly, to dumb.” ( Tabatha Southey, Globe and Mail )
About This Post