Urban Vancouver

Notes on Chapter Five of The Corporation by Joel Bakan: Corporations Unlimited

By Richard Eriksson on May 24, 2004 - 6:02pm

In the final descriptive chapter of The Corporation (the sixth chapter is a prescriptive one which I will leave to the reader to investigate), Joel Bakan details the corporation's infiltration into formerly public spaces. I recently quoted at length the section about the corporate influence at the Vancouver International Children's Festival, and Bakan talks about corporations enclosing spaces so that they can employ security guards and display advertising so that areas conducive to business are created. I am reminded of a class with Martin Laba in which he pointed out that there is no sight-line in GM Place in which there is no advertising. Sports arenas are now effectively captive audiences for showing people advertisements. (Same with movie theatres these days.) Bakan also discusses the the market for private education, and not just the operation of schools by large corporations on contract for governments but by-passing the state altogether and providing "education services" to children.

Also, the process of marketing to kids is examined:

According to Harvard business ethics expert Joe Badaracco, "On the question of advertising to young kids, I'm inclined to say that it's fine so long as it doesn't work very well." The problem, however, is that it does work well. Junk-food marketers' claim to innocen ce is about as plausible as the tobacco industry's long-standing position that cigarette advertising does not increase smoking. Marketers such as Lucy Hughes work hard to design campaigns that encourage children to nag their parents to buy junk food and to take them to fast food restaurants. It is more difficult for a parent to say "no" to a child when the child has been urged by advertisers to question the parent's authority over food and is persuaded that he or she needs the advertised product. Under these conditions, the result of saying "no" is often petulence, sulking, acting out, and family conflict—which is why so many parents are prone to just put the kids in the car and drive to McDonald's. WIth the industry actually working to incite children to punish their parents for saying "no," its blaming parents for saying "yes" has more than a ring of hypocrisy to it.

Bakan then covers stealth marketing, such as leaving empty boxes of a delivery company outside of an apartment complex or people discussing the latest hip album and mentioning where they got it from. Dave Pollard has recently written about viral marketing and the need to use stealth, but Bakan here is arguing that people are now being targetted for advertising without realizing that they are being sold something.