The Image (27 page)

Older and more obvious illustrations are the trademark and the brand name, both of which have become increasingly important in this century. A trademark (intended to become a standard for judging all products of a certain kind) is a legally protected set of letters, a picture, or a design, identifying a particular product. Because trademarks and many of the other images flooding our experiences are, like most other pseudo-events, expensive to produce, someone always has an interest in disseminating, re-enforcing, and exploiting them. Unlike other standards, they can be owned. To keep them legally valid as trademarks, the owner must constantly reassert his ownership.

It was by elaborate design that the cumbersome name “International Business Machines Corporation” was made in the public mind into “IBM.” This is probably the most expensive and most valuable abbreviation in history. Under the creative direction of Eliot Noyes and a design group consisting of Paul Rand, Charles Eames, and George Nelson, the firm developed its streamlined trademark, to project a “clean, impressive”
image. Nowadays a trademark is seldom a simple by-product of other activities. It is not merely the name, initials, or signature of the maker or owner, or a hallmark assigned by a guild. Usually it is produced by specialists.

But the images which fill our experience are not only the few letters, the simplified picture, or the catchy slogan. They are not merely “IBM,” “USS” staggered in a circle (for United States Steel Corporation), the graceful cursive “Coca-Cola.” They are not merely “His Master’s Voice” (the dog listening quizzically at the horn of a primitive phonograph), “Time to Re-tire,” (a yawning infant wearing Dr. Denton pajamas and holding a candle), “Rock of Gibraltar” (Prudential Insurance Company), a Benjamin Franklin medallion (
Saturday Evening Post
), a sleek, speeding greyhound (Greyhound Buses). Nor are they merely memorable slogans: “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel,” “The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous,” “When It Rains It Pours,” “Breakfast of Champions,” “Man of Distinction,” “57 Varieties,” “Milk From Contented Cows,” “Hasn’t Scratched Yet,” “Don’t Write—Telegraph,” “Keep That Schoolgirl Complexion,” “Say It With Flowers,” “Next to Myself I Like B.V.D.’s Best,” “Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should,” etc. etc.

While all these uses of the image have become more important with each decade of the twentieth century, a more abstract kind of image is the peculiar product of our age. Its tyranny is pervasive. An image in this sense is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan, or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product, or service. It is a value-caricature, shaped in three dimensions, of synthetic materials. Such images in ever increasing numbers have been fabricated and re-enforced by the new techniques of the Graphic Revolution.

When we use the word “image” in this new sense, we plainly confess a distinction between what we see and what is really there, and we express our preferred interest in what is
to be seen. Thus an image is a visible public “personality” as distinguished from an inward private “character.” “Public” goes with “image” as naturally as with “interest” or “opinion.” The overshadowing image, we readily admit, covers up whatever may really be there. By our very use of the term we imply that something can be done to it: the image can always be more or less successfully synthesized, doctored, repaired, refurbished, and improved, quite apart from (though not entirely independent of) the spontaneous original of which the image is a public portrait.

Examples could be multiplied. Systematically collected, they would be nothing less than an encyclopedia of the most vivid figments among which we live. A few examples will suggest the pervasiveness of image-thinking. Such a headline as “President Striving to Develop Public Image” (Kalamazoo
Gazette
, February 20, 1961) is common in our daily papers. “Goldwater Attempting to Shape a Popular Conservative Image,” topped a front page story of
The New York Times
(January 16, 1961) showing a photograph of the Senator. There Senator Goldwater amplified his intention “to make sure the image of conservatism is not an obstructive image.” “Do you read between the lines?” asked an advertisement for the S. D. Warren Paper Company. “Your customers certainly do. When a hi-fi enthusiast studies your catalog, he sees more than just text and pictures. Unconsciously he is reading between the lines for evidence of your company’s character. He looks for the quality image that only a good printer can help you achieve.” The pamphlet
Admission to Harvard College
(1960), a printed report by a special committee on college admission policy of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, talks the same language. It devotes a special section to the “public image” of Harvard, recommending that Harvard undertake “a careful investigation of its public image or images.” The committee urges “a much more systematic study of the public image question than the time and resources available to this committee would permit. The committee believes that such a study
should be launched by the University, with all the thoroughness and sophistication of research technique it obviously deserves.” Everywhere we meet the implication that if an image is damaging or unacceptable, it can and should be repaired.

(2)
An image is believable
. It serves no purpose if people do not believe it. In their own minds they must make it stand for the institution or the person imaged. Yet if an image is to be vivid and to succeed popularly in overshadowing its original, it must not outrage the ordinary rules of common sense. It would be a mistake, then, for Harvard College to claim that it selected its whole student body without any regard to family antecedents, alumni associations, or financial connections; no one would believe it. The most effective images are usually those which have been especially doctored for believability. One of the best paths to believability is understatement. “Ask the man who owns one.” In the words of the great public relations genius of American higher education in this century, The University of Chicago was “not a very good university … simply the best there is.” Ivory Soap is “99.44% pure.” A prudent advertiser or master of public relations takes advantage of the increasingly reckless use of superlatives to make his own hyperbole seem a conservative truth.

(3)
An image is passive
. Since the image is already supposed to be congruent with reality, the producer of the image (namely, the corporation) is expected to fit into the image—rather than to strive toward it. The consumer of the image (namely, the viewer of the corporate image: a potential client or customer) is also supposed somehow to fit into it. All these relations are essentially passive. The real effort in relation to an image is not by the corporation as a whole, but by the experts and executives who have made the image and who are its chief custodians. The “projection” of an image is itself a way of touting reputed virtues. Both subject and object then will want to fit into the picture. Both will assume that a portrait so persuasive and so popular must be made from life. Once the image is there, it commonly becomes the
more important reality, of which the corporation’s conduct seems mere evidence; not vice versa. In the beginning the image is a likeness of the corporation; finally the corporation becomes a likeness of the image. The image (unlike actual conduct) can be perfect. It can be a precise pattern which will satisfy everybody.

When the Container Corporation of America decided (according to one reporter) “to make itself known as a company both tasteful, resourceful, and design-conscious,” this decision might have been made simply enough in the minds and inner councils of its executives. Such an ideal had all along existed and could have been privately pursued. Traditionally, such inward-dwelling convictions were those considered most real and most effective. But now this is not enough.

An image is the kind of ideal which becomes real only when it has become public. A corporation which decides to rebuild its image has decided less on a change of heart than on a change of face. The face-lifting operation can usually be done for hire, by the new professions of plastic surgeons and cosmetic experts. The Container Corporation redesigned everything from its checks to its delivery trucks. It sponsored a major advertising campaign featuring “Great Ideas of Western Man,” embellished by reproductions of works by modern painters. In the jargon, Container Corporation was not “pursuing an ideal.” It was “constructing an image.” Once the image was constructed, the object was to make the corporation, its products, and, hopefully, its customers, all fit neatly into the picture.

Because an image is essentially passive, it need have very little to do with the activities of the corporation itself. In old-fashioned language, image building is the building of reputations, not of characters. When, for example, Daniel J. Edelman & Associates of Chicago undertook a “corporate image job” for Brunswick Corporation, the object, as a business journalist put it, was “to build an image of Brunswick as a company on the go—no longer merely a 115-year-old
bowling equipment outfit, but an increasingly diversified company.” Edelman’s spectacular success, widely admired in public relations circles, was accomplished by offering a shrewdly selected range of stories—items of pseudo-events—each well suited to the interests of a particular newspaper or magazine.
Fortune
was given a personality piece on the president of the corporation, who was depicted as a sportsman turned business genius, and another piece on the sudden emergence of a smaller corporation as a giant; the Associated Press columnist was handed an item on how bowling had become a billion-dollar business;
The New York Times
received a more sober biographical feature; in the
Wall Street Journal
was placed a story on the boom in the school equipment industry (tied to a convention of the American Association of School Administrators); for
Life
Edelman planned the photogenic stunt of completely modernizing a classroom, with Brunswick school furniture, in a single week-end. Each of these was another brush-stroke in the painting of the image. Meanwhile, the company itself, of course, had to do nothing more than go about its business, avoiding scandals or any public information that might discredit the image.

Sometimes the image build-up is concentrated on the chief executive rather than on the corporation itself. Benjamin Sonnenberg built up an image of Charles Luckman (then president of Lever Brothers) as a supersalesman genius; the effort here was by Sonnenberg, not by Luckman, much less by the corporation as a whole. It was necessary for Luckman to do very little except not break the image. A build-up of Benjamin Fairless (then president of United States Steel Corporation) was accomplished in similar fashion. Perhaps most important were the speeches he gave. The decisive one of these, an attack in 1950 on “jugglers in Congress attempting to alter U.S. business economics,” was written by Phelps H. Adams, who had come from the New York
Sun
’s Washington Bureau. This success in building up Fairless helped make Adams a vice president for public relations. The build-up of Charles Percy, the imaginative and
energetic head of Bell & Howell (by features in
Life
and elsewhere) has shaped the image of his company.

When the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey took over the New York television program “Play of the Week” ($600,000 for a thirteen-week sponsorship; later to be considered a bargain in image building), it was building its image as a public-serving corporation. The production of plays, of course, had nothing to do with the production of oil. In an age when the average consumer has only the vaguest notion of the actual activities of a vast, complex corporation, the public image of the corporation substitutes for more specific or more circumstantial notions of what is actually going on. Most corporations today, like most scientists, operate on unintelligible frontiers. Institutional advertising—which, for example, makes us think of the Du Pont Corporation no longer as “Merchants of Death,” but as making “Better Things for Better Living through Chemistry”—is a form of corporate celebrity building. Far from being resentful, we are usually grateful for the image. It is a concrete, graspable picture, taking the place of our amorphous notions.

As consumers, too, we can similarly be persuaded to buy. When Edward Gottlieb & Associates undertook to promote cognac (and actually succeeded in tripling its sales), they did it by creating images. They distributed cognac free at gourmet dinners, to food editors, to TV cooking programs, and to the White House, where its use would be photographed and reported. When Communications Counselors Inc. took an assignment from the Millinery Institute of America, they gave elegant hats free to fashion models, fashion editors, movie stars, TV performers, and society celebrities. Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Eisenhower, wearing hats, were photographed for national magazines. Hat sales soon showed the profitable effect of people wanting to fit themselves into the picture.

Amidst lamentation of the rise of conformity in American life, it has seldom been noticed that to “conform” now commonly means to fit into an image. Since the Graphic Revolution
the multiplying and vivifying of images has provided the new molds within which the new conformity becomes possible. In England, where the word “conform” had long been in use, it was primarily a transitive verb meaning “to form according to some model”; in the intransitive sense (to say simply, “he conforms”) it meant primarily to comply with the usages of the Church of England. In twentieth-century America the word has acquired a new meaning. Commonly nowadays when we say “he conforms” or when we talk of “conformity,” we usually mention no explicit object. This is because now there is always an object implied. We mean he is trying to fit into an image. “Conformity” is one of the most characteristic words of our age. Its widespread use is, I suspect, an unconscious, inevitable by-product of the rise (and the passivity) of images. Images themselves are invitations to conformity.