Book reviews

315

James B. Twitchell, Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc. and Museumworld, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2004, $26. Cultural authority is undercut in a value-added culture when the Church, University and Museum embrace the use of public relations, advertising and marketing, the practices that once separated them from the commercial culture, according to James Twitchell. Branding is practiced by institutions that formerly held cultural authority, he argues, when religions, colleges, universities, and museums belong to a social economy of interchangeable services that require differentiation in order to survive. Twitchells view mirrors his hypothesis that Americans are a people who tend to frame everything as a commodity, including belief, intellect, art and artifact, a viewpoint borne out through media industries. Twitchell is on the right track when he describes what is occurring in the U.S., a blurring of once sacred boundaries that shielded cultural institutions from commercial and economic forces. In this ve chapter, 300 page book, Twitchell charges that the homogenization of cultural identity, collective memory and shared beliefs result from the blended branding practices of marketing, advertising and public relations. Other scholars engaged in similar analysis of cultural authority concur that the sum total of the conuence of social and commercial forces result in a blurring of high low and middlebrow, but many scholars persist in using the horizontal distinctions of secular versus sacred, mass mediated democracy versus ideological, material versus educational, and commercial versus non-commercial segments of the culture. Although neither Twitchells criticism of the marketing of religious nor of academic institutions breaks new ground, the rst two sections of the book provide the platform for the third part, where Twitchells central argument occurs. He writes that branding has so permeated the American collective consciousness and cultural memory that it permeates every aspect of our social infrastructure and civic institutions, and that inuence is as high as it is wide. No authority, be it cultural, political, clerical or academic can thrive in such a culture without understanding and commanding the pervasive realities of the publicity industries that made marketing of objects more salient than the dissemination of ideals. In the rst level of argument, the problem with examining religion purely from a marketing standpoint, is that it places too great an emphasis on rational choice theory over those advanced by theorists of public opinion formation. Religion operates within the material economy, most certainly, but people chose religion for reasons that are beyond the psychographic. In this, Twitchell seems to be preaching to the choir: the appeal of being a belonger, be it the Episcopal High Church or local Megachurch such as Willow Creek, derives from a more complex reasoning than marketing paradigms can supply. Twitchells argument in this chapter would be strengthened by delving into the growing body of interdisciplinary and international research in the eld of media and religion by scholars who are both critical of religion and persons of Abrahamic and mainstream faiths. In the second level of argument, Twitchells challenge to higher educations practice of reputation management, as complicit with publicity scams such as the ranking of the US News and World Report is astute. Further, the implications of opportunities for universities to extend their brand into new areas, such as branded living space for seniors as retirement communities, are provocative, extremely interesting, and important for the future of thinking about the cultural implications of branding in futures research, environmental scanning, and trend analysis. Selling a museums prestige by capitalizing on the reputation of artists is an ethical compromise more complicated than the problem of cultural literacy outlined by E.D. Hirsch some years ago, which Twitchell cites at length. Administering a similar cultural literacy test to his students to nd out how much

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Book reviews

they remember about advertising slogans, he nd that students bored by the high cultural educational establishment, seize happily on advertising slogans and messages. Advertising images as art and the slogans and jingles as a measure of common knowledge about cultural literacy is more real to the young absorbed by brand words since infancy. This is an historical argument of signicance in American cultural identity. Since the turn of the century, when the printing industry embraced the growing professionalization of advertising and public relations, and job printers became entrepreneurial ne printers, there were those in the advertising and public relations industry, notably George Macy, who said in 1930 that the only real art of the twentieth century would be advertising illustration. Twitchells publicists at Simon & Schuster anticipate howls of protest from pastors, professors and curators, according to the six-page press release sent to reviewers. Yet, academic critics of Twitchells book may nd his propositional theory that situates religion, education and museums as interchangeable to be the result of his examination of the surface of American culture rather than its deeper roots, though he does cite Lawrence Moores book on selling religion as an important work in the history of branding. Twitchells work is always interesting, and his style gregarious and engaging. His primary evidence is anecdotal and personal; his secondary evidence is often presented in lengthy, unedited excerpts from other sources. Though one might want a better-edited book, Twitchells argument is salient and relevant to the cultural analysis so vital to the practice and the study of public relations, especially in trend analysis and reputation management. Claire Badaracco College of Communication, Marquette University Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881, USA Tel.: +1 414 288 7293 E-mail address: badaracco@marquette.edu 15 January 2005
doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2005.02.001