In an age of surplus, people seem to define themselves every bit as much by the brands or categories they don't buy as by those they do. For some of the world's greatest brands, this is an alarming trend. Allied to the environmental movement, it could become sillier still.
Just after my second year at university, a bunch of ten friends and I planned to go on holiday together after our exams had ended. We had about £25 each to spend (no easy loans in those days) and so our decision was gloriously simple. We could go and charter a large boat on the Norfolk Broads. Or we could do nothing at all. So we went and chartered a large boat on the Norfolk Broads and (despite a few personal catastrophies) all enjoyed what was one of the best holidays it is possible to imagine. (I didn't actually see Maradona's "Hand of God" Goal, as I was holding the TV aerial above the set to try to stop the picture going fuzzy as the boat swayed at anchor.)
If you had asked any of us then what we would have done with a budget of £2500 each we would have described a fabulous group holiday. A villa outside Portfino, perhaps? Somewhere in the Caribbean? A yacht in Turkey? We were all wrong.
Unexpectedly, most of that party from 1986 are still friends. Even more unexpectedly, most of them are really quite rich. And yet we don't go on holiday together at all.
The reason is what economists would call rich-asshole syndrome. That with increasing wealth comes increasing choice. And with increasing choice comes increasing pickiness. Any idea mooted will be met with something like "Actually I don't want to go to Tuscany, I want to go to Umbria." Or (and I'm not making this up) "I don't want to go to Italy until we're much older. Besides we're planning to go to Bhutan that month anyway."
One of the very few group trips we have managed involved seeing a total solar eclipse - where there is mercifully little debate about where you can go.
As with holidays, so with everything else. When consumers are oversupplied, three things happen. First, supply becomes fragmented into smaller categories. Secondly, people are inclined to simplify choice by summarily rejecting perhaps the majority of the categories on offer. Then most "educated" people reject the mass-market, popularist categories first.
One category which suffers grievously from this is the frozen food category. In many ways healthier, fresher and more nutritious than refrigerated ready meals, frozen food is almost entirely overlooked by a whole generation of middle-class housewives who shorten their trip to the supermarket by by-passing the frozen food aisle altogther. This is sheer snobbery. To overcome this prejudice, an upmarket brand called "Cook" has openened a whole chain of specialist frozen food shops in prosperous parts of Surrey and Kent which seem to destigmatise the category somewhat.
But this category rejection is nothing new. Music did the same thing earlier. Indeed it is interesting to see how mainstream and vanilla the music charts once were. The best selling singles artist in Britain in 1964? No. it wasn't them. It was actually "Gentleman" Jim Reeves.
The 1970s saw rapid musical fragmentation into different genres, each with their own distinct crowd of followers. Even if more catholic music-lovers will explore several of these genres, one of their first musical decisions will be the rejection of more popularist forms - Easy Listening Country, Rap and Metal probably being the first to fail the cut.
Economist Tyler Cowen writing in "Discover Your Inner Economist" cites studies that show how more "educated" people, as they grown in status, increase their dislike of low-status musical genres more pronouncedly than they identify with high status genres. Indeed Heavy Metal and Rap are unique in gaining higher scores for "Dislike it very much" than for merely "Dislike it."
Economists call this signalling. What seems interesting to me is that brand signalling (ie using brands to signal your refinement or status) now seems to happen negatively as much as positively.
Take brands such as Sky, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Tesco, easyJet, Ford, Birds Eye. These magnificent, popularising brands seem to create an opposition that takes the shape of an unholy alliance between a particular kind of leftist and a particular kind of snob.
You would think that leftists would admire the above businesses for providing a large proportion of the population with affordable and egalitarian access to what were once luxuries. Eating out. Breaks to Prague. Tasty, non-alcoholic drinks. (I am always a big fan of Andy Warhol's observation: "what I like about Coke is that the president of the United States can't get a better Coke than the bum on the street.") Marx couldn't have wished for more. And, through innovative pricing and clever value ranges, easyJet and Tesco may do more to redistribute wealth than Gordon Brown.
Oddly, leftists hate these brands. (Even more oddly, to these same leftists, expensive and elitish French wines are quite acceptable.)
To hear a certain kind of pinko talk about low cost air travel is slightly reminiscent of Vita Sackville West's comment when public transport became visible from the upper floors of Knole: "What do they need buses for anyway? It will only encourage the working classes to move about".
Why does this "You are what you refuse to eat" approach matter so much? Surely these people are in a minority? In most of the country they certainly are. But among journalists and broadcasters those twin vices of snobbery and pinko sanctimoniousness are to be found, singly or together, in practically every practitioner of the trade.
That is why every single story on global warming will feature an easyJet or RyanAir plane, not a Thai Airways 747. And why every story on child obesity will show a child clutching a hamburger despite the fact that there are fewer than 1,000 McDonalds restaurants in the UK (there are 8,000 Chinese TakeAways alone) and despite the fact that Brits have been eating beef, bread and potatoes for over 400 years without apparent ill effects. (Pizzerias couldn't possibly be to blame - they aren't American and they sell Chianti, for a start).
This journalistic bias against the popularist (it also applies in music - scan every music magazine for months and you'll see barely a mention of a country artist) unites anti-Americanism with snobbery - often under the guise of environmental concern. For those of us who work with big, popular, American brands it is the biggest issue we face.
It is also an opportunity. To save money for my children's birthday party I tried to persuade my wife to hold it at our local McDonald's and to promise unlimited supplies of Coke. I'd budgeted for maybe three going-away bags. The other 17 parents belong to that pissy group of people who enhance their social status by never darkening the Golden Arches.
Maybe it's time for one burger chain to borrow the positioning of Heavy Metal. Or of Milwall FC. "No-one likes us, we don't care." After all, it's the fact that your parents hate metal that makes it so great.
