“I don’t drink coffee to wake up. I wake up to drink coffee.” — James Lileks
At The Dispatch, Christian Schneider looks at what happens to companies and creators when the “alt-right” adopts their products as their own:
In 2016, the Daily Stormer deemed New Balance the “Official Shoes of White People” after the company’s VP of Public Affairs, Matt LeBretton, said “things are going to move in the right direction” during a Trump presidency. LeBretton has also said the Obama administration “turned a deaf ear” to New Balance in pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade agreement that critics argued would hurt American companies.
Not only did neo-Nazis start to endorse New Balance, but Trump opponents also began filling their social media feeds with photos of New Balance shoes lit on fire or thrown in the trash.
The company quickly began to contain the damage, pointing out that LeBretton was simply discussing Trump’s position on TPP. The company’s opposition to TPP was shared by progressives like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
In a tweet, New Balance said the company “does not tolerate bigotry or hate in any form.”
“As a 110-year old company with five factories in the U.S. and thousands of employees worldwide from all races, genders, cultures and sexual orientations, New Balance is a values-driven organization and culture that believes in humanity, integrity, community, and mutual respect for people around the world,” the company wrote.
The first response to the apology tweet features two New Balance shoes with the “Ns” turned to represent the “N” and “Z” in “Nazi.”
[…]
The ability of racist and extremist factions to infiltrate society through social media and other means has also spoiled actions that, until just years ago, nobody considered to be controversial.
For instance, as racial strife spread throughout America this spring and summer, an armed far-right anti-government group known as the Boogaloo Boys adopted Hawaiian shirts as their official uniform.
“As a fat guy I take this extremely personally,” tweetedWashington Post reporter Dave Weigel at the news of the Hawaiian shirt takeover. “This is the shirt of my people.”
In 2017, a Wisconsin-based company that made Tiki torches was forced to issue a statement distancing itself from the white supremacist-led marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, that summer. Some Americans are now afraid to wear the red baseball hats of their favorite Major League teams lest someone mistake it for a “Make America Great Again” cap.
Progressive activists are only too happy to pile on. In just the past few months, they have declared the following to be indicators of “white supremacy”: Referring to classical music composers by their last names, modern architecture, Roman statues, being on time, Tom Brady’s popularity, horse mascots, and the Kardashians.
Matt Furie’s Pepe the Frog character is a particularly sad case. When Furie created the character in 2005, it had nothing to do with racism. Now, it’s listed among “general hate symbols” by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL actually teamed up with Furie to try “reclaiming” the character, with a #SavePepe hashtag, but once the extreme right has claimed a symbol, there’s not much you can do about it.
This Nova Scotia hockey team was playing when Hitler was still trying to make it as an artist, but what’s your reaction the first time you see it?
The Lonsdale athletic wear company, once the choice of neo-Nazis because the letters N, S, D and A (as in “NSDAP,” as in the Nazi party) are included in their name - I’m not making that up - has gone so far as to sponsor traditionally left-wing football clubs to shake this unwanted image:
Starting in March, Lonsdale will be the sponsor of left-leaning amateur soccer club "Roter Stern Leipzig" (Red Star Leipzig). For two years, the brand will provide the club's jerseys. Perhaps even more important, Red Star is also getting a bus with speakers from Lonsdale that will be used in the stadium for providing announcements and music during home games and will take players to away games. In addition to that, both the soccer club and Lonsdale explicitly agreed that the bus can and should also be used during anti-racism protest marches, where the speakers will come very much in handy. "We wanted to cooperate with this club, because they are known for their anti-racist and anti-right-wing stance," Elfering said.
A second cooperation Lonsdale has entered into this year is with regional league soccer club "SV Babelsberg 03." The club has been fighting racism and rightwing extremism since the early 1990s, according to Thoralf Höntze from Babelsberg's marketing department. "We have an annual stadium festival called 'The colorful ball' promoting tolerance," Höntze told DW. "Smaller things are just happening all throughout the year, like fans making food for asylum seekers."
Last fall, Babelsberg approached Lonsdale about a cooperation because they were looking for a partner with a mission and goals to match their own. Most fans did not connect the brand with neo-Nazis anymore.
[…]
These new partnerships are only the most recent step Lonsdale has taken to distance itself from its former Neonazi clientele. In a "back-to-the-roots" campaign, they began by sponsoring the boxing department of the famously left-leaning St. Pauli sports club from Hamburg in 2011. They have also been working with the "Loudly against Right" initiative since 2005 and launched a pro-tolerance campaign, "Lonsdale loves all colors," as early as the 1990s. During that time, Lonsdale's Ralf Elfering said, the company also combed through their entire distributor catalog and stopped delivering clothes to shops and sellers that were in any way connected to the neo-Nazi scene.
"We couldn't prohibit anyone from buying our clothes, of course [but] in the 90'3 we ... began to make clear that Lonsdale is no brand for racists or nazis" Elfering said. The neo-Nazis who used to sport Lonsdale shirts have realized themselves, however, that the brand doesn't match their ideology, so Lonsdale has successfully managed to rid itself of their problematic image - at least for the most part.
"Google doesn't forget," Elfering said. "It presents old photos from the 90s side by side with current ones and so the image sticks in some people's heads." While other brands like Helly Hansen and Fred Perry also faced problems with appropriation from Nazis, Lonsdale's struggle was especially hard, because of the way most of the label's shirts look: they have the brand name across the front in large letters. And that is well visible and immediately recognizable in all those old photos of neo-Nazis wearing Lonsdale that Google still spits out.
“Lonsdale Nazi” still gets you over two million search results on Google, though. In the meantime, European neo-Nazis have discovered Thor Steinar, a clothing brand with fewer qualms about associating with them.
Check out this real subtle logo:
Ironically, in 2009 Thor Steinar found itself the target of a boycott campaign from the far right, because of its high prices (“We are of the opinion that our complex worldview cannot be printed on a T-shirt which costs €32.95”) and the company’s sale to a Dubai-based consortium. There’s just no satisfying some people.
In stark contrast to Thor Steinar, companies can also use niche marketing for good.
Back when same-sex marriage was still a fringe idea, Subaru noticed that no other car companies were concentrating on the potentially lucrative LGBT market, and went for it:
How do you advertise a car that journalists describe as “sturdy, if drab”?
That was the question faced by Subaru of America executives in the 1990s. After the company’s attempts to reinvigorate sales—by releasing its first luxury car and hiring a hip ad agency to introduce it to the public—failed, it changed its approach. Rather than fight larger car companies over the same demographic of white, 18-to-35-year-olds living in the suburbs, executives decided to market their cars to niche groups—such as outdoorsy types who liked that Subarus could handle dirt roads.
In the 1990s, Subaru’s unique selling point was that the company increasingly made all-wheel drive standard on all its cars. When the company’s marketers went searching for people willing to pay a premium for all-wheel drive, they identified four core groups who were responsible for half of the company’s American sales: teachers and educators, health-care professionals, IT professionals, and outdoorsy types.
Then they discovered a fifth: lesbians. “When we did the research, we found pockets of the country like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon, where the head of the household would be a single person—and often a woman,” says Tim Bennett, who was the company’s director of advertising at the time. When marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian.
[…]
By 1996, Subaru ads created by Mulryan/Nash were appearing in both gay publications and mainstream media. Although the marketing team worried about conservatives mounting a boycott, Subaru developed a public stance: Since the company sold cars to, in the company’s words, a “diverse and well-educated” group of people, their customers wouldn’t be offended by the ads.
Inside Subaru of America, though, not everyone was united on the effort. There was public backlash, and Bennett says the campaign survived only because their team really cared about the project and had the support of a cohort of straight allies in the company.
And the Subaru company line did have some truth to it. In response to the ads, Subaru received letters from a grassroots group that accused the carmaker of promoting homosexuality. Everyone who penned a letter said they’d never buy a Subaru again. But the marketing team quickly discovered that none of the people threatening a boycott had ever bought a Subaru. Some of them had even misspelled “Subaru.” Like nerds who grow up to confront their bullies, Subaru executives came to realize that the people opposing the acknowledgment of gays and lesbians were not as imposing as they seemed.
One of the reasons that, these days, the carmaker’s role in cultivating its lesbian-friendly image is less well known is that so many straight people were blind to the subtext of the advertisements.
Judge for yourself:
If American social conservatives are really trying to boycott Subaru, it hasn’t worked: in 2019 the company had its eleventh consecutive year of record sales in the United States.
We have our Woke Mad Libs champion of 2020:
The Chicago Teachers Union, which represents more than 28,000 educators in the nation's third largest city, tweeted on Sunday: "The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny."
Clothing brands being unwittingly taken over by Neo-Nazis is a problem that never occurred to me before. But of course that would have to happen somewhere along the line. Social groups use clothing to help define their image - just thinking back here to my amazement at the brand fascination of teenagers when I spent a year in public school to earn my high school diploma, back in the twentieth century. It’s ubiquitous in sports from football to golf, social strata from street youth to white-collar professionals, and so on. This is so ingrained in society that one seldom realizes its importance until one is on the outside looking in: not knowing how to dress appropriately for one’s social position immediately reveals a person as an outsider, with unpleasant consequences that may include being shunned or having one’s competence questioned, for example.
So it makes sense that even (or especially) extreme groups would want an unofficial uniform, and that this could become a problem for their unwilling targets because clothing is about image.
As are cars, coffee mugs, bags to briefcases, and many other things in our daily lives that we unconsciously match to our personal identity even when we’re not actively trying to convey a message. It can be subtle: A shy person might button their shirt all the way to the top. Trust in someone else might be conveyed by not feeling the need to keep everything perfect around them. Etc.
Good for companies like Lonsdale and Subaru (and my old favourite, NB) for successfully figuring out this delicate balance.
You never know when you might be taken for a Nazi just for being punctual. :p
Being a father that's a bit larger than normal, the Neo-Nazi takeover of Hawaiian shirts really burned my biscuit! Now I come to find out (after reading this) that they've taken over New Balance shoe wearing too? I always thought New Balance was the "Official Shoe of Dads"! My dad uniform was a Hawaiian shirt and white New Balance 608's. (newer ones for dress, grass stained ones for casual). What am I to do now? Any suggestions for brands that us Big Dad types can take over? On a more serious note, it was very interesting piece.