A while ago, I wrote about marketing alcohol to women. Let's look at the flip side. Here's a question: Why has Canadian whisky become the alcoholic beverage most closely associated with uncompromising maleness? We saw it first with the ads for Canadian Club from a few years ago and now Wiser's is pushing the same line.
I should confess right upfront that the Canadian Club ads worked for me. I saw them and immediately got the point that these ads were speaking to me. With the Wiser's ads, my friends figured out they would appeal to me even before I saw them. So I speak not as a objective observer here but as someone who holds many of the same values promoted.
There are two guys of note in the ads below. The guy you are scared of becoming is the first guy to appear and the older role model you wish you'd had growing up appears at 0.19 seconds and is sitting in a chair:
I've been trying to pick out the fabric on that sports jacket. I think it's ultra-suede. You have to wonder where they got it as I don't think anyone has made a jacket like that since the 1979. That's not an accident.
It's also not an accident that a whole lot of people look at that guy in the chair and hate him. It's not an accident that these ads have produced the same lame parodies from the same angry wimps who so hated the Canadian Club ads. One of the principal differences between men and women is that men choose our values not only because they appeal to us but also because they are an affront to the people we want to be affronted.
As I said in the post about marketing alcohol to women, the power of these commercials stems not from wish fulfillment but nightmare avoidance. That power comes from its ability to reassure us that we are not becoming what we are scared we are settling into. The ads for women traded on the fears of single women in their late twenties and thirties that they are out with the girls because they can't make a long-term relationship work with a man. The Canadian whisky commercials trade on the fear of men in their thirties and forties that they are turning into a bunch of pussy-whipped boys. (And yes there is a grim biological truth for women hiding in the difference between those age ranges.)
For what it's worth, the Urban Dictionary says:
But it doesn't say a lot about who we want to be. No, it's not the guy in the chair. That guy isn't the guy you wish you were but the guy you wish you'd had for a role model. Maybe you knew that guy once upon a time and he was a bit of a role model but you wish you'd known him a lot better and learned the lessons you could have from him. Or maybe you just got him second hand through books and old movies.
Here's the math. If you are between 35 to 45 today, you were a boy in the 1980s when the last examples of chair-man still existed in the wild in significant numbers. Chair-man is old enough to remember when Esquire was the best magazine on the rack; old enough to remember when Detroit still made great cars; old enough to remember when you could wear after shave that cost less than $10 a bottle without shame; old enough to remember when men read Playboy fully clothed in a comfortable arm chair with the magazine in one hand and a whisky in the other instead of sitting half-undressed in front of a computer screen pathetically masturbating to "porn".
A lot of it depends on vague memories. Canadian whisky, for example, used to be sold by associating it with class of the "Esquire" type. "Esquire" was a courtesy title awarded to a man with gentlemanly ways but who wasn't actually a gentle man in the (very) old sense of the word because that meant someone who didn't have to engage in trade or work for a salary because he was a member of the nobility. It worked perfectly for the magazine and the men who read it, however, because it implied something you had earned as opposed to inheriting and because this status was determined entirely by your behaviour and not inherited.
There is just enough memory of that ideal that a lot of us know we want it.
No, you can't buy the status by the bottle. But who said you could? Like it or not, values go in clusters and whisky and whiskey both go with uncompromising manliness.
I should confess right upfront that the Canadian Club ads worked for me. I saw them and immediately got the point that these ads were speaking to me. With the Wiser's ads, my friends figured out they would appeal to me even before I saw them. So I speak not as a objective observer here but as someone who holds many of the same values promoted.
There are two guys of note in the ads below. The guy you are scared of becoming is the first guy to appear and the older role model you wish you'd had growing up appears at 0.19 seconds and is sitting in a chair:
I've been trying to pick out the fabric on that sports jacket. I think it's ultra-suede. You have to wonder where they got it as I don't think anyone has made a jacket like that since the 1979. That's not an accident.
It's also not an accident that a whole lot of people look at that guy in the chair and hate him. It's not an accident that these ads have produced the same lame parodies from the same angry wimps who so hated the Canadian Club ads. One of the principal differences between men and women is that men choose our values not only because they appeal to us but also because they are an affront to the people we want to be affronted.
As I said in the post about marketing alcohol to women, the power of these commercials stems not from wish fulfillment but nightmare avoidance. That power comes from its ability to reassure us that we are not becoming what we are scared we are settling into. The ads for women traded on the fears of single women in their late twenties and thirties that they are out with the girls because they can't make a long-term relationship work with a man. The Canadian whisky commercials trade on the fear of men in their thirties and forties that they are turning into a bunch of pussy-whipped boys. (And yes there is a grim biological truth for women hiding in the difference between those age ranges.)
For what it's worth, the Urban Dictionary says:
Pussy-whippedThe ad works because it plays on our fear of being this guy:
(1) adj - situation whereupon a male is undeniably at the mercy of his high-maintinence girlfriend & answers to her every beck and call, usually followed by the reprioritizing of girlfriend over friends, family, school, food, water, and air.
(2) adj - making decisions based on the incentive of sex
But it doesn't say a lot about who we want to be. No, it's not the guy in the chair. That guy isn't the guy you wish you were but the guy you wish you'd had for a role model. Maybe you knew that guy once upon a time and he was a bit of a role model but you wish you'd known him a lot better and learned the lessons you could have from him. Or maybe you just got him second hand through books and old movies.
Here's the math. If you are between 35 to 45 today, you were a boy in the 1980s when the last examples of chair-man still existed in the wild in significant numbers. Chair-man is old enough to remember when Esquire was the best magazine on the rack; old enough to remember when Detroit still made great cars; old enough to remember when you could wear after shave that cost less than $10 a bottle without shame; old enough to remember when men read Playboy fully clothed in a comfortable arm chair with the magazine in one hand and a whisky in the other instead of sitting half-undressed in front of a computer screen pathetically masturbating to "porn".
A lot of it depends on vague memories. Canadian whisky, for example, used to be sold by associating it with class of the "Esquire" type. "Esquire" was a courtesy title awarded to a man with gentlemanly ways but who wasn't actually a gentle man in the (very) old sense of the word because that meant someone who didn't have to engage in trade or work for a salary because he was a member of the nobility. It worked perfectly for the magazine and the men who read it, however, because it implied something you had earned as opposed to inheriting and because this status was determined entirely by your behaviour and not inherited.
There is just enough memory of that ideal that a lot of us know we want it.
No, you can't buy the status by the bottle. But who said you could? Like it or not, values go in clusters and whisky and whiskey both go with uncompromising manliness.
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