In today’s creative economy, the tail increasingly wags the dog. Marketing is driving culture as promotional campaigns overshadow the offerings they seek to elevate — in fashion, music, art and film. With fashion weeks taking place around the world and awards season well underway, the hype machine is operating at full throttle. But few products, if any, can compete with such fanfare. On the runway, the red carpet and beyond, culture is at risk of being subsumed by the sound and the fury, the hype and the buzz, of its own promotion.
Fashion houses seemingly no longer hire creative directors for their design skills or aesthetic vision but for their marketing prowess. “The marketing guys frankly have invaded the companies,” Sidney Toledano, the former chief executive of Dior, said recently. This explains why there is less creativity on the runway and the most high-profile appointment in fashion last year was the rapper and music producer Pharrell Williams. In June, Mr. Williams presented his first men’s wear collection for Louis Vuitton, which, while confident and commercial, lacked “any new shapes, or ways of addressing the body, or thinking about luxury,” as the fashion critic Cathy Horyn put it. For Louis Vuitton, however, the show was an unqualified success: The star-studded spectacle attracted over a billion online views.
Marketing is nothing new, whether it’s deployed to promote consumer goods or creative works. First came the product, then the persuasion. But now the hype often precedes and overwhelms the product, to the point that the product seems almost irrelevant to its own success. “We have long moved beyond fabricating and selling products,” said the Louis Vuitton chief executive Pietro Beccari, contending that “fashion is becoming music, becoming pop culture, becoming a spectacle itself.”
“Barbie,” the top grossing film of 2023, with nearly $1.5 billion in ticket revenues, was a sensation even before it opened in theaters. Its ubiquitous marketing campaign cost an estimated $150 million, more than its $145 million production budget. (In comparison, marketing across sectors averaged 10.6 percent of company budgets in 2023, according to a major industry survey.) Somewhere along the way, Barbiemania took on a life of its own, spawning countless social media memes and hundreds of items of bright pink merchandise. “It stopped becoming a marketing campaign and took on the quality of a movement,” explained the Warner Bros. president of global marketing, Josh Goldstine.