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Re-enchanting

Weirdness

2 August 2023

4 min read

The age of re-enchantment and how brands will exploit it

One of the world's largest advertising agencies has released a report on 're-enchantment', Daniel Kim predicts a not-too-distant future when brands will exploit and commodify spiritual hunger.

Daniel Kim

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

Last month, Wunderman Thompson published a new insight report called The age of re-enchantment. I was giddy to get into it, not least because Seen & Unseen has a podcast called 'Re-Enchanting' (which you should listen to by the way).

For the uninitiated, Wunderman Thompson is a 20,000 person-strong global advertising agency who literally invented the term ‘marketing’ back in 1961. With clients like Heinz Ketchup, Burger King, Bose, HSBC, KitKat and countless other ubiquitous brands, they are a culture-shaping juggernaut. They’re no joke.

Like all Wunderman reports, The age of re-enchantment is meticulously researched, beautifully presented, and written with finesse, coining terms left, right and centre like 'joy-deficit' and 'sensory techtopias'. It had me nodding along from the get-go.

'Re-enchantment is fulfilling a craving for feelings of wonder and awe, an appetite for joy and fun, and an openness to thrills and adventures'.

Yes.

The top two emotions that people want more of in their lives are ‘joy’ and ‘hope’.

Yes, yes!

'We live in a rational, explained world, and one in which we are harried and anxious, with little time to pause and pursue these sensations'.

Yes, yes, yes!

But then, as I read on, my warm glee turned into abject horror.

In the introduction of the report, Marie Stafford, the Global Director of Wunderman Thompson wrote:

'It’s time to remake the world through the lens of re-enchantment, where the new brand metrics are jaw drops, heart swells, and goosebumps. Brands can help people transcend tough times and jolt them from long-standing malaise by celebrating the thrilling and uplifting, the awe-inspiring, and the magical'

In other words, the market has recognised this profound existential hunger in culture at large, and will now try and extract capital value from you.

A couple months ago, I wrote a piece on the dangers of selling spirituality and wellness, and how it had become a $3.7 trillion dollar industry, warning that 'we can’t let our spiritual hunger be commodified for profit'. Well, get ready folks. Here comes the re-enchanting brands here to do just that.

The middle bulk of the report parades a line-up of case-studies that have leant into the ‘age of re-enchantment’.

Some brands, like Levi Strauss, were leaning into themes of mortality and death in the post-pandemic period, such as in the 2023 Campaign, 'Greatest Story Ever Worn: Legends never Die'. This ad dramatises the true story of a man who requested all his loved ones to wear Levi’s to his funeral.

The Greatest Story Ever Worn: Legends Never Die, 2023

Others were leaning into the desire for transcendence, trying to (legally) replicate spiritual and psychedelic experiences. Of note was a new VR experience called Isness-D developed to deliver a transcendent experience that replicates spiritual and near-death experiences. Apparently, this VR product has similar effects to a medium dose of LSD.

Product demonstration of Isness-D.

The report also recommended that brands tap into the ‘Joyconomy’. Yup, you read that right. That means ‘advocating for moments of joy, play and fun’ because that can be a ‘powerful strategy for brands to uplift and engage customers’. After all, 49 per cent of people say that they would be even more likely to purchase from a brand that brings them a sense of joy. In fact, the CEO of Daybreak, a fitness-and-dance company, even said that one of the core KPIs for her business is ‘tears of joy’. …

Look, I’m sure they mean well, but quite frankly, I don’t want to be part of a world where tears of joy(!) are considered key performance indicators for brands. Tears of joy are for weddings, reunions, or the end of a national war. Not a market transaction! Similarly, I find something bizarrely distasteful about a mortality-themed brand activation. ‘Yes, embrace your mortality and stare into the void, but don’t forget to buy our 501 Original Levi Denim.’ And I don’t know about you, but if I am going to seek out experiences of profound, spiritual transcendence, I’m sure as hell not going to do it in some VR-fake-LSD-hellscape-nightmare that I overpaid for.

There’s a profound irony in all of it. There is chunky section in the report about the rise of ‘New Spiritual Rebels’, the ever-growing community of people interested and practicing non-traditional religions like witchcraft and paganism. The report recognises that, wrapped up in this movement, there is a desire to 'break things down and build them up again in paths of inclusive post-capitalist… futures'.

How are brands meant to respond to that?! “Ah, yes”, nodded the advertiser. “Now, how do we bake that into our new Spring campaign for Airbnb? Maybe an authentic Wicca hut in Salem could be the hero ad?” It’s absurd.

This is blindingly obvious, but brands will be hopeless at addressing questions of mortality, transcendence, awe, serendipity, hope, joy, and meaning in a chaotic and anxious world. I love brands, but that’s above their pay-grade. Unfortunately, that won’t stop them from trying to commodify 're-enchantment' and extract capital value from it. No thank you.

The age of re-enchantment is real, and this report does a tremendous job at demonstrating it. But this piece of work is not, and shouldn’t be, for brands. It should be for community and religious leaders, and it should be for you. And so I will end this article in a similar vein to my last one.

If we are going to embark on this journey of re-enchanting our society with joy, spiritual depth, and existential meaning, we can’t let that hunger be commodified for profit. The re-enchantment of our hearts is too important for that. It is worth more, infinitely more, than 501 Originals.

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Music

Sustainability

17 October 2024

4 min read

What’s the point of celebrating the harvest?

We reap what we sow: a once young man’s guide.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A soot stained burnt-out harvester sits in a recently harvested field.

A burnt-out harvester, Lonesome Farm, Oxfordshire.

Nick Jones.

I plan next week to visit a small nursery school, called Young Haymakers, for their Harvest celebration where toddlers to five-year-olds will sing songs about tractor wheels going round and round, with vigorous manual actions as they shake, shake, shake the apple tree.

We’ll have a Harvest snack at tiny tables, a prayer and then they’ll give me the Harvest gifts from their families for those who may be hungry.

It is, of course, a delight, one of the happiest duties of a parish priest and I’ll miss it terribly as I hand it over to a new Rector. But, while I take nothing away from the sheer joy of thanksgiving of these children for the fruits (and vegetables) of this harvest and for those who farm them, I can’t help but wonder what Harvest, as a festival, really means for grown-ups.

The metaphor has been just too rich to avoid this season. We reap what we sow – and we witness that from Ukraine to Gaza and Lebanon, from Sudan to a United States that teeters on the brink of self-destruction as the world’s beacon of democratic values.

One might add to this sorry list the longer-term grim gathering-in from the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, a failed harvest of biblical-scale abomination as we destroy our planet’s natural capacity to host us. Truly, we have sown a wind and, in so many areas of human endeavour, we look like we reap a whirlwind (literally, in the case of weather crises such as Hurricane Milton).

There are prophetic voices that cry out in our human wilderness, from those who foresee the demise of the US at the hands of a shallow nationalism to those few on the political stage who predict an all-out war in the Middle East as the only possible conclusion to the escalation of revenge attacks between Israel and its neighbours.

The ancients saw famine and failed harvests as judgments for their sin, their divergence from the divine will. It’s unlikely that our world is going to accept such culpability any time soon. To do so would require a humility that we have lost, along with losing our religion.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation.

Setting aside the reaping of whirlwinds from millennia ago, I’m going to invoke a popular folk song from a little over half a century ago. I do so because, in 1972, we lived in a more innocent world, before we knew how industrialisation could destroy our human species and when a western hegemony in democracy was taken for granted. Little did we know the precipice on which we were perched.

The song is by the folk-rock colossus Neil Young and is called, appropriately enough, Harvest. It is, lyrically, one of his more obscure works and to listen to it now is to struggle to get past a strangulated hippy voice that verges on self-parody.

But it repays the effort. Young’s lyrics are infused with religious reference and imagery, but no claim should be made for his affirmation of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, we’re entitled to view art through the prism of what informs us and, as such, Harvest yields its fruits. Young may well be singing about his lover, but it’s in love that all truth is explored.

Listen to it. Young’s Harvest opens with the lines “Did I see you down in a young girl’s town/ with your mother in so much pain?” Through a scriptural lens, this sounds like the pain of incarnation, the sharing of Mother Mary’s agony in visceral human experience.

It continues: “Will I see you give more than I can take”; for the confessing faithful, we’re at the foot of the cross here. “Will I only harvest some?”; we can, all of us, only harvest a little of the mystery of that event. “As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp?”; of course we will – time is finite. “Or fuse it in the sun?”; an uncanny pre-echo of climate change worthy of Nostradamus.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation. But it’s also true that we should be careful of where we look for prophetic voices.

For Young, the Harvest is indeed a cruel and painful event, which we can only understand in part. We do indeed reap what we sow, but there may be purpose to be found in that. And the Harvest is indeed bitter, but in it we may glimpse a plan: “Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup/ With the promise of a man”.

Or, okay, it’s just a song, harvesting a good deal of cash for its writer and singer. I’m no big fan of Young. But it might just have told me more about the Harvest than singing All Things Bright and Beautiful.