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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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General Election 24

Politics

20 June 2024

4 min read

What small boats tell us about belonging

Do I belong to these politics? And do these politics belong to me?

George Pitcher

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

A grainy surveillance picture of an rusty boat overloaded with people

A small boat overloaded with migrants.

BBC.

Our son used to say that “home is where the dogs are”, as he was greeted by them. It’s a variation on “home is where the heart is”. Either way, it means that a sense of home isn’t just about place or geography, so much as family and, relatedly, the familiar.

If home were simply an address, candidates in an election campaign wouldn’t bother knocking on doors to meet people. To be familiar is to meet people where they are, circumstantially as well as literally on their doorstep.

To date, the solution to the refugee crisis has been to “stop the boats”, as if our principal concern is with rubber dinghies. We’ve still not addressed the people in those boats; we’re not familiar with them, their circumstances and motivations.

I’d hazard a guess that a common desire among those who flee persecution and mortal danger is something else associated with familiarity – a sense of belonging.

The refugee belongs nowhere, until she or he reaches a new and safe home. Indeed, all of us know we’re home only when we’re somewhere we belong.

Somewheres are rooted in place and community; Anywheres are footloose and and educationally privileged. To which I would add the global category of migrants, who are Nowheres.

This is Refugee Week (17-23 June) and Thursday 20 June is World Refugee Day. It’s theme this year is “Our Home”, which is why I started this column on the nature of familiarity and belonging.

Out of which arise two questions: Do I belong to this country? And does this country belong to me? The first is fairly straightforward in a practical sense – I have a British passport and pay my taxes here, so yes I do. The second question is more complex, more of which in a moment.

When it comes to sovereign governments, the questions move from first to third person. Do you belong to (or in) this country and does this country belong to you? Again, the first question is about paperwork. The second, however, becomes crucially about exclusivity.

Exclusive ownership reaches its abhorrent nadir in a BBC2 documentary this week titled Dead Calm: Killing in the Med?, which provides evidence that the Greek coastguard has been employing masked vigilantes to cast adrift landed refugees, including women and children, in international waters and, in some cases, to throw migrants overboard to their deaths. A story told alongside the capsizing, through incompetence or otherwise, of the rust-tub Adriana, in which more than 600 migrants drowned a year ago.

These are matters for international law. But it shows where treating migrants like cargo, rather than people, takes us. It’s a mindset that could start with repellent (in both senses) wave machines, as considered by a former UK home secretary.

None of which arises if the criteria of belonging are applied. Former Prospect editor David Goodhart famously wrote that a key electoral demographic could be defined in Somewheres and Anywheres. Somewheres are rooted in place and community; Anywheres are footloose and and educationally privileged. To which I would add the global category of migrants, who are Nowheres (see above).

The key here is having nowhere to belong. Former PM Theresa May talked of “citizens of nowhere” in 2016, but she meant globe-trotting tax-exiles and the like. I mean Nowhere people, with nowhere to go – and it’s toxic for all of us that there are so many of them.

This is where the question “does this country belong to me?” carries so much human freight (like a small boat, as it happens).

To belong is an atavistic human need. American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs places belonging and love as principal needs in his pyramid between basic physicalities (such as safety) and self-fulfilment at the apex. “Belongingness”, a sense of home, is vital for human stability.

This is where the question “does this country belong to me?” carries so much human freight (like a small boat, as it happens). Simply to repel refugees like they’re someone else’s problem is massively to miss a point, because they’re going to carry on looking for somewhere to belong. So they’re going to keep coming.

Maslow identified religious groups as one of those offering a sense of belonging. I would guess as much as two-thirds of the congregation I’ve looked after over the past decade came to church for that sense of belonging, which we’re called to offer to the despised and marginalised as well as the Somewheres and Anywheres.

Miroslav Volf has written here that “God created the world to live in it” and therefore, I contend, belongs to it. So we’re called to “live in more homelike ways”, which I define as a sense of familiarity and belonging. That’s the theology of it.

We are now facing the politics of it. Nationalism is not enough. We need leaders who can solve this at a global level, which is both a political and a theological imperative.

Perhaps a way of reframing my questions, in this Refugee Week as we ponder how to vote, is: “Do I belong to these politics? And do these politics belong to me?”