Lifestyle TV

Laurie Ouellette

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317665526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

From HGTV and the Food Network to Keeping Up With the Kardashians, television is preoccupied with the pursuit and exhibition of lifestyle. Lifestyle TV analyzes a burgeoning array of lifestyle formats on network and cable channels, from how-to and advice programs to hybrid reality entertainment built around the cultivation of the self as project, the ethics of everyday life, the mediation of style and taste, the regulation of health and the body, and the performance of identity and "difference." Ouellette situates these formats historically, arguing that the lifestyling of television ultimately signals more than the television industry's turn to cost-cutting formats, niche markets, and specialized demographics. Rather, Ouellette argues that the surge of reality programming devoted to the achievement and display of lifestyle practices and choices must also be situated within broader socio-historical changes in capitalist democracies.

1 Branding Lifestyle

DOI: 10.4324/9781315768137-1

In 2014, eight hopeful young women competed to become the inaugural Global Brand Ambassador for celebrity fashion designer Diane von Furstenburg, creator of the iconic wrap dress, while TV cameras rolled. House of DVF (2014– ) chronicled their immersion into the business operations of DVF, a global luxury lifestyle brand that sells clothing as well as shoes, handbags, leather goods, jewelry, scarves, luggage and home furnishings. In the debut episode, von Furstenberg describes the DVF brand as representing confidence, attitude and the “empowerment of women,” while the camera pans a cornucopia of merchandise on display at the company’s opulent New York City headquarters. A shot of one of DVF’s retail stores lingers on a picture window displaying the designer’s name, and segues into scenes of von Furstenburg being photographed at fashion shows and hobnobbing with Hollywood celebrities. On the audio track, a narrator boasts that Forbes magazine named von Furstenberg “the most powerful name in fashion . . . with 106 stores in 56 countries.” By the time the female contenders (who have been promised the chance to “travel the world living the jet set life,” while representing the DVF brand at “cultural happenings, store openings, and premiere fashion events”) arrive on the scene, the series has been established as a weekly showcase for an upscale designer lifestyle in which branding, identity and consumption are closely intertwined.

House of DVF stitches a lifestyle brand into the heart of the reality competition, a hybrid genre that combines the conventions of the documentary, the game show and the soap opera. Under von Furstenberg’s direction, the contestants compete to master a “crash course” in styling, public relations, merchandising and event planning in storylines that promote the DVF brand in an “authentic” fashion industry setting. What is being sold is not a dress or a pair of shoes, but rather the aspirational identity and lifestyle that DVF claims to represent. The contestants competing to play a role in this process are closely monitored and evaluated on the basis of their appearance, personality, social skills and compatibility with the DVF image. This scrutiny presents the narrative context for arguments, teary meltdowns and other melodramatic elements, and sets the stage for a subtle type of self-branding. To win the game, the women must present a commercially viable persona to von Furstenberg and her team, while also providing talent for a reality show that expects them to perform for high ratings. The women are encouraged to perform marketable images of themselves for the judges and the TV industry, in the hope of winning the prize or paving the way for future payoffs—perhaps even a lifestyle brand of their own.

House of DVF contributes to the intensified branding of contemporary life, from the television channels we watch to our lifestyles and even ourselves. The program neatly illustrates the different layers of branding at work in the lifestyling of television, defined as the focus on “who to be and how to live” across a growing number of popular nonfiction and reality programs. Beyond the “natural” publicity afforded by the reality format, House of DVF benefits from a synergistic partnership with the E! media brand. The E! cable network (owned by NBCUniversal) is branded as a programming service for “upscale, professional” fans of celebrities, fashion and pop culture, and the hub of a mediated community for TV viewers, advertisers and E! personalities, including the cast of Keeping Up With the Kardashians (2007– ). House of DVF’s appearance on E! situates DVF within the tastes and sensibilities of the E! brand community, and digital media platforms enhance the partnership. E! online circulates clips and bonus scenes, Instagram photos of von Furstenberg and “news” coverage of the designer’s jetsetter lifestyle, and DFV operates its own House of DVF website, where TV viewers can find inside scoops on the E! program, “shop the episodes” for the DVF goods featured in them and browse the company’s online catalog. Both E! and DVF also use social media (Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook) to connect with House of DVF viewers while promoting their respective brands. Branding shapes the storyline of House of DVF, and structures the institutional and cultural contexts in which the program circulates.

This chapter introduces the concept of brand culture as a lens for analyzing the lifestyling of television. Branding originally referred to the process of marking livestock with symbols to indicate their owners. Similarly, early manufacturers used visual trademarks to differentiate more or less identical mass-produced consumer goods, like soap and oatmeal. Today, branding involves more than stamping a “logo to the surface of a product” (Johnson 2013, 17): successful brands animate cultural meanings and social practices that supplant the utilitarian function of consumer goods and services and constitute active relationships between individuals and the commercial world. Contemporary branding is less about imposing meanings and tastes on to passive consumers than creating a context or “ambience, comprised of sensibilities and values” from which their actions are poised to unfold in particular ways that generate value and profit for brands (Hearn 2008, 197). While branding is imbricated in hyper-commercialism, “logo mania” and the increased commodification of modern life, it is as much a cultural phenomenon as an economic one, argues Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012). Such is the case with lifestyle-themed television, where branding provides the scaffolding for profitmaking as well as consumer belonging, advice and aspirational models of personhood and daily living.

Banet-Weiser uses the term ‘brand culture’ to characterize the impact of branding on our shared meaning systems, cultural institutions, understandings of ourselves and everyday practices. Branding is about monetizing our social experiences, practices of self-making and our sense of identity and belonging in the social world. The logic of branding has become more pervasive in recent decades, extending beyond the “persuasive powers” of any particular campaign to the broader “relationships between consumers and the commercial world, and the way in which these types of relationships have increasingly become cultural contexts for everyday living, individual identity and affective relationships,” Banet-Weiser contends (quoted in Jenkins 2013). In what follows, I connect the lifestyling of television in recent decades to brand culture, and discuss the branding of TV networks, lifestyles, products and people across nonfiction and reality formats.

Figure 1.1 House of DVF operates as an extended branding campaign for fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.

Brands of Television

The first layer of branding in the lifestyling of television involves what Amanda Lotz calls brands of television (2006). Before the arrival of hundreds of cable and satellite channels, “on demand” viewing options and new media technologies, television (like radio before it) was a mass medium. In the US, four major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS) and a smattering of independent channels dominated the medium’s cultural output well into the 1970s. Programs were geared to the largest audience possible during their timeslot, and (until the invention of the VCR in the 1980s) were necessarily watched in real time. With the exception of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which was created as a high cultural and studious alternative to commercial entertainment (Ouellette 2002), broadcast TV networks did not have clear brand identities. As the number of channels expanded, beginning in the 1980s, and the logic of narrowcasting, or gearing programming to specialized audiences conceived as lifestyle clusters, became more prevalent, “cable networks—and increasingly broadcast networks as well—established brands to attract certain audiences to their programming,” which in turn allowed “advertisers to inundate these audiences with appeals for goods and services” (Lotz 2006, 38).

Today, television networks establish recognizable brand identities through scheduling practices, promotional campaigns, genre and casting priorities, and repetitive visual and sonic cues, argues Victoria Johnson. Together, these practices “create a symbolic field that signals a coherent destination for a viewer who is addressed and welcomed as belonging to that network’s community” (Johnson 2013, 263). In the current era of more than 300 cable and satellite networks, “strong brand recognition” is crucial to commercial success in a highly cluttered cultural environment. In addition to offering a differentiated product, networks must establish a strong “connection to the viewer” that increasingly extends beyond programming into digital platforms and activities like gaming, tweeting, posting and sharing (Curtin and Shattuc 2009, 120). As television has converged with new media technologies, the promise of interactivity has become more integral to the cultural construction of brands of television as “meeting places” between consumers and producers (Johnson 2012, 17), or what Celia Lury calls interfaces (2004). Characterizing the impact of these changes, Michael Curtin and Jane Shattuc contend: “No longer do we have TV audiences—now, we have brand communities” (2009, 20).

Television’s shift from mass medium to a multichannel and increasingly interactive cultural environment can be traced to deregulatory telecommunication policies and the commercial development of cable, satellite and digital media technologies. The fragmentation of the mass market, which began even earlier, paved the way for the TV industry to target particular lifestyle clusters and construct brand communities around them. Cultural historian Lizbeth Cohen (2003) traces this fragmentation to the impetus to make the Fordist capitalist system of production and consumption more efficient. As the postwar consumer economy expanded, marketers developed ways to pitch more specialized products to particular consumer niches. The move toward niche marketing gained momentum in the 1970s with the implementation of new forms of marketing research that combined precise demographic data on age, gender, race, education and other variables with “psychographic” information about values, lifestyles, interests and consumer behaviors. From this research, marketers identified “clusters of consumers with distinctive ways of life and then set out to sell them idealized lifestyles constructed around commodities,” says Cohen (2003, 229). These lifestyle clusters were merely statistical profiles assembled by marketers for their own commercial purposes. However, niche marketing tapped in to a growing discontent about mass culture, especially among the educated elite, and offered new opportunities for individuals to “express their separate identities through their choices as consumers” (2003, 309).

Class hierarchies were depoliticized as marketers presented unequal access to education and income as lifestyle choices. “What consumers bought—a Cadillac over a Chevrolet, a ranch house instead of a Cape Cod, The New Yorker over True Story magazine became indicators of their class identity” and chosen membership in a class community, Cohen observes (2003, 310). As the social movements and youth countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s gained currency, and pursued identity formation apart from mainstream culture, independent and working women, racial minorities, disaffected youth, hippie subcultures and gays and lesbians were also recognized and targeted as consumer clusters. Collective practices and political struggles for recognition were recast in the vocabulary of lifestyle and consumer choice. The breakup of the major networks’ hold on television has paralleled the fragmentation of consumer culture writ large. While some television programming was always geared to “segments within the mass audience” (such as housewives and children), it was difficult to target viewers conceived as specialized lifestyle clusters with a mass medium. The expansion of cable channels in the 1980s enabled the “carving up of television programming into market niches” and eventually made segmentation the norm in television, says Cohen (2003, 304). Indeed, cable’s business model hinged on the ability to target niche consumer markets through specialized content.

Joseph Turow identifies MTV and Nickelodeon as the first U.S. cable channels to establish recognizable brand identities (1997). Targeting relatively upscale teenagers and children whose families could afford cable subscriptions, these networks (owned by media giant Viacom) operated not only as program suppliers, but as “lifestyle parades” that offered their target audiences a “sense of belonging” that wasn’t limited to television, but also included tie-in magazines, books, videos and other media packaged and sold by Viacom (1997, 5). Cultivating a “must-see, must-read, must-share mentality,” cable channels made their niche audiences feel like “part of a family, attached to the program hosts, other viewers and sponsors,” which made it easier for advertisers to pitch “specific messages about how certain products tie into their lifestyles,” Turow observed of early cable branding. When viewers “feel that a TV channel resonates with their personal beliefs, and helps them chart their position in the larger world,” they become more valuable to advertisers as especially targetable and loyal consumers (Turow 1997, 4). This is still the case. However, brands do not simply reflect and target pre-existing social identities and lifestyles—they create them (Davila 2001). From the classification of niche markets to the programming and sense of community developed around these conceptions, brands of television play an active role in constituting and mobilizing the consumer clusters they target and sell to advertisers.

Following the success of MTV and Nickelodeon, narrowcasting has become standard in U.S. cable television. Psychographic market research, known as “Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles” (VALS) to the industry, is widely used to pinpoint niche audiences and match differentiated brands of television with advertisers and products. From Animal Planet (“animal lovers and pet owners”) to Esquire TV (“intelligent and stylish men”) to Oxygen (“socially savvy female millennials”), U.S. television is awash with distinct cable brands targeting specialized interests, values and demographics. While owned by a small number of global media conglomerates, the proliferation of different brands of television, each catering to specialized and “unique” audiences, has created an impression of social and cultural diversification. However, the assumption that U.S. television now offers “something for everyone” has been debunked by critical scholars who note that affluent consumers are more likely to be constituted as “desirable,” and niche marketing flattens and conceals the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexual orientation. For example, Lifetime and BET, which pioneered the targeting of women and African Americans as niche TV viewers, have been criticized for overemphasizing the interests, aspirations and experiences of economically privileged consumers, and for circulating narrow and often stereotypical understandings of femininity and blackness that synchronize with commercial agendas (Byars and Meehan 1994–95; Smith-Shomade 2007). Newer cable brands explicitly targeting Latino and LGBT audiences, such as NuvoTV and Logo, evoke similar concerns.

Lifestyle Brands

The branding of television has facilitated a proliferation of lifestyle brands that are built around but extend beyond specialized cable channels. Since the early 1990s, a growing number of cable networks have cued opportunities for self-actualization, lifestyle formation and consumer belonging to particular aspects of daily life, such as travel, fashion, home decorating, house hunting, gardening and cooking. For example, the Scripps Interactive portfolio of “popular lifestyle brands,” which encompasses the DIY Network, Cooking Channel and Travel Channel, as well as the (now defunct) Fine Living Network, Food Network and Home and Garden Television (HGTV), aims to connect TV viewers to “relevant ideas, information and solutions every day, everywhere.” Focusing on informational and unscripted lifestyle programming, these channels operate as cultural interfaces (Lury 2004) to expansive multimedia lifestyle brands that include magazines, books, websites and interactive social media platforms (such as Twitter and Facebook).

Lifestyle brands connect the fragmentation of the television audience into specialized lifestyle clusters to suggestions for everyday living structured through commercial relationships. Sam Binkley defines lifestyle branding as an especially nuanced form of marketing that brings the “dream world of commodity seduction” into actual practices of everyday life, exemplified by the Nike lifestyle brand’s famous slogan, “Just Do It.” Lifestyle brands, he argues, imbue consumption choices “with expl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• 1. Branding Lifestyle
• 2. The Self as Project
• 3. Governing Citizens
• 4. The Labor of Lifestyle
• 5. Performing Difference
• Questions for Discussion
• Bibliography
• Videography
• Index