Lady Business: Convicted murderers and other corporate role models
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the sixty-second issue, published March 21, 2019.
Corporate #Inspo
Tomorrow I’m going on my first, real, laptop-left-at-home, work-email-off-the-phone vacation vacation in seven months. It’s going to be amazing. Of course, while I’m going to be as disconnected as possible from my professional obligations, I’m not actually leaving the smartphone behind. (Because if you go on a vacation and don’t document it on Instagram, did the trip even really happen?!)
So what better way to prepare than by reading Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker profile of Outdoor Voices, the don’t-call-it-athleisure brand by and for women who Do Things? It includes the fantastic term “paraprofessionally,” as well as a meditation on how women live -- and perform -- their lives on social media these days:
If you spend time scrolling through the most popular #doingthings photos, you’ll find a seemingly focus-grouped parade of women in colorful OV outfits hiking, doing yoga, jogging on the beach. Almost none of these women are paid by OV, but many of them use Instagram professionally, as life-style or fashion bloggers, or paraprofessionally, as millennials with phones whose well-being is loosely connected to their popularity online. A life-style blogger in Connecticut, whose uncompensated #doingthings post I had come across, lamented how much time she and her peers devoted to Instagram. “It’s a shame,” she said. “People need to wake up and realize—like, what are we really doing here? But, until then, you have to do it.”
…Nike built its identity by paying celebrity athletes millions of dollars to serve as the faces of the brand. Outdoor Voices advertises non-famous people who mostly do not get paid but whose lives, thanks to social media, are refracted through the usual mechanisms of celebrity.
#Doingthings is short for the company’s full slogan, “Doing Things Is Better Than Not Doing Things.” As a general proposition, this does not strike me as especially convincing: idleness can be wonderful, and, these days, most of us are required to do too much. But, as a guiding principle for athletic activity, the slogan is pleasantly open-ended—“Just Do It” flipped for an era of inclusivity and wellness. (The Nike slogan was inspired by the last words of the Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, who, just before he was executed, in 1977, by firing squad, said, “Let’s do it.”)
Wait, what? Per the Washington Post:
In a plain T-shirt with a bag over his head, Gilmore was strapped into a chair, waiting for a firing squad to execute him at Utah State Prison. It was the morning of Jan. 17, 1977, and Gilmore, convicted of murdering a gas station employee and motel manager in Utah the year before, was to become the first person in the United States to be executed in nearly a decade. The author Norman Mailer wrote in his 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Executioner’s Song” that shortly before his execution the 36-year-old Gilmore was asked if he had any last words.
“Let’s do it,” Gilmore reportedly said. As The Washington Post reported at the time, Gilmore did not flinch when he was executed.
And then in 1988, an advertising agency executive decided that this declaration of … commitment? Resignation to one’s imminent mortality? … would be a great inspiration for a corporate slogan for aspiring athletes:
“Certainly, it wasn’t a question of Dan being inspired by Gary Gilmore, but rather, it was about the ultimate statement of intention,” Liz Dolan, former chief marketing officer at Nike, told The Washington Post. “It had to be personal.”
“It had to be personal!” Like, sometimes your intention is to go run a marathon and sometimes it’s to accept your death. Who are we -- the big corporation spending millions upon millions of dollars to sell stuff using these three little words -- to say?
That Post story, by the way, was published in September, upon the occasion of Nike naming Colin Kaepernick as a spokesman. That decision caused boycotts as well as sales bumps, and gave Nike (an official supplier of apparel to the NFL) a bit of a corporate halo for seemingly backing Kaepernick’s protests against racism and police brutality (which caused the NFL team owners to effectively end his football career). So the Gilmore backstory adds a good amount of creepiness to Kaepernick’s tag line in the Nike ad: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
Sure, the condemned murderer’s last words were not quite “just do it,” and that was four decades ago, and hey, everyone’s gotta take inspiration somewhere, right? But these origins underline the corporate soulnessness behind most #branding, no matter how inspirational or brave or political it tries to be. Whether it’s urging us to #justdoit (whatever “it” is), or trying to convince us that we should always, relentlessly be #doingthings, marketing-by-hashtag for a larger company can’t reflect an individual identity -- and it’s anything but “personal.”
Lady Bits
--Speaking of brands struggling to imitate humans! Netflix has been justifiably roasted for canceling One Day at a Time in the most condescending, “It’s not us, it’s you,” breakup-Tweet-style possible. It’s a sweet, worthwhile show that I’ve been enjoying in short bursts over the past few weeks; sitcoms with laugh tracks are a very hard sell for me usually, but ODAAT deserves all the praise it’s gotten for being funny, feminist, inclusive, and universally watchable by virtue of depicting a very specific Cuban-American experience:
--Book Stuff: Thanks to James Miller for having me on his Lifeology radio show! Also, a request: If you have read and enjoyed my book, would you take a couple of minutes to leave me an Amazon review?
--As mentioned above, Lady Business is off next week on a vacation adventure. See you in two weeks!
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com