We've conjured up a set of mythical and iconic proxies to symbolically represent us.
When we dismiss the evidence of our own experience, placing our faith instead in what comes through today's ostensibly more important media channels, we can feel very small and alone in a vast and unknowable world.
In contrast, by appearing to inhabit our latter-day transcendent realm (i.e., our Olympus), our celebrities are rendered substantially larger than life. Moreover, like the fallibly anthropomorphic gods of the Greco-Roman era, they tend to embody profoundly and even exaggerratedly human traits. This combination of characteristics renders them virtually ideal as proxies, whose ability to comfortably navigate and thereby humanize an otherwise overwhelmingly vast world can vicariously become our own.
Not surprisingly, we have found ways to coin them in all sorts of areas. We have celebrity actors, celebrity musicians, celebrity sports figures, celebrity politicians, celebrity artists, even celebrity scientists.
The trade in celebrities is often a component of the more economically fundamental process of selling things. For example, top sports stars now tend to make a great deal more in product endorsements than they do in salary. But celebrity actors also are crucial to selling movies, as celebrity musicians are to selling CDs, celebrity authors are to selling books, and so forth.
An iconic association is at work here, creating the kind of powerful symbolism on which today's passive-engagement techniques of marketing communications depend.
The most potent icons are those who are able to make the jump from marketing one set of goods and services to another.
Michael Jordan is probably now the king of these super-icons, having progressed far beyond drawing audiences to sports programs for the standard underlying economic purposes of marketing beer, tires, and life insurance. As of this writing, Jordan has even gone so far as to use his persona to launch a personal brand of cologne (and apparently gotten by the inevitable associations with the smell of gym shoes).
Perhaps more interesting, from a socioculturalpoint of view, is the experience of the Lakers' Shaquille O'Neal. Shaq recently made the jump from promoting sales of beer and tires to drawing children to a fantasy action movie--from which vantage point he in turn employs his persona in a tertiary level of service, selling lunchboxes, pajamas, pencil holders, and the like.
(c) COPYRIGHT 1998 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
