As Professor of Music Lydia Hamessley tells it, she was preparing dinner when she was seduced by a quaint fiddle tune emanating from the living room. To her surprise, she found the television showing a "Human Element" advertisement for Dow, the multibillion dollar chemical giant. The company's $20 million print and TV campaign inspired Professor Hamessley to explore the techniques that Dow uses to rebrand itself as a responsible corporate citizen that focuses on people.
At a presentation of her research on Tuesday, Jan. 29, Hamessley asked her audience why Dow would need to rebrand its image. Unperturbed by the attendees' tepid response to her question, she explained that few people understand Dow Chemical's complicated past. "You need to be older than 30," Hamessley remarked, since much of the controversy emerges from Dow's former role in manufacturing products such as Agent Orange and napalm.
Putting moral judgments aside, Hamessley's purpose was to examine the "Human Element" campaign's efforts to improve Dow Chemical's image. As a music scholar, she thoroughly explored the juxtaposition of images and fiddle music, presenting the results of her analysis by using audio and video. According to Hamessley, Dow altered Susan Voelz's "New Harmony Waltz" to create a feeling of forward motion, to provoke an emotional reaction, to allude to Ken Burns' poignant civil war documentaries, and to evoke a shared past that lends hope for the future. Yet as Hamessley argues, this "shared past" is a kind of illusion: "It continues to erase the past and make people not think about the issues that Dow may face today."
Hamessley concluded her presentation by discussing the trend toward "humanness" in recent business communications. For example, Cisco Systems markets its "human networking" and Chevron brags about its "human energy." Although numerous audience members had not previously seen Dow Chemical's "Human Element" advertisements, they easily recited their own examples of corporate rebranding.
-- By David Foster '10.
At a presentation of her research on Tuesday, Jan. 29, Hamessley asked her audience why Dow would need to rebrand its image. Unperturbed by the attendees' tepid response to her question, she explained that few people understand Dow Chemical's complicated past. "You need to be older than 30," Hamessley remarked, since much of the controversy emerges from Dow's former role in manufacturing products such as Agent Orange and napalm.
Putting moral judgments aside, Hamessley's purpose was to examine the "Human Element" campaign's efforts to improve Dow Chemical's image. As a music scholar, she thoroughly explored the juxtaposition of images and fiddle music, presenting the results of her analysis by using audio and video. According to Hamessley, Dow altered Susan Voelz's "New Harmony Waltz" to create a feeling of forward motion, to provoke an emotional reaction, to allude to Ken Burns' poignant civil war documentaries, and to evoke a shared past that lends hope for the future. Yet as Hamessley argues, this "shared past" is a kind of illusion: "It continues to erase the past and make people not think about the issues that Dow may face today."
Hamessley concluded her presentation by discussing the trend toward "humanness" in recent business communications. For example, Cisco Systems markets its "human networking" and Chevron brags about its "human energy." Although numerous audience members had not previously seen Dow Chemical's "Human Element" advertisements, they easily recited their own examples of corporate rebranding.
-- By David Foster '10.
