LAZULI BUNTING MANUSCRIPT REVIEW HISTORY …

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This document is part of a JCR Manuscript Review History. It should be used for educational purposes only.

LAZULI BUNTING MANUSCRIPT REVIEW HISTORY MANUSCRIPT (ROUND 1)

Abstract One hundred years after its sinking, the Titanic holds many in its thrall. If not quite a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, it continues to captivate consumers worldwide. This paper explores RMS Titanic from a cultural branding perspective, arguing that “the unfathomable brand” can be fruitfully examined through the ambiguous lens of literary criticism. Although brand ambiguity is often regarded as something to be avoided, this article demonstrates that ambiguity is a multi-faceted construct, five aspects of which are discernible in the brand debris field surrounding the totemic vessel. Combining empirical research and archival investigation, the article contends that ambiguity is a strength, rather than a weakness, of iconic brands like Titanic.

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In my own dreams of the Titanic, I am a disembodied robotic eye, gliding like a wayward star through the adits of its wrecked Atlantean cathedral, or through a porthole oculus, taking account of tilted apses and saloons,

wandering their marble stairs and passageways. —Ciaran Carson, The Star Factory

Paul Tillich (1952), the eminent theologian, defines maturity as an ability to tolerate

ambiguity. If this is correct, then branding probably qualifies as a mature marketing practice. The early certainties of branding, encapsulated in Rosser Reeves’ (1961) USP, are gradually giving way to cultural and critical perspectives that are more oceanic, more polysemic, more amorphous than before (Bengtsson and Ostberg 2006; Beverland 2009; Kates and Goh 2003; Puntoni, Schroeder, and Ritson 2010). As Rose (2011) explains in his study of popular culture in a digital age, ambiguity is a defining feature of 21st century television (Lost), cinema (Inception), literature (1Q84), computer games (Gears of War) and, not least, iconic brand advertising (Coke’s “Happiness Factory”). Ambiguity, Johnson (2011) further avers, is the Holy Grail of verbal cleverness in today’s short-form society of texts, tweets and micro-messages, since it delivers two meanings for the price of one.

Ambiguity, of course, is not simply an indicator of adulthood. For Tillich, ambiguity is evident in humankind’s highest achievements and greatest failures. That being the case, the purpose of the present paper is to explore the inherent ambiguities of an outstanding brand that is one of the highest achievements and greatest failures in western civilization, a brand that sank in 1912 yet remains afloat one hundred years later, a brand whose USP is crystal clear but whose meanings are boundless, a brand that, for one enthusiast at least, is “the most famous ship built since Noah’s Ark” (Cameron 2011, 11).

That brand is the Titanic. Our attempt to fathom this seemingly unsinkable icon commences with a brief history of

branding, noting its ever-increasing indeterminacy. We then examine the nature and meaning of ambiguity, which is predicated on the literary theories of William Empson and the New Critics. A succinct summary of the story of Titanic then follows and our cultural research methods are explained. The findings section describes the five major types of Empsonian ambiguity that contribute to Brand Titanic’s abiding mystique. After discussing the meaning of our findings for the theory and practice of cultural branding, some lines of future research inquiry are outlined.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BRANDING

Although the pre-history of branding dates back several thousand years (Belk and Zhou 1987; Simòes and Dibb 2001), the great take-off occurred in the mid-nineteenth century (Blackett 2003; Moor 2007; Room 1998). Mass production, mass consumption and mass communications, coupled with the introduction of legally binding trademark legislation, created conditions conducive to the ascent of brand (Koehn 2001; Petty 2012; Strasser 1989; Tedlow 1990). The contemporaneous emergence of advertising agencies – as well as radical breakthroughs in package design – gave rise to legendary brands like Heinz beans, Kellogg’s cereals, Levi’s jeans and Gillette razor blades that remain icons to this day (Sivulka 2011). As Petty (2011) shows, the principles of marketing management and best branding practice – not least, P&G’s fabled brand management system – were in place by the Great Depression and widely adopted thereafter.

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If the first half of the twentieth century resembled a brand blast-furnace, the second half was akin to a fast-breeder reactor. Despite occasional high-profile setbacks, such as the infamous bonfire of the brands on “Marlboro Friday” (Klein 2000), a rapid increase in branding’s scope and standing transpired (Pavitt 2000). Originally confined to FMCG and similar staples, the term was applied to an ever-widening array of activities, everything from hospitals, universities, art galleries and police forces to politicians, celebrities, utility suppliers and religious denominations (Lury 2004; Olins 2003). More pertinently perhaps, the post-war period was marked by many attempts to conceptualize and delineate the brandscape. As Heding, Knudtzen, and Bjerre (2009) explain, the understanding of branding has evolved through three main phases: the first, characterized by a focus on features, benefits and the communication of USPs, was company-centric; the second, where brand meaning was situated in the recipient rather than the sender, was consumer-centric; the third, which considered brands to be a cause and consequence of shifting socio-economic currents and contradictions, was culture-centric.

Heding, Knudtzen, and Bjerre’s (2009) three-stage model of brand evolution is far from comprehensive. Casual observation suggests that all three perspectives operate simultaneously, possibly in accordance with Williams’ (1977) contention that cultural formations are characterized by dominant, emergent and residual elements. Just as the USP is still part of brand managers’ lexicon, consumer-centred concepts, such as positioning, never go completely out of fashion. The evolutionary typology by Heding et al. nevertheless illustrates the increasingly ambiguous nature of brands and branding. The narrow functional preoccupation of the late 1950s has given way to a much more macro sense of the meaning of branding (Hales 2011; Holt 2002; Stern 2006). Indeed, when this looser conceptualization is combined with the inexorable processes of context creep, where branding is applied to ever-more diverse domains, communications creep, where brands are showcased through ever-more media channels, competition creep, where the choice of brands in most categories is mounting ever-more rapidly, cogitation creep, where the study of brands and branding is attracting ever-more academic interest, from ever-more disciplines; consequence creep, where branding is rising from a minor subsidiary of marketing’s 4Ps to a veritable corporate philosophy that permeates ever-more organizations; and clamour creep, where the background noise of brand babble in magazines, newspapers, movies, websites, music videos, social networks, television programmes and so forth is becoming ever-more incessant, it would be surprising indeed if brands and branding were as unambiguous as they used to be (Grant 2003; Keller 2003).

ADVANCING AMBIGUITY

Ambiguity, for many authorities on branding best practice, is not a desirable trait. It is, rather, a one-way ticket to oblivion. As most mainstream textbooks make clear, clarity has long been the watchword of both branding and advertising. In his formal statement of the USP, for example, Rosser Reeves (1961, 39) expressly states that the reality principle of branding involves a single, clearly expressed claim or concept that is striking and easy to remember. In their concise classic, Positioning, the Battle for Your Mind, Ries and Trout (1986, 8) advise brand managers to “jettison the ambiguities, simplify the message, then simplify it some more.” Kevin Lane Keller (1999) likewise contends that lucidity is essential when building strong, favorable and unique consumer associations, which are best compressed into a short, vivid and crisp “brand mantra.” Aaker and Joachimsthaler (2009, 40, 54), furthermore, maintain that leading brands not only

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possess “a rich, clear, brand identity” but that “less ambiguity” is always better when it comes to the branding crunch. Undesirable as it is, ambiguity is unavoidable. Whether it be Delphic slogans such as Just Do It (just do what, exactly?), I’m Lovin’ It (what “it” would that be?) and Because You’re Worth It (is that the same “it” as Nike’s or another “it” entirely?), or the recent rise in consumer co-creation, where the meaning of a brand ebbs and flows between interested parties, it is evident that the old certainties are, if not entirely negated, much less certain than before (Fournier and Avery 2011; Kozinets, Hemetsberger, and Schau 2008). Indeed, according to the tenets of post-structuralist philosophy, linguistic meaning is never stable or settled, let alone set in stone (Firat and Venkatesh 1995; Scott 1993; Stern 1996). Language is always in flux and until such times as the shackles of language are transcended – as Zaltman (2003) recommends – an element of ambiguity is inevitable in branding theory and practice.

If ambiguity cannot be abolished, surely it must be eschewed. Not necessarily (Wilkinson 2006). The strictures against ambiguity are a manifestation of the scientific mind-set of marketing and consumer research (Hunt 2002). I.A. Richards (1929), the founding father of literary theory, makes a fundamental distinction between scientific language and literary language. The former aspires to clarity, precision, specificity, accuracy and exactitude; the latter sets great store by richness, variety, allusion, equivocation and polyvalence. Scientists minimize meaning, poets maximize. Ambiguity and analogous figures of speech, such as paradox, oxymoron, irony and caesura, are integral to the literary worldview. Far from being flatulent rhetorical flourishes, or pretentious demonstrations of preening self-indulgence, they are the pith and pelf of poetry’s power (Sherry and Schouten 2002). Ambiguity, therefore, should be admired, applauded and, not least, analyzed by appropriate literary methods. Or as Graff (1995, 164) puts it:

In the criticism of the mid-twentieth century, this tendency to define literature as the opposite of science led to the theory that “ambiguity” of meaning is a distinguishing feature of good literature…Whereas ambiguity may be a fatal defect in a laboratory report or an accounting ledger, it is a necessary and valuable attribute in a literary work. Whereas science speaks directly by means of propositional statements that aspire to have one and only one meaning, poetry speaks obliquely through metaphors or images, which multiply the number of meanings rather than restrict it. Although this desire to unpack and extract the meanings that inhere in great works of

literature has been dismissed by Eagleton (1983, 49) as mere “lemon squeezing,” Richards’ (1929) Practical Criticism laid the foundation for arguably the most influential school of 20th century literary theory. Led by John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren, the New Critics rejected biographical, psychological and historical explanations of poetic meaning for detailed line-by-line explications of individual poems, a process known as “close reading” (Davis 2008; Stern 1989). The New Critics, in other words, focussed on the words on the page, excavating layers of meaning, identifying the incongruities, noting the contradictions and teasing out the ambiguities that were the starting point for subsequent, even more radical, schools of literary criticism like deconstruction and post-structuralism (Lentricchia 1980).

The line of descent from New Critics to Deconstructionists is not continuous, admittedly. New Critics, by and large, believed in conciliation, inasmuch as the paradoxes, tensions and ambiguities within a work of literature are resolved within the confines of the “verbal icon” itself (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954). A successful poem was a harmonious, balanced, self-justifying entity, a little piece of perfection (Logan 2008). Poststructuralist deconstructionists, by contrast,

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maintained that meaning was wild, untrammelled and chaotic, with a tendency to spin off into ever more complex spirals of ineradicable indeterminacy (Eagleton 1983).

In between these seemingly irreconcilable interpretations of ambiguity – centripetal versus centrifugal – lies the work of William Empson (Norris 1978; Norris and Mapp 1993). Now largely forgotten, Empson was once regarded as the greatest literary critic of his day. His landmark work, Seven Types of Ambiguity, was written while he was a precocious undergraduate student at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and promptly hailed as the literary equivalent of splitting the atom (Haffenden 2005). Read today, it is clear that Seven Types of Ambiguity anticipated both the post-structuralist and reader-response schools of literary criticism, while remaining true to the close reading that characterized New Criticism (Sutherland 2010).

Despite its title, Seven Types of Ambiguity is far from systematic. The seven types of the title are not clear-cut. They merge into one another to such an extent that Empson (1930) himself is uncertain as to their specificity. His work, nevertheless, reveals firstly that the concept of ambiguity is itself ambiguous, since it underpins puns, metaphors, allegories and more; secondly, that there is a spectrum of ambiguity, from simple confusion or vagueness at one extreme to clever contradiction or paradox at the other; and, thirdly, that ambiguity should not be regarded as a weakness or failing on the part of the poet – or reader, for that matter – but as a source of strength and richness, especially when multiple meanings are packed into the same expression. For the purposes of the present study, however, the inherent ambiguities of Empsonian ambiguity can be collapsed into five main forms: confusion, contradiction, comedy, conceit and cumulation.

THE UNSINKABLE BRAND

The keel of the Titanic was laid on March 22, 1909 (Ward 2012). Twenty-two months later, the White Star liner was launched from Slipway 3 at Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland (Eaton and Haas 2011). At the time, Titanic was the largest moving object on earth. Although it wasn’t as fast as rival steamships that plied the lucrative North Atlantic route – European emigration to America was then at its height – Titanic was the most technologically advanced. Its novel double hull, innovative watertight compartments, fuel-efficient propulsion system and cutting-edge telecommunications equipment represented revolutionary advances in the science of shipbuilding (Johnston 2008). More important perhaps than its technological might, Titanic was the last word in luxury. It was a floating grand hotel. Not only were its first and second class cabins lavishly decorated in a variety of historical styles – Regency, Jacobean, Georgian, Louis XV, Queen Anne, Heppelwhite and William & Mary, among others – but its opulent public rooms were a riot of stained glass, intricate woodwork, crystal chandeliers and deep pile carpets. In addition to its state-of-the-art electric lighting, Titanic boasted a swimming pool, squash court, gymnasium, Turkish baths, banks of elevators and stupendous sweeping staircases for grand entrances and exits. True, the bulk of its passengers were accommodated in second and third class but fixtures and fittings there were on a par with first and second elsewhere. If not quite the “ship of dreams” mentioned in James Cameron’s blockbuster film, RMS Titanic was a technological and mechanical work of art (Davenport-Hines 2012).

After ten months’ fitting out in Belfast, and formal certification by the British Board of Trade, Titanic sailed for Southampton on April 2, 1912 (Wilkinson and Hamilton 2011). Although its maiden voyage had been delayed by a coal strike and an accident to its sister ship, Olympic, whose repairs held up work at Harland & Wolff, Titanic finally cast off at noon on

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April 10. The luxury liner picked up 274 passengers in Cherbourg, France, and, after collecting 120 more in Queenstown on the southern tip of Ireland, it steamed off to New York on April 11. With each passing day, Titanic’s speed steadily increased, as its spanking new engines were eased into action. Sailing conditions were excellent and, while the North Atlantic ice floes were extensive that year, the ship took the standard precaution of a safer southerly route. On Sunday 14th, Titanic’s wireless operators received several ice warnings from nearby ships, including the Californian which stopped for the night rather than sail into an ice field. Some but not all of these were passed on to Captain Smith, since the operators were employed by the Marconi Company, not White Star, and spent most of their time sending messages from rich passengers to their acquaintances on shore (Matthews 2011).

Titanic steamed ahead, confident it could cope with the inclement conditions. As everyone knows, Titanic couldn’t. Hampered by an uncharacteristically flat calm –

which made icebergs harder to see at night, because breaking waves at the base indicated position and magnitude – the lookouts failed to spot a large iceberg looming right ahead. Despite desperate attempts to take evasive action, the latest addition to the White Star Line received a glancing blow from the berg. It was 11.40 p.m. Less than two-and-a-half hours later, the ship sank beneath the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. There were insufficient lifeboats to accommodate the 2,026 passengers and crew, and many were launched less than full. Approximately 1,500 people died that night, mainly from hypothermia, though there were dramatic differences in the survival rates of the various shipboard classes (Maltin and Aston 2010). All 705 survivors were picked up by the Carpathia, which had steamed to the rescue at dangerously high speed. They were taken to New York City, where an official inquiry was promptly launched into the unthinkable sinking of the unsinkable ship. Three-hundred-and-thirty further bodies, most still in their life jackets, were gathered up by the Mackay-Bennett and Minia from Halifax, NS, the majority of which were interred at the city’s Fairview Lawn cemetery (Bartlett 2010).

The sea continued to give up its dead for months thereafter. In fact, the American inquiry had been completed before the final three corpses turned up in an open boat several hundred miles south of Titanic’s last reported location. By then, many of the facts, fables and fictions surrounding the unsinkable ship had hardened into the narrative that’s been recycled ever since: too few lifeboats, sailing unforgivably fast, ignoring ice warnings, inadequately trained crew, selfless acts of heroism, unconscionable acts of cowardice, women and children first, band playing to the last, the plutocrats in first class who perished with dignity, the paupers in steerage who were locked down below (Biel 2012; Howells 2012). Whether it be the legend of Captain Smith urging panicking passengers to “Be British!” before doing the noble thing, or the scurrilous story of Bruce Ismay, the chairman of White Star Line, who escaped on a lifeboat while dressed as a woman, the lore of the Titanic is almost inexhaustible. Within weeks of the sinking, movies, songs, poems and books about the calamity were in circulation and macabre memorabilia were on sale, most notably the black teddy bear by Steiff. The shock waves reverberated for decades in cities like Southampton, where most of the crew resided, Belfast, where the supposedly unsinkable ship was built, and New York, which lost numerous eminent citizens including Astor, Straus and Guggenheim (Barczewski 2004). All erected Titanic memorials in due course, as did many other places including Liverpool, Halifax, Queenstown, and Washington, DC. All were determined never to forget that fateful night (Hammond 2004).

Forgotten, though, the Titanic soon was as the 20th century rolled on and the horrors piled up inexorably – Verdun, Hindenburg, Hiroshima, Belsen, et al. (Lord 1986). The unsinkable

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brand, nevertheless, resurfaced during the 1950s, thanks to a bestselling book by Walter Lord (1955). An advertising copywriter for JWT, Lord’s breathless retelling of Titanic’s tale – a real time account that anticipated the “non-fiction novels” of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer (Philbrick 2005) – was made into an enormously successful British movie, A Night to Remember. The Titanic picked up further steam when Robert Ballard discovered the wreck in September 1985 and whose dramatic undersea photographs triggered a spate of touching remembrance, tasteless scavenging and lucrative touring exhibitions by the salvors-in-possession (Ballard 1995). The momentum increased a decade later when James Cameron’s staggeringly expensive movie of the tragedy – widely expected to sink without trace on release – not only triumphed at the box office, with worldwide receipts of $1.8 billion, but bagged a record haul of eleven Oscars, which put it on a par with Golden Age Hollywood classics like Gone With the Wind and Ben Hur (Lubin 1999; Studlar and Sandler 1999). Top speed, however, has been reserved for 2012, when the 100th anniversary of the sinking is commemorated. Apart from the 3-D rerelease of Cameron’s classic and a glut of made-for-TV movies and mini-series, the cities most associated with the tragedy are pushing the boat out. Southampton boasts a brand new Sea City Museum; Cobh (formerly Queenstown) has a Tourist Trail and Heritage Centre; Liverpool, Titanic’s home port, tells the terrible tale in its Merseyside Maritime Museum; and Belfast, the city that once turned its back on the black sheep of the White Star Line – since the sinking reflected badly on its image as an industrial powerhouse (Hill 2004) – Titanic is being celebrated as never before. A striking, six-storey, steel-clad commemorative centre has been built beside the original slipway, graving dock and drawing office of the immemorial vessel. The centrepiece of a massive riverside regeneration project – pointedly renamed Titanic Quarter – the Signature Building showcases the world’s most famous ship, with artifacts, replicas, interactive displays and innovative dark ride technology. Constructed to the same dimensions as the original liner, Belfast’s Titanic Signature Building purports to be the biggest brand museum in the world.

It remains to be seen whether the unsinkable brand will continue to float once the centennial passes and the commemoration industry moves on. What is clear, though, is that the cultural impact of Titanic has been immense (Foster 1997, 1999, 2002). It is titanic in more ways than one. It has become a myth, a legend, a symbol, an icon (Howells 2012). Considering that there have been much worse disasters in maritime history – and human history generally – Titanic’s totemic triumph is inexplicable yet incontestable. If not quite a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, brand Titanic’s curious allure is worth exploring in depth.

METHOD

According to Holt (2003, 2004), the secret of successful branding in post-postmodern times is storytelling (see also Levy 2006). Iconic brands are storied brands, brands that assuage the cultural contradictions of society with timely and consoling narratives. Such narratives are not solely crafted by the company or corporation that owns the brand. They are co-authored at a narrative nexus where interested parties’ interpretations clash, collide, coalesce and comingle (Hopkinson and Hogg 2006; Schultz and Hatch 2006). Brand stories, Holt (2003) further contends, are authored by four distinct groups – owners, consumers, influencers and popular culture more broadly – whose telling and retelling supply the brand with symbolic content and capital. This gives rise to a meaningful marketplace myth, which competes in myth markets against similarly storied brands, and, when cultural conditions eventually align, elevates it to the iconosphere (Holt and Cameron 2010).

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Researching cultural brands, as Schroeder and Salzer-Mörling (2006) and Cross and Gilly (2012) explain, is an eclectic undertaking. It is predicated on the methods of the humanities rather than the social sciences (Holbrook and Hirschman 1993). It is a genealogical process (Thompson and Tian 2008). It blends archival endeavor and empirical investigation (Holt 2004). It necessitates the examination of various authors’ narratives, which rarely concur, while remaining sensitive to the wider social and cultural developments that shape the stories stakeholders tell (Holt and Thompson 2004). It is a qualitative methodology that does not aspire to generalizability – except in the liberal arts sense, whereby universal resonance or meaning can be found in an individual work – but attempts rather to situate brands within the swirling currents of consumer culture. It seeks to go beyond the study of companies and consumers, important and necessary though they are, by considering integral aspects of popular culture and the storytelling roles of significant stakeholders (Bengtsson and Ostberg 2006). It builds upon the literary approaches pioneered by Stern (1988, 1989), Scott (1993, 1994), McQuarrie and Mick (1992, 1996) and many more. It is compatible with the Consumer Culture Theory program, specifically the “mass-mediated marketplace ideologies and consumers’ interpretive strategies” domain (Arnould and Thompson 2005).

Brand Titanic, albeit unfathomable, can be plumbed with profit using the tools and techniques of this cultural research tradition. In an attempt to unpick the Titanic dialectic, the authors combined empirical data gathering and genealogical research in the RMS Titanic repository. Representatives of all four authors of the brand story were contacted and questioned over a five year period. A mixture of qualitative methods was employed, in keeping with established cultural research conventions (Hackley 2003). These included introspective essays (74), focus groups (4), long interviews (9), netnography (1) and participant observation at Titanic-themed exhibitions, museums, memorials, guided tours and fund raisers (6).

Of the four principal brand authors, most data were gathered from consumers (mainly Irish but also French, German, Spanish and American). The brand owners were also interviewed and, while Harland & Wolff no longer builds ships from scratch, it continues to sell Titanic memorabilia and takes a proprietorial interest in the wreck (Pellegrino 2012). A selection of key influencers – specifically, spokespersons for tourism, property development, public relations, movie making, historical preservation and the marketing of Belfast’s Signature Building – was questioned about their involvement with the brand. Popular cultural representations of the unsinkable ship (in movies, novels, photographs, oral histories, newspaper articles, television documentaries) were collated and content analysed, as were extant anthologies of Titanic’s cultural impact (Biel 2012; Foster 1997; Howells 2012). Archival research at the Public Record Office, Belfast, which holds a large and comprehensive Titanic collection, was supplemented with digital data gathering exercises. These ranged from website monitoring and e-interviews to a netnography (Kozinets 2010) of comments posted on Titanic-related media stories.

Although compendious, our Titanic dataset is far from comprehensive. It does, nonetheless, endeavor to cover all four brand author bases identified by Holt (2003). It combines the in-depth interviewing and deep hanging-out models of data gathering. It incorporates a genealogical dimension, in keeping with cultural branding best practice. Given the staggering amount of material that is available, though, it comprises the merest tip of the Brand Titanic iceberg.

AMBIGUOUS FINDINGS

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When asked about the appeal of the unsinkable ship, a movie producer interviewed as part of this research project stated that “Titanic” is a one-word sales pitch with worldwide name recognition. The cinematic equivalent of Madonna, Shakira, Prince, or Eminem, Titanic makes the legendary pitch for Alien (“Jaws in Space”) seem verbose by comparison. Wilson (2011) indeed contends that Titanic is one of the three best-known words in the English language, alongside God and Coca-Cola. The managing director of Belfast’s Signature Building goes even further when he claims that Titanic is one of the top five brands on earth (Kincade 2011). This might come as a surprise to Google, IBM, Microsoft and GE, which ordinarily occupy such slots (Interbrand 2011). But it is no less surprising for consumers, who are inclined to regard Titanic as a steamship or a tragedy or a movie, for that matter, rather than a brand. The very idea was met with bemusement in all four focus groups and dismissed out of hand by the sales manager of Harland & Wolff:

Moderator: Is the Titanic a brand? Group: Titanic a brand? A brand of what? Titanic is not a brand. It is the name of a ship. It’s the movie, basically…which was kind of sad. (Spanish focus group) Titanic is not a brand, because the name cannot be trademarked or copyrighted. The name is part of the public domain, all over the world. We are not happy with some of the uses of the word, but we can do nothing about it. We can’t stop them. (Sales manager, interview)

Confusion Brand or not, it can’t be denied that Titanic has a unique selling proposition: the unsinkable ship that sank. This concision, nevertheless, belies the confusion, the vagueness, the nebulousness that surrounds the epic vessel. Almost every aspect of the sinking, apart from the timing of the iceberg strike (11.40 p.m.) and the stern section’s final plunge (2.20 a.m.), is muddled at best and misleading at worst. Despite three official inquiries, there is no consensus on the causes of the accident – excess speed, bad workmanship, flawed design, corporate complacency, unusual weather conditions, failure to heed ice warnings, failure to fit sufficient lifeboats, absence of binoculars in the crow’s nest, sheer bad luck and so on – which has led to endless debates about the details of the disaster (Maltin and Aston 2010). Did the band play “Nearer, My God, to Thee” at the end and if so which version? Were steerage passengers locked below decks or denied access to the lifeboats? Did the Californian ignore Titanic’s distress flares or was there a “mystery ship” in between them? Were panicking passengers shot by first officer William Murdoch, who then took his own life? Did Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon bribe the seamen on board Lifeboat One, with a view to standing off and staying safe rather than returning to rescue the dying? Did the stricken ship split in half or sink in one piece, as was widely assumed at the time?

Added to all this is the confusion caused by the basic layout of the ship (which was a labyrinthine maze of corridors, stairwells, and bulkheads), the confusion on board during the loading of the lifeboats (different admission rules operated on port and starboard sides), the confusion caused by the band’s sprightly playing of upbeat ragtime standards (which led many to underestimate the seriousness of the situation), the confusion many passengers felt when first urged to abandon ship (most were reluctant to leave a large, warm, well-lit luxury liner for a tiny lifeboat on the cold, dark North Atlantic), the confusion among passing ships when they discovered Titanic was in trouble (the Californian thought its distress flares were fireworks), the confusion back on shore when news of the sinking broke (initial reports suggested everyone

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survived and the damaged vessel was being towed to Halifax), the confusion over who exactly died and who didn’t (due to typographic errors in the bulletins issued by White Star Line), the confusion surrounding the total number of people on board (which is still not settled, despite decades of investigation) and, most incredibly of all, the confusion about where the wireless-equipped liner actually went down (the wreck was found fifteen miles from its last broadcast position).

All of these unfathomable issues have been compounded and perpetuated by a century’s worth of cultural representations, not least the public inquiries, which were riven with conflicting eyewitness testimony, at least some of which was deliberate White Star misinformation (Lightoller 1935). First officer Murdoch’s portrayal in Cameron’s Titanic, for example, caused a storm of controversy in the Scottish sailor’s home town (Barczewski 2004), as did the stereotyped depiction of Irish emigrants in steerage, who were “Riverdancing as the ship went down” (Donnelly 2004), as did the insinuation that Titanic was badly built, since the Olympic had a long, successful, accident-free life and was known as “Old Reliable” (Johnston 2008):

When oh when are people going to stop banging on about design faults? If the design was lethal, then how come her sister ship the Olympic sailed for years across the Atlantic before being scrapped? They were the same basic design after all. (Diddleypete, netnography) Brand Titanic, then, is not unlike an iceberg: crystal clear on the surface but with hidden

depths that get murkier and murkier the further down one goes. The same is true of consumer reaction. On the one hand, most informants are familiar with the unsinkable selling proposition, succinctly summarized by a somewhat cynical interviewee as “it sailed, it sank, people died.” On the other hand, all sorts of idiosyncratic misunderstandings are readily apparent. The dates, the dimensions, the destinations, the departure times, the direction it was sailing, the details of the captain, crew, construction, controversies, conspiracies, etc. are all routinely misreported, even by self-styled experts. This confusion-filled discourse, of course, is not necessarily a brand negative, since it raises questions, stimulates debate and perpetuates the conversation. Nor, for that matter, is it alleviated by exhibitors’ attempts to explain the twists and turns of the extended narrative:

To broaden my knowledge of the Titanic, I visited an exhibition. It consisted of displays of memorabilia taken from the Titanic and its sister ships. There were cards on the walls taking you through the story of the Titanic. To be honest, I thought it was hard to follow. In the end I just walked around in a bit of a daze, confused about what order I was supposed to be doing it in. (Clare, introspection) More confusing still, for many, is how such an enormous steel ship could have been sunk

by a hunk of ice and, even more pertinently perhaps, why on earth anyone would want to celebrate such a terrible catastrophe:

I remember the first time that I was introduced to the story of the Titanic. I was given a book about it by my grandmother. It didn’t excite me much but the pictures were much more interesting for me to look at. I remember thinking how big and strong the ship looked. I couldn’t understand how this big strong unsinkable ship could have sunk. It was a bit confusing, though I was much too young to know better. (Pamela, introspection) Why Titanic? That was the initial reaction. Why celebrate a ship that sank? Why build an attraction around that? People were confused. They didn’t get it. So we produced a

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brand book that explained the Titanic legend and suggested brand guidelines going forward. (Tourism official, interview) Equally incomprehensible, among Irish informants at least, is the widespread lack of

awareness of Belfast’s role in the Titanic saga. Most visitors, tourist guides admit when interviewed, are completely ignorant of the city’s connection to the steamship. Even those in the know, though, are themselves baffled to the point of amazement by the fact that the biggest and most beautifully-appointed boat in the world was built in a tiny, parochial, frequently mean-spirited place like Belfast:

Harland & Wolff were responsible for producing an amazing ship, which was the largest moving object at that time. How amazing is it to know that something so remarkable came from Belfast. It was a big accomplishment for little old Belfast to be recognized for their part in the ship. I never imagined that something so astonishing could come from Belfast. I mean we are always known here for the bombs and the riots, but for once we have a piece of gold that no one else can claim. (Elizabeth, introspection)

Contradiction If confusion or vagueness comprises one pole of the ambiguity spectrum, contradiction or paradox represents the other. In literary circles, paradox is regarded as a particularly powerful literary device, since it consists of two opposing sentiments in a single statement. For New Critics like Cleanth Brooks (1968, 1), “the language of poetry is the language of paradox.” Nowadays, we tend to see paradox in more prosaic terms, as clever wordplay of the “toxic assets,” “friendly fire,” “negative growth,” “serious play,” “love to hate,” “kill with kindness” variety (Johnson 2011). It is increasingly recognized, however, that paradox is integral to business and management, where executives struggle with competing contradictory demands involving “glocalization,” “masstige,” “creative destruction,” and “predictably irrational” consumer behavior (O’Driscoll 2008). Contradiction, indeed, lies at the very core of creative branding, according to Holt and Cameron (2010), because it is a brand’s ability to resolve cultural contradictions that separates the average from the iconic (see also Beverland 2009; Fournier, Sele, and Schögel 2005; Rose and Wood 2005; Schultz and Hatch 2006).

Contradiction is integral to Titanic culture. The sinking of the unsinkable is itself a contradictory concept, as are watertight compartments that aren’t, as is the Titanic’s original status as a nondescript ship. Up until its sinking, Titanic was regarded as somewhat unremarkable compared to its big sister and alpha predecessor, Olympic, which was launched the year before to enormous worldwide publicity (Johnston 2008). The back-up vessel, by contrast, was launched with comparatively little fanfare or awestruck media attention. In truth, Titanic’s high speed transatlantic dash was designed to generate the press attention that had been absent thus far. At the time, Titanic was just another enormous White Star steamship, the second of three Olympic-class carriers:

You know, Titanic was not that significant. Even in its day. Titanic was the second of its class, the Olympic class. It was not that big a deal. The Olympic was the important one, a step change. Olympic was the greatest ship of its day, not Titanic. When Olympic was launched, it was painted white so that it would look good in photographs and publicity. The Titanic wasn’t. All that stuff you read that Titanic was a wonder of the world. It wasn’t. Well, it was. But not really. Not back then. (Sales manager, interview)

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Titanic may or may not have been a big deal at the time – the photographs and newspaper reports of its launch indicate it was far from insignificant – but there is no doubt that Belfast’s relationship with the Titanic was, and is, decidedly contradictory, a strange combination of pride and shame, coupled with uneasiness about commercial exploitation and the branding brouhaha:

As I live in Belfast city where the Titanic ship was built I cannot help but feel proud that where I live had such a big part in the whole Titanic experience. Although I do wonder why I feel proud as so many lives were lost and I don’t think this is something to be proud of. (Thomas, introspection) The Titanic isn’t a brand, not for ordinary people. It’s more like an archetype of the, um, perfect disaster. You know that claim about Titanic being one of the top three brands in the world? I checked it out on Google and couldn’t find it anywhere. I think the marketing people made it up. (Heritage consultant, interview) In all the Titanic hype, where is the memorial to the victims? That is a good question. The answer is that there isn’t a memorial because it’s all about the money honey. (TJMcClean107, netnography) Building a place brand on misfortune is far from unusual in a world awash with dark

tourism, as the Alamo, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Cambodia’s killing fields bear witness (Blom 2000; Lennon and Foley 2000; Stone 2006), but it appears profoundly paradoxical, or perhaps perversely appropriate, in a city that is world famous for bombs, bullets, death and destruction (Neill 2001). Once seen as a symbol of ethnic division – built by a largely Protestant workforce in a shipyard where Catholics were routinely persecuted – Titanic is now portrayed as something that unites a formerly divided community. The old antipathies and contradictions remain, nevertheless:

One thing I like about the ship is the fact that it tends to bring people together with a common interest, despite the troubles this country has had, when it comes to the Titanic, people have a common interest, Protestant, Catholic, it simply doesn’t matter, people suddenly see through the differences as it’s something that everyone in this country should be proud of. (Graham, introspection) I asked my father how he felt towards the Titanic. He told me some interesting facts, one of which was that very few Catholics were employed to work on the Titanic or even at the docks at all. “The Titanic was built with only Protestant hands”, he says, almost indicating that that is why it was such a disaster. (Mairead, introspection) The Titanic tragedy may be a boon for Belfast’s new and improved branding strategy,

albeit a boon that dismays many in boomtown (Neill 2006, 2010). But urban unity from cultural diversity isn’t the only good thing to come out of the most calamitous new product launch of all time. Apart from the seafaring benefits that the sinking precipitated – changes in lifeboat regulations, North Atlantic ice patrol, round-the-clock wireless communications, international agreement on distress signals – it’s evident that many people benefitted by association (Heyer 1995). The New York Times, Guglielmo Marconi, David Sarnoff, Lady Duff Gordon, Captain Rostron of the Carpathia, and diverse survivors who were idolized in their declining years, all reaped untoward rewards from the nightmare. Granted, the reputations of several key players were ruined as a consequence – Bruce Ismay, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and Captain Stanley Lord of the Californian (see Molony 2008) – but for all the appalling loss of life there’s no denying that the disaster was a good career move for many, what Žižek (2009), discussing Titanic, terms the “ambiguity of obscenity”. That is, human catastrophe as blessing in disguise.

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It thus seems that RMS Titanic, like Elvis, Janis, Jimi, Kurt, Marilyn, Michael, Heath and Witney, lived fast, died young, and attained iconic status thereby. James Cameron, Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio and Celine Dion didn’t do too badly either – nor have auction houses, maritime museums and memorabilia merchants – though their success has not been without a countervailing consumer backlash:

When people are asked what they think or know about the Titanic, they seem to be able to recount the events which took place in the film and Celine Dion’s name would be mentioned on numerous occasions, due to the smash hit “My heart will go on”. This should not be how the younger generation remember or are taught history. Hollywood has taken advantage of the tragedy and has manipulated people into thinking this is the way in which the line of events happened. They are just out to make more money for themselves. They should think of the families and friends of those who died in the tragedy and make a film which they would be proud of, without all the hype behind it and such extensive merchandising techniques. (Jemma, introspection) Interestingly, Cameron’s hugely successful film is often described in contradictory terms,

as an auteur blockbuster, a romantic disaster movie, as a cinematic rotten tomato that’s so bad it’s good, as a love to hate combination of old-style movie making with cutting-edge special effects (Keller 1999; Lubin 1999). This incongruous blend of old and new is apparent throughout the Titanic cultural complex (Foster 1997). Ballard’s discovery of the disintegrating wreck, for instance, was made with the aid of futuristic submersibles (and he was lionized thereafter as a high-tech throwback to good old-fashioned American can-do). Walter Lord’s 1955 bestseller, A Night to Remember, was sold with a state-of-the-art advertising campaign and told the old tale in a fractured, impressionistic, multiple-viewpoint literary style that owed more to the modernist movement than the conventions of historical narrative (Philbrick 2005). The Titanic itself, what is more, was simultaneously the most advanced steamship on the planet and a monument to period interior design (Davenport-Hines 2012). It was retro from the get-go and remains so, not least among today’s Titanic enthusiasts, who are inclined to discuss the disaster in a weirdly antiquated language of “watery graves,” “mortal wounds,” “darksome nights,” and “racing o’er the unruffled seas” (Biel 2012).

Cameron’s retro recreation of Titanic is contradictory in another sense, insofar as it represents the usurpation of reality by the fake (Baudrillard 2002). For the vast majority of our informants, Titanic means the movie not the historical event. Their interest in the latter is a consequence of the former, as is Belfast city’s recent conversion to the Titanic cause (and its attendant commercial possibilities):

Moderator: Are you familiar with the Titanic? Group: The movie? Ah, okay. You mean the boat that sank? The movie? Moderator: Titanic for you is the movie? Group: Yes, it means Leo DiCaprio…(laughs). (French focus group) The people in Belfast didn’t speak about Titanic once it sank. They just stopped talking about it. Let’s not go there, lads. You have to wonder whether Titanic would be established in Belfast as it is now if the Titanic movie hadn’t been such a success, or a success story. It’s kind of ironic that they’re building a world around a ship that sank, essentially, and 1500 people lost their lives. (Movie producer, interview) Although the movie infuriated historical purists, who objected to its derivative storyline

and egregious anachronisms, it has become the base line for Brand Titanic. Nowhere was this better illustrated than by the sinking of Italian cruise liner Costa Concordia in January 2012.

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Many media reports drew unprompted parallels with the Titanic – Cameron’s Titanic – in their accounts of the tragedy, as did the passengers themselves (Hooper and McVeigh 2012). Certain on-line cynics even suggested that it was a tasteless public relations gimmick to draw attention to the centennial of the sinking:

It beggars belief that such a tragedy should occur 100 years – minus a few months since the horrific 1912 tragedy of the April 14 sinking of the Titanic. Could have been a stunt to commemorate the tragedy if it wasn’t so real. (JohnHynds, netnography)

Comedy Certain readers might consider such remarks to be in bad taste. There’s nothing wry or ironic about the drowning of thirty innocent people. Nor, even one hundred years after the event, is there anything remotely amusing about Titanic. Such admonitions, nonetheless, ignore the long tradition of graveyard or gallows humor, which unfailingly makes light of tragic occurrences (Aspden 2012). Some theorists contend that black comedy is an ego-maintaining mechanism of sorts, others consider it the rote response of oppressed minorities in authoritarian societies (Berger 1997). But for the purposes of the present paper, it reflects the fact that wisecracks are predicated on ambiguity, inasmuch as comic wordplay exploits semantic slippages for humorous effect. Not every form of comedy, admittedly, relies on witticism or repartee (e.g., slapstick, pantomime, practical jokes, etc.), however from the bon mot to the double entendre, humor depends upon linguistic equivocation, not least in marketing communications. Puns, for one leading literary theorist, “embody ambiguity in its most crystalline form” (Sutherland 2010, p.9).

The really funny thing about Titanic is not the gallows humor that the tragedy triggered in 1912 – a spoof, lifeboat-based board game went on sale within months of the sinking – but that many of those on board treated the collision and its aftermath in a light-hearted manner (Lord 1955). Some passengers played football with chunks of ice on the promenade deck, others threw blocks of ice into their friends’ beds for fun, yet others dropped fragments into their drinks to freshen them up. The words “watch out for small ice” were used as a jokey salutation between members of the boat crew when changing shift or climbing into the crow’s nest. Many passengers made frivolous remarks about the life-jackets’ fit or fashion or figure flattering effect prior to putting them on, or wondered whether appropriate provision had been made for young children and companion animals. The process of abandoning ship provided more than a few pratfall moments, at least in the early stages, since many ill-prepared passengers tumbled inelegantly into swaying lifeboats, much to the amusement of bystanders. Even the radio operators joked with the captain about the most appropriate distress signal, whether to employ the traditional C-Q-D or the new-fangled S-O-S. Captain Smith recommended the latter, with a laugh, “since it might be your only chance to use it” (Bartlett 2010, 130).

Graveyard humor in the face of impending tragedy is of course understandable – consider the Titanic jokes that survivors exchanged when their cruise ship, Explorer, hit an Antarctic iceberg and capsized in November 2007 (Chittenden 2007) – but the comedy has continued ever since. Humor is rarely absent in, and around, cultural representations of the sinking. The first Hollywood talkie about the tragedy had the band playing “Oh Dear, What can the Matter Be?” as the steamship went down. A Night to Remember contains several stiff-upper-lip squibs, mainly about the lower orders’ bad manners. Jean Negulesco’s Titanic of 1953 was nominated for an Oscar in the children and animals category but unexpectedly lost out to Lassie. Raise the Titanic was not only a hugely expensive box office disaster, whose model (55 feet in length) used for

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long shots cost more than the original liner, but it provoked the legendary quip from producer Lew Grade, “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic.” Cameron’s Titanic, moreover, is so full of in-jokes, gross-out humor and knockabout moments – the spitting competition, for instance, the Wayne’s World-esque line “angels might fly out of your arse,” Ismay’s philistine reaction to Rose’s mention of Freud, “is he on the passenger list?” – that some film analysts maintain it owes much to the screwball comedy genre (Lubin 1999). The deleted scenes include an outtake where the Unsinkable Molly Brown asks a bar steward for more ice as bergs loom menacingly in the background.

As if that weren’t enough, a spike in cruise line bookings was reported in the aftermath of Cameron’s disaster movie, though passengers’ attempts to strike the “I’m flying” pose in ships’ prows caused several serious accidents and led to its official prohibition (Howells 2012). The practice lives on, however, not least in Google images, where humorous photographs of cute cats, naked pranksters, Lego characters, WWF grapplers, Lord Voldemort/Harry Potter and Sarah Palin/Hilary Clinton, are captured or composited in the arms-outstretched posture:

I don’t have any real interest in the Titanic but my seven year old cousin has huge affection for the brand. It leads me to ask myself just why a little seven year old girl would be so interested in the Titanic. She watches the film about twice a week, sings the soundtrack continuously and recently begged my uncle and aunt to take her to a Titanic dramatization in the Grand Opera House, which, by the way, she thoroughly enjoyed. Surely a seven year old girl should be more interested in dolls or colouring books? It seems not in my little cousin’s case. She can regularly be seen performing Titanic related role plays with her friends, for example, the scene in the film where Jack and Rose are at the front of the ship with their arms stretched out, this is one of her favourites. (Aaron, introspection) The humor doesn’t stop with consumer imitation or cinematic moments of light relief (as

in Titanic’s cameo appearances in humorous movies like Ghostbusters 2, Time Bandits, Cavalcade and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked). It is found in many other cultural forms from lists of top ten on-line Titanic jokes, through the tourist industry’s annual Titanic Awards for the worst holiday resort, via spoof academic articles on the psychopathology of the iceberg, to the song cycle about Shine, an African-American trickster figure who survives the Anglo-Saxon sinking (Biel 2012). It is hard not to chuckle on discovering that Robert Ballard’s main rival for recovering the wreck had previously cut his teeth on searches for Noah’s Ark and took decisions on oceanographic search patterns with the aid of a pet chimpanzee. Ditto the memorabilia, which is often in dubious taste, be it swizzle sticks, ice-cube moulds and bath-time playthings in the shape of the ill-starred vessel, electric toasters that burn images of the four-funnelled steamship onto slices of bread, bars of Titanic brand chocolate that taste better after being kept for a while in the fridge, or T-shirts that proudly proclaim I Survived the Titanic (and in much smaller letters) Exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, which also sold soap-on-a-rope in the shape of an iceberg (Deuchar 1996; McKeown 2012).

In Ireland, moreover, there are several Titanic-themed restaurants, including a chain of oriental eateries called Thai Tanic. An Irish television commercial for Guinness claimed that the perfect angle for pouring pints was inspired by the list of the leviathan. A Belfast poet said that rather than celebrate the unsinkable ship, an iceberg should be towed into town and allowed to melt symbolically. Other observers have noted that the city’s Signature Building looks not unlike a North Atlantic iceberg and suggested that an ice sculpture of the steamship (or, better yet, the iceberg) should greet visitors on arrival. Instead they have to make do with ready-mixed,

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freezer-ready “Gin and Titonic” kits, T-shirts that assert “She was fine when she left here” (even though it demonstrably wasn’t), or Titanic baseball caps that boast “Made in Belfast” (even though the head-gear is actually made in Beijing). More ironic still, the city’s official Titanic memorial (consecrated in 1920) had to be relocated in 1959, because it was a traffic hazard and caused several serious car accidents (Cameron 2011).

Humor, inevitably, is never far away with the informants. One tells of her father’s response on picking her up from a showing of Cameron’s Titanic (“‘Well, did the ship sink and everyone die in the end?...ha, ha, ha?’ He thought it was so funny because he set us off into a fit of sobbing again!”). Another reports on his experiences as a barman in a pub designed to look like the Titanic’s first-class lounge (“People kept asking for more ice or claiming to feel a bit seasick as they staggered across the floor”). Yet others, whose forefathers formerly worked in Harland & Wolff, jokingly blame the sinking on their ancestors’ bad workmanship (“And, oh my God, the bolts shot off the side of the ship…My great-great-granddad didn’t do a good job there!”) or tell tales of filling tiny terraced houses with magnificent fixtures and fittings purloined from the luxury liner (“Visitors used to ask ‘What time does she sail?’”). Even the marketing manager of Harland & Wolff acknowledges that jokes and banter about Titanic are not unusual when clients are relaxing after a hard day’s negotiation over multi-million dollar contracts (“Titanic is a foot in the door”, he concedes). By far the most common reaction, though, is a simple refusal to take the selling or the sinking of the Titanic too seriously:

We build hotels like we used to build ships. Then take the people who stay in them to see where we used to build the ships. New proposals for the Titanic Quarter will cut out the middle man: the shipyard will become a giant hotel (Patterson 2006, 195). A while back, I was making a presentation to a gathering of potential investors in America. I’d made up little gifts for them. They were bits of wood from the blocks that supported Titanic’s keel during construction. They were polished up, with an inscribed brass plate, and placed in a nice velvet bag. All very classy. However, the person who introduced me to the crowd said that the gift blocks had come from the Titanic itself. That I’d been down to the wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic to pick them up! He made it up on the spot. He told the crowd what they wanted to hear. He was a marketing man. Like you. (Laughs.) (Property developer, interview)

Conceit Amused bemusement at Titanic culture is one thing, metaphorical extrapolation is something else again. A striking tendency among our informants, regardless of their position in relation to the brand, is their unprompted preparedness to treat Titanic as a metaphor. Once regarded as “deviant and parasitic” (Ortony 1993, 2), the preserve of pretentious poets and love-lorn romantics, metaphors and analogous linguistic conceits, such as metonymy, allusion and simile, are central to humankind’s thinking processes (Pinker 2007). They are the means by which human beings in general, and marketing and consumer researchers in particular, make sense of the world (Cornelissen 2003; Coulter and Zaltman 2000; Fillis and Rentschler 2008; Kitchen 2008). As Zaltman (2003) observes, those who fail to recognize the role of metaphors in marketing management are heading for disaster, like Captain Edward J. Smith of the Titanic.

Zaltman (2003) of course is just one among many thinkers who have treated Titanic as a trope. It was being used as a metaphor for American party politics even before the survivors arrived in New York City (by Henry Adams, of all people, who was booked on Titanic’s return

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sailing) and as a symbolic stand-in for human folly in post-sinking sermons preached throughout the United States and Great Britain during 1912 (Biel 2012). Its metaphorical power has not dimmed in the decades since the disaster, what’s more. On the contrary, it has become an “all-purpose metaphor for any doomed enterprise” (Molony 2012, 9). Whether it be rearranging deckchairs, iceberg ahead warnings, manning the lifeboats, going down with the ship, playing music in the face of catastrophe or indeed the on-board social stratification – patricians up top, plebeians down below – each component of the fateful incident is a simile in itself. On top of all that is the overarching metaphorical constellation of hubris and nemesis, of nature versus technology, of pride before a fall, of hamartia, the fatal flaw that afflicts heroic high-achievers and arrogant over-reachers. Titanic is nothing less than a 20th century Ancient Greek tragedy, as the very name of the vessel suggests (Lord 1986):

The phenomenal hype surrounding the Titanic is not as a result of its engineering qualities, but the sinking as almost a metaphor for life’s tragedy. The stories of human relationships within the tragedy, the fact that the full spectrum of human life and society was there, the different nationalities, the thwarted hope of those wanting to improve their lives, man versus merciless nature, man cut down to size in the face of almighty God under the starry heavens, the fact that it was the greatest man-made object anywhere in the world at the time, the unbelievable loyalty and dedication of the captain and the crew. This was a tragedy where the reader could not fail to be affected. It was a film waiting to be made. (JSavo89, netnography) It is little wonder then that Titanic is the go-to trope for commentators, columnists,

cartoonists, comedians, sub-editors, speechwriters and after-dinner speakers (Howells 2012). It is the name of a satirical magazine in Germany (repeatedly alluded to by the German focus group). It is the subject of a much-admired headline in The Onion (“World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-berg”). It features regularly in critiques of contemporary advertising, business schools and western capitalism, as well as the music industry and network television (Parker 2011; Street-Porter 2012). It rose from the deep during the recent financial crisis in the Eurozone, and Estonia’s earlier campaign to join the single currency (Womack 2011). It has even been adapted to executive development programmes, where able-bodied managers ruminate on lifeboat leadership lessons, iceberg avoidance strategies and sink or swim scenarios going forward (Cale and Tate 2011):

Informant: Take the key from the case that held the binoculars… Interviewer: You mean the binoculars in the crow’s nest? The ones they couldn’t access because someone left the key in Southampton? Informant: [nods] Well, it was recently sold to a Chinese businessman. He uses it in his staff instruction workshops. He shows them the key and says it is an example of how small things, the tiniest thing, can cause a disaster if they’re overlooked. Interviewer: He uses it as a motivational tool, a training device? Informant: Yes, and he paid close to £100,000 for it. Interviewer: Wow. (Tourism official, interview) Metaphors work, as Punter (2007) observes, by transferring the characteristics of one

domain into another, from the target to the source. This transfer is never isomorphic, since certain characteristics are emphasized (or underplayed) during the transfer process (Hirschman 2007). The richness and power of metaphor lies in this innate ambiguity, this inbuilt polyvalence (Knowles and Moon 2006). The real strength of the Titanic metaphor is that its characteristics are so rich and varied that they can be adopted or adapted to almost any situation. This is evident

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in informants’ unprompted responses to Titanic, where many readily apply the archetype to their personal circumstances. Some refer to the terrible loss of life and relate this to the loss of their own loved ones. Some treat Titanic as a lens through which to view analogous human tragedies like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina or the Japanese tsunami. Some see Titanic as a symbol of Ireland’s war-torn society and the unnecessary deaths that have occurred in the century since the ship was constructed in Belfast. Some interpret Titanic in professional terms, as an emblem of their ambitions, aspirations and dashed hopes in attempts to forge careers, build businesses or attain educational qualifications. Some regard the Titanic reflexively, as a warning about the egregious exploitation of the brand in Belfast and elsewhere. Some even turn the tragedy on its head, arguing that Titanic is ultimately inspirational, not only as a symbol of the new and improved Northern Ireland but as a personal reminder to live every day to the full, because calamity may be lurking right around the corner:

The signature building has many parallels with Belfast itself. Just as Titanic was at the cutting edge of technology and innovation in the nineteen hundreds, the same is true today in the new Belfast, the renaissance city, which is at the forefront of so many things – aerospace, wind turbines, robotic technology, culturally too. It’s an inspirational message that’s reflected in the signature building, which has the latest design technology and is at the leading edge of visitor experience. (Project manager, interview) The Titanic was always referred to as the Ship of Dreams and it is clear it meant different things to different people and like those people I myself have my own dreams and I hope that I will get everything I want in life no matter how many icebergs there are in the way. It makes me realize that no dream is too small or impossible if you really want it, but there will be times when it will be more difficult than others or seem impossible but you can make it. (Wayne, introspection) Such examples could be cited many times over. They suggest that Titanic is more than a

mere figure of speech. It is a generative metaphor (Pinker 2007), a deep metaphor (Zaltman and Zaltman 2008), a prototype (Lakoff 1987; Veryzer and Hutchinson 1998) that can be pressed into service as occasions demand. It is a multi-purpose myth, a handy allegory, where key players are inserted into their appropriate slots (heroes like Herbert Lightoller, villains like J. “Brute” Ismay, comic foils like the Unsinkable Molly Brown) and where all seven primal plots of popular culture (overcoming the monster, rags to riches, tragedy, comedy, rebirth, the quest, voyage and return) play out in perpetuity (Booker 2004; Stern 1988). It is a myth indeed that was in place before there was any eyewitness testimony to speak of and it has proved highly resistant to contradictory historical evidence (Howells 2012). The alleged playing of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” by the brave bandsmen, for instance, has been subject to detailed archival investigation and shown to be extremely unlikely (physically impossible, near enough). Yet it continues to endure, as does the canard that Titanic was considered “unsinkable” (it was never specifically sold as such), as does the legend of the lookouts’ missing binoculars (which wouldn’t necessarily have helped, had they been available), as does the yarn about the race for the Blue Riband (Titanic couldn’t have broken the transatlantic speed record; it wasn’t designed to do so).

However, perhaps the single most important factor behind Titanic’s enduring metaphorical power is not the ship itself. The gigantic Titanic trope, according to a lengthy posting on Encyclopedia-Titanica, is not attributable to the loss of life or the lack of lifeboats, or the celebrities on board, or the size of the steamship, or the poignancy of its maiden voyage. It was the unwitting part played by an innocuous iceberg, which…

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Just floated there, waiting for us to crash into it. Curiously, it is this small fact that seems to lend the greatest enduring metaphorical power to the disaster…The passivity of the iceberg provides the focus for the irony and hubris. That the iceberg can also be sculpted into any shape or caricature by the cartoonist, and provides good scope for being labelled, merely adds to its appeal. (MonicaHall, netnography)

Cumulation Regardless of rival explanations for Titanic’s figurative efficacy, there’s no denying that the vessel is a cornucopian horn of cultural plenty, a self-replenishing tankard of meaning. Just as Empson’s (1930) capstone category of ambiguity comprised particularly rich poetical allusions that brimmed and overflowed with multiple meanings – he cites Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Windhover with particular approval – so too Titanic is a meanings magnet. Stories and legends and theories accumulate around the brand like barnacles (Foster 1997). Innumerable movies, musicals, miniseries, documentaries, poems, plays, operas, murals, periodicals, pop songs, museum displays, photographic exhibitions, heritage centres, computer games, requiem masses and more, have been conceived or created or curated. The artwork alone is vast, especially on-line. There are websites and appreciation societies beyond number. More than 2,000 books have been published about Titanic, everything from the story of the iceberg to studies of passengers’ companion animals. There’s a vampire novel set on the rescue ship Carpathia (Forbeck 2012) there’s a Sherlock Holmes sequel, where the great detective defeats Moriarty’s vengeful brother (Seil 1996), there’s a teenage mutant horror story – a Masque of Red Death manqué – that treats Titanic as a contemporary plague ship (Bateman 2007), there are any number of heartrending romances, heart-stopping thrillers and heartfelt family sagas, such as Danielle Steel’s (1991) No Greater Love and Louise Patten’s (2010) Good as Gold, that use Titanic as a colorful backdrop and its sinking as crude but effective plot device. There is a strangely affecting short story, based upon a tabloid headline in the National Inquirer, about the ghost of a Titanic victim trapped for eternity in a waterbed (Butler 1997). There is an equally spooky police procedural that passes caustic comment on Belfast city’s continuing commercialization of the catastrophe:

“Look at that,” McKenna said, indicating the stretch of land around the cranes. “They’re calling it the Titanic Quarter now. Can you believe that?” Fegan didn’t answer. “There’s a fortune being made out of that land. It’s good times, Gerry. The contracts, the grants, all that property they’re building, and everybody’d got their hand out. But, Jesus, they’re naming it after a fucking boat that sank first time it hit the water. Isn’t that a laugh? This city gave the world the biggest disaster ever to sail the sea and we’re proud of it. Only in Belfast, eh?” (Neville, 2010, p.20) And the accumulation doesn’t end there. The calamity is a crucible of conspiracy

theories and tall tales (Ward 2012). The former range from claims that the sinking was an elaborate insurance scam by the White Star Line which went disastrously wrong, through the unfounded rumor that Titanic was cursed by an Ancient Egyptian mummy in the cargo hold, via the crazy contention that the accident was a Jesuit conspiracy led by Father Browne (of Titanic photographs fame), to the infamous allegation, once rife among Catholic communities in Belfast, that Titanic’s hull number 3909 04 stated No Pope when viewed in the mirror of Protestant ship-workers’ sectarianism:

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My only opinion toward the shipyard it was built in was instilled to me by my father at a young age. This was that it was a predominantly Protestant work force who subjected Catholics workers to beatings and threw them into the water at the docks. Another memory I recalled was the hull number 3909 04 assigned to the Titanic, if written in longhand and looked at in a mirror read NO POPE. Of course this is just urban legend and not even slightly true. (Martin, introspection) The latter, by contrast, comprise manifold exaggerated narratives, tales as tall as the

Titanic itself (Lord 1986). These include everything from the fanciful story that Harvard undergraduates are required to take a swimming test as stipulated in the will of Eleanor Widener (the survivor who endowed the eponymous library in memory of her bibliophile son, Harry, who perished alongside his father) to the rather more mundane claim that the Titanic contained a vast treasure trove of gold bullion, silver ingots, precious jewels and so forth (or, conversely, was transporting a consignment of domestic refrigerators and industrial ice-making machines). All sorts of eerie premonitions have been reported furthermore, everything from the ship’s cat and its kittens disembarking at Southampton, through the 55 pre-booked passengers who had bad feelings about the voyage and cancelled, to Morgan Robertson’s novella Futility, which was published in 1898 and told the tale of a brand new luxury liner that collides with an iceberg in the North Atlantic en route to New York, and sinks with huge loss of life caused by a shortage of lifeboats. Fourteen years before the event, Robertson named his fictional steamship Titan (Behe 1988).

As the poetic epigraph of this article bears witness, and as many of our informants make clear, the uncanniness of the unsinkable is undeniable (such feelings, incidentally, are reported by scientists who have visited the wreck and encountered its “ghosts of the abyss”):

To think that the remains lay at the bottom of the ocean undisturbed for so long, it’s actually quite spine tingling. Seeing footage of it through the diver’s cameras it’s hard to believe that people were once on board the ship. Seeing bits and pieces still intact, people’s possessions lying still is incredible too. It’s very eerie looking at the ship under the water, as if it’s a ghost ship with many watery souls still onboard. (Nicola, introspection) So weird and wonderful are the cultural effusions surrounding Titanic that it is difficult to

know where the truth stops and fiction starts. The legendary conman Titanic Thompson was supposed to have been on board (hence the nickname) but wasn’t. The legendary African-American boxer, Jack Johnston, was allegedly denied passage by a racist booking agent (who said “we ain’t haulin’ no coal”), but wasn’t. The legendary psychic W.T. Stead predicted the disaster in several short stories (one of which described an encounter between the real life Captain Smith and an iceberg) yet he boarded Titanic anyway and failed to survive its sinking. The legendary fictional character Jack Dawson was figment of James Cameron’s imagination, but the grave of a near namesake in Halifax’s Fairview Lawn cemetery, is visited by fans of the blockbuster movie, many of whom leave tokens of undying affection (Nash and Lahti 1999).

The Titanic, in truth, is capable of accommodating just about every first class narrative, second class fable and third class yarn that chooses to clamber on board. The ship, in Boorstin’s (1961) much-quoted formulation, is “famous for being famous.” It benefits from a cultural version of Merton’s (1968) Matthew Effect, “for those who have, more will be given.” It occupies a liminal location beyond the confines of time and space (Ward 2012), between the old world and the new, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic where 2,200 people suddenly found themselves surreally poised between life and death, between the devil and the deep blue sea,

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which rose as if in slow motion (albeit the sinking took less time than a showing of Cameron’s blockbuster). It is nothing less than the acme of catastrophe, the quintessence of calamity, the storytelling equivalent of a perpetual motion machine:

The stories are unending. We have a master-plan for the next three years, based on brainstorming sessions. But they are self-perpetuating. We have human interest stories, engineering stories, cultural stories, design stories, architectural stories, historical stories, inspirational stories, off-beat stories, quirky things. The stories themselves generate stories, because we get local coverage of the international coverage in Fodor, National Geographic, The Economist and around the United States generally. There’s always something. Always new angles. We’re holding stuff back we have so much. It’s non-stop. (PR consultant, interview) RMS Titanic, it seems, is what movie director J.J. Abrams calls a “mystery box,” a

container of infinite possibilities that continues to fascinate because it remains unopened (Rose 2011). Akin to Bigfoot, Jack the Ripper, the Loch Ness Monster and KFC’s secret blend of herbs and spices, Titanic falls into the unsolved-mystery category and is perpetuated thereby. Alongside Godzilla, Frankenstein, Dracula and the USP, Titanic is undead and undying. Narratives, no doubt, will continue to pour out of the ill-fated vessel as fast as the North Atlantic poured in. Consider the following recent story from The Sunday Times “weird but wonderful” column, which was headlined Titanic Goes Down off Dorset:

With hindsight, it probably wasn’t a good idea to head off to sea in a boat called Titanic II. Sure enough, Mark Wilkinson’s 16 feet-long cabin cruiser went down on its maiden voyage under his ownership. The vessel was entering West Bay harbour, Dorset, after a successful fishing trip when it sprang a leak in the hull and began taking on water. The lone sailor made frantic attempts to save the boat, but had to abandon ship. He was pulled from the water by the harbour master. “I got pretty fed up with people asking me if I’d hit an iceberg,” he said. “It’s all a bit embarrassing.” (Sunday Times, June 12, 2011, 10)

TITANIC REFLECTIONS

Titanic is the Rolls-Royce of disasters (Molony 2012). It is an iconic superbrand of the human misery market alongside 9/11, 7/7, the Haitian earthquake, the Irish Famine, the destruction of Pompeii, the Great Flood of Genesis and countless others. But what can brand managers and consumer researchers learn from RMS Titanic? Are there any general lessons to be drawn from such a singular event? Titanic, certainly, can be adapted as a metaphor for brand management. Most brands are launched with fanfare and finery and flummery – all in their striking, ship-shape liveries – only to founder on the iceberg of consumer indifference. Since 80 % of new products fail ignominiously (Franklin 2003), Titanic is an apt trope for the Ford Edsels, Pepsi Clears, Apple Lisas, American Apparels, Microsoft Vistas, McDonald’s Arch Deluxes, Disney’s Mars Needs Moms and BP’s Deepwater Horizons of this world (Economist 2012a). Brands, likewise, are traditionally positioned in a hierarchically stratified manner, comprising high end, low end and mid-market (Levitt 1980), just like the class structure on board Titanic. However, the disproportionate survival of high status luxury brands in today’s adverse economic conditions is perhaps a parallel too far (Economist 2012b).

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More than mere metaphorical malleability, Holt and Cameron’s (2010) contention that iconic brands are born in moments of societal rupture and ideological opportunity, holds true for Titanic. In his detailed study of the sinking’s cultural resonance, Biel (2012) stresses that Titanic wasn’t so much timeless as timely. The accident attained iconic status because it coincided with contemporary concerns over feminism, immigration, religiosity, and class conflict and by highlighting these issues in a dramatic fashion (e.g., “Women and Children First!”), Titanic served as a lightning rod for society’s sense of self. The second wave of Titanicity, similarly, transpired in the mid-1950s when the sudden death visited upon the steamship’s passengers resonated with a society worried about no-warning thermo-nuclear immolation. The third wave, which surged in the wake of Ballard’s discovery of the wreck using advanced undersea technology, struck a chord during the new dawn, hi-tech, rip-roaring Reagan years that were pricked by the Challenger disaster, in an echo of 1912 (Howells 2012). The contemporary tsunami, what is more, cannot be divorced from the nostalgia boom that has permeated western society in the first decade of the 21st century (Reynolds 2011) and which is related in turn to a series of tumultuous events – from the Iraq invasion to the Occupy movement – that has shaken western culture and triggered a turn to times past, tragedies included (Lowenthal 2012).

Outstanding brands, Holt and Cameron (2010) also note, are storied brands and, whatever else it is, the iconic vessel is overflowing with narratives. Indeed, as story repositories go, few containers are more capacious than RMS Titanic, whether it be stories as noble as Isa Straus’s refusal to leave her husband Isidor behind, then relinquishing her place on Lifeboat 8; stories as uncanny as the letter posted at Queenstown by survivor Edith Russell, which stated “I cannot get over my feeling of depression and premonition of trouble”; stories as poignant as Jerimiah Burke’s farewell message, which was thrown overboard in a bottle and, after washing up on the west coast of Ireland, was delivered to his heartbroken mother in Glanmire, Co. Cork. Or, for that matter, stories as inconclusive as the innumerable “what if” scenarios: what if they’d rammed the iceberg head-on instead of exposing the liner’s vulnerable flank?; what if the ice warnings had been delivered to the bridge rather than placed under a paperweight in the radio room?; what if the engines hadn’t been thrown into reverse, which rendered the rudder less effective than it could have been?; what if the radio operator on Californian had picked up the initial distress signal instead of going to bed ten minutes beforehand?; what if the iceberg had damaged four watertight compartments, which was survivable, instead of five, which condemned Titanic to its doom?

In addition to the non-stop narratives that snake over, under and around the sunken ship, like the great white worm now resident in Titanic’s Turkish baths (Pellegrino 2012), there is the all-important issue of ambiguity. According to Kemp’s (2012) study of western cultural icons From Christ to Coke, outstanding symbolic objects are characterised by fuzzy boundaries, blurred edges, hazy outlines. The outer limits of icons are unfocussed, imprecise, ill-defined. This fuzziness is contrary to the received wisdom of marketing, which has long lauded clarity, precision, specificity (Reeves 1961). Blurred edges are associated with myopia, after all, and that is something to be avoided at all cost (Levitt 1960). Fuzziness, nevertheless, has crept into the branding conversation, partly as a consequence of proliferating conceptualizations and partly on account of branding’s ever-broadening domain, as well as its diffusion into everyday consumer discourse (Brown 2006). Yet eradicating ambiguity rather than embracing it remains the received wisdom of brand management. As Bengtsson and Ostberg (2006, 88) observe, the

key aim in conventional brand management thinking is to streamline marketing communications so as always to communicate the same message. If a company stays

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true to its timeless essence over time it will, according to theory, achieve a clear uncluttered image in the consumers’ minds that is compelling because of its consistency and clarity. Clarity may still be considered best branding practice, and ambiguity regarded as a cause

for concern (Adamson 2006). But an element of uncertainty comes with the territory, particularly when it comes to iconic brands. Icons, however, aren’t just fuzzy at the edges. They are simple and symmetrical at the visual core. Iconicity, for Kemp (2012) involves a combination of clear core and blurred boundaries. In branding terms, the ideal is a compact, cogent, coherent premise which can be stated in a few words – what Twitchell (2004, 481) terms a “holophrasm” – and an extensive hinterland which is not only open to diverse, often conflicting, interpretations but riddled with paradoxes and imponderables (O’Driscoll 2008). Coke is sparkling refreshment in an ice-cold can. Apple is cool kit for hip kids. Ikea is Swedish style at meatball prices. Coke, though, is fuzzy as well as fizzy (Thomas 2009). Ikea’s backstory almost beggars belief (Stenebo 2010). Apple was the fruit of an autocratic hippie, who espoused peace, love and profitability (Lashinsky 2012). Titanic, analogously, is both the unsinkable ship that sank and a bottomless brand filled with seafaring stories.

This combinatorial contention, clearly, should be subject to careful empirical scrutiny, as should the five component parts of brand ambiguity. Combining simplicity and complexity, clarity and obscurity, cohesion and profusion, is nevertheless very much in keeping with Empson’s (1930) original exposition where literary ambiguity may have had seven elements or five elements or four elements or an infinite number of elements, no one really knows for sure. It is also in keeping with Shakar’s (2001) notion of “paradessence,” the contradictory or schismatic core that characterizes outstanding brands in general and retro brands like Titanic in particular. Whether such simplex approaches apply to different brand types or categories or domains – luxury/discount, convenience/speciality, high involvement/low involvement, hi-tech/ low-tech, global/local, iconic/mundane – remains to be seen. Recommending contradiction and obscurity may appear downright perverse, but no more perverse than previous perversities like Apple’s “1984,” Bernbach’s “Lemon,” Ogilvy’s “Hathaway Shirt” campaign and the inaugural Marlboro Man’s mysterious “tattoo” (Twitchell 2002). Zagging when everyone zigs applies just as much at the conceptual level as it does in practical situations (Neumeier 2007). Sudden turns need to be carefully considered, though, as the Titanic eternally attests.

CONCLUSION

In his legendary article, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German social theorist Walter Benjamin (1973) argued that the indefinable aura of artworks would be denuded by their incessant reproduction in newspapers, magazines, movies, picture books and analogous modes of mass reproduction. If anything, the opposite is true (Institute of Cultural Inquiry 2001). Artworks’ auras are enhanced by representational dissemination, since the original becomes ever more impactful when copies proliferate and authenticity is at a premium. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of RMS Titanic, whose virtual manifestations have become ever more fascinating, ever more intriguing, ever more mysterious, as reproductions and representations and research findings proliferate. Titanic has become a cultural icon, an evil inversion of the Model T Ford, a deadly demonstration of dark marketing writ large (Thompson, Rindfleisch, and Arsel 2006).

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This paper has explored the ambiguous essence of Brand Titanic. Employing a range of cultural research methods, it examined the unfathomable brand in relation to William Empson’s (1930) aptly ambiguous ambiguity typology. It showed that five key forms of this ambiguity continuum are discernible in Titanic’s multi-faceted brand culture. It also argued that, although ambiguous branding strategies can be pursued, since they add a dash of intrigue, this needs to be counterbalanced with a clear positioning statement, an unsinkable selling proposition.

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