“The jewelry symbolizes the story’s themes of wealth and privilege, and we approached its design with the utmost style and luxury in mind.” Jon King, executive vice president of Tiffany & Co.
With their “Gatsby Collection” of fine jewelry, Tiffany & Co. is doing what many companies do: associating their product with an iconic narrative in order to tap into the strong emotions people feel about it. Another recent example is the Leonard Nimoy/Zachary Quinto Audi ad, in which Audi taps into our love for the ironic-campy-nostalgic vibes emanating from the infinitely expanding Star Trek franchise.
“The jewelry symbolizes wealth and privilege.” Yes it does. But that’s not all it represents in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel. The jewelry, along with the rest of the accoutrements of Gatsby’s fabulous parties out on Long Island, are images of gigantic excess and grotesque debaucherie.
There are moral ambiguities in The Great Gatsby, but the utterly vacuous nature of the parties Gatsby throws in order to attract Daisy Buchanan are not among them.
The relevant folks at Tiffany & Co. have either chosen to ignore this fact or have simply, perhaps with some help from Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation, misread FItzgerald’s novel. Tiffany’s aim is to get women in particular to ooze with delight at what they see Carey Mulligan and other actresses wearing on screen and then to discover that they can be wearing that too.
Catherine Martin, costume and jewelry designer on Luhrmann’s film as well as designer of the Tiffany line, had this to say about the connection between Gatsby and Tiffany’s: “Plus, in the book, Tom Buchanan gives Daisy a string of pearls worth $300,000 on the eve of their wedding, and Tiffany had been promoting pearls as a female rite of passage during that exact time. I thought it was a wonderful connection.”
A wonderful connection? Did Ms. Martin miss the fact that Tom Buchanan has no real love for his wife, nor she for him, and that the string of pearls he gives her is a hollow token of an even hollower marriage?
This is glamor?
But why should anyone care if the marketing campaign works? After all, selling jewelry is not literary criticism…
That’s the assumption I want to dispute. I want to argue that the point of telling stories, even in a business context, is to make us, not primarily better consumers, but better, wiser human beings.
It matters, in other words, what stories we tell, even when–perhaps especially when–we’re using them to sell something.
Stories can be dangerous things. We can use them in ways that cater to our baser appetites. Or we can use them to elevate and inspire.
Tiffany & Co. has blurred the distinction between these two uses of storytelling. That’s why I think the practice of brand storytelling needs to benefit from sound literary criticism. Our use of storytelling should always begin with the question:
“What does this story have to say about who we are as human beings?”
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