Is It Home Yet?
Sharon August 26th, 2009
Apparently a cynical new ad campaign, funded by home improvement and furnishings companies is about to begin, trying to get you to spend your money on a new sofa or wing chair, since, after all, you haven’t been foreclosed on…yet. The advertising slogan is “is it home yet?”
According to the New York Times:
“With such dreams of sudden wealth having gone the way of Dow 14,000, Americans may be getting used to the idea that they will be living in their current homes or apartments for a while longer. And if they are staying home more, because they cannot afford to take vacation trips or dine out as much as during the boom times, thoughts may be turning to refurnishing, refurbishing and generally sprucing up.
Those are the underpinnings of an ambitious campaign, with a budget estimated at $20 million, that is scheduled to begin on Monday. The campaign, by agencies that are part of the North American operations of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, a division of WPP, seeks to persuade consumers to start shopping again for furniture and home furnishings.
Needless to say, such discretionary merchandise has been particularly hard hit by the buying strike that has affected marketers during the recession in almost every category except, perhaps, groceries and gasoline. Sales of home furnishings fell 0.9 percent in July from June, according to the Commerce Department, and declined 12.9 percent last month compared with July 2008.
The campaign carries the upbeat theme “Is it home yet?,” which will be featured on a logo depicting the phrase embossed across a welcome mat. The theme evokes schmaltzy television commercials from decades ago for Lipton instant soup mix, in which hungry children asked their mothers, “Is it soup yet?”
The campaign will include print, outdoor and online advertising; search engine marketing; and promotions and materials in stores. There will also be a celebration of September as “National Home Furnishings Month” as well as a special Web site (homeyet.com).
“For the last 10 or 15 years, you looked at your home as a financial investment, but the return on this investment is actually emotional,” said Robert Maricich, president and chief executive at the World Market Center Las Vegas, a showroom, exhibition space and design center for the furniture industry that was opened in 2005.”
Yup, you can’t afford to move, you are already 3 payments overdue, but definitely put some new drapes and wing chairs on the credit card. You can’t get any money out, and the payments are impoverishing you, but the emotional return, is, like the credit card company says, “priceless.” After all, who could put a price on the feeling wall-to-wall carpet gives.
This, of course, is the commercial version of home is where the heart is. It is also, of course, complete bullshit. Later in the story, a furniture executive observes that buying that new sofa isn’t discretionary - after all, “try sleeping on the floor, sitting on the floor, dining on the floor.” Besides noting that all over the world, the vast majority of people do precisely those things, it might be worth noting the ridiculousness of the duality set up here - if you don’t buy a new sofa, you’ll have to sit on the floor. Ok, everyone who doesn’t have anything to sit on, but internet acccess or who buys Elle Decor and has no sofa, raise your hand? Anyone who can’t find a perfectly nice sofa down at the local Salvation Army, raise your hand.
Now advertising is like this, and there’s really no point in getting heated up, except for this - they’ve gotten very close to something we do need to know about our homes - that it is possible to tranform the into a place that can be home in the long term. This is what Adapting in Place is about. But for most of us the tools for this are precisely the opposite of those being sold by consumer culture - not the new sofa, but the ability to retrofit the old one or make do with something else; not the ability to purchase, but the ability not to, not “home as expression of one’s consumer taste” but “home as workshop and workplace, as a place that makes it easier for you to go on.”
The more we are taught that home is made by our purchases, the harder it is for us to fundamentally transform our relationship with home, and make it a place that gives back to us, rather than absorbs the contents of our pocketbooks, until, of course, the day they are emptied, and the repo guy comes to take the sofa, and the house, back.
Sharon