America is not exactly flavour of the month at the moment, least of all in the Islamic world. This disenchantment, for reasons that are clear enough to all except busloads of nonplussed Nebraska tourists clambering over European cathedrals, was confirmed by a study commissioned by the Bush administration that showed plummeting approval ratings for the US among Muslims worldwide. The BBC reported in October that one per cent of Jordanian respondents thought favourably of the US, down from 25 per cent during the middle of 2002; this in a country with a Westernised and not unpopular monarch in King Abdullah.
Yet while there is opposition, ranging from dissatisfaction to outright dissent, it has not yet deteriorated to the point of Muslim consumers in the global south eschewing those enduring symbols of America—Levis, burgers and Coca-Cola. Maybe it is because these brands in the FMCG sector (for the uninitiated that means Fast Moving Consumer Goods) are now global and as such have transcended their national origins. Muz Daud, marketing lecturer at the Indonesian Management Institute in Jakarta, suggests that this is not a contradiction disaffected Muslims feel the need to reconcile.
The consumer can make a distinction between what is written on the label of a bottle and what is said by a politician, they are two different things. It is not an unthinking approach but a rational one.
Daud’s argument might offer comfort to the anxious CEOs of global giants Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Xerox and McDonald’s who convened with US embassy officials in Cairo during March to discuss the potential costs of the Iraq conflict for American firms. In recent years American brands have realised the need to adjust their products (McDonald’s selling lamb burgers in India, for example) for fear of losing out to competitors that cater to local tastes.
American brands are part of the global cultural superstructure. The products sold under these brands are, naturally, eaten, drunk and worn on the TV shows and films we see (or unnaturally in the gratuitous case of product placement), and have been promoted as the accoutrements of an idealised life through the clever image-creation of advertisers. But now there are competitors looking for new ways to locate their products within the consumer’s sense of self in order to get the ‘love mark’ that—according to Kevin Roberts, the global CEO of the premier advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi—the consumer gives to products