Sept. 11 becoming marketing strategy

~ Now, at the five-year mark, commemorative plates and coins are being sold.

"Since Sept. 11 ... "

The phrase has been uttered countless times during the last five years.

Since Sept. 11 -- the nation changed, its psyche altered and Americans bore out a new existence in ways subtle and clear. Airport passengers slip off their shoes without a second thought. A war rages; casualties mount. And color-coded threat levels are part of the country's consciousness.

This much is indisputable.

But with the passing of each anniversary, so much else has been hung on that phrase, so much consequence attached to the terror attacks that it doesn't hold as sturdy -- or at least raises a skeptical brow.

Since Sept. 11, the stories have gone, Americans have been buying up real estate, swathing themselves in cashmere and furnishing their homes with luxuries. The nation indulged in comfort foods like never before, visited psychologists and ingested anti-anxiety pills in new numbers. As the nation supposedly sought comfort from the scary new world, there were anecdotal upticks in the viewership of classic, 1960s-era TV shows, the installation of cozy fireplaces, the purchase of custom motor homes and RVs, even instances of outpatient cosmetic surgery.

They were all reported in the media, all pegged by their industry leaders to Sept. 11.

Can it be a coincidence that each of these hypothesized social trends is tied to spending? Is this the marketing of Sept. 11?

"9-11 is a very powerful marketing tool," said branding expert Rob Frankel, author of "The Revenge of Brand X: How To Build a Big Time Brand on the Web or Anywhere Else." "It's a touchstone to get closer to the buying public -- everyone connects to it on an emotional level. Mention 9-11, and I'm that much closer to making a sale."

One would think some things, a national tragedy of this scale, are left sacred.

"As long as people can make money off of T-shirts and shot glasses and movies -- no, nothing is sacred," Frankel said.

Recall the vendors who swiftly set up shop near ground zero, peddling postcards, pictures and T-shirts -- anything bearing an image of the World Trade Center towers.

Vultures, B.L. Ochman calls them. She lived three blocks from the towers and was in the street when the first plane struck. She saw the people jumping. She doesn't need a souvenir to remember.

"It's ghoulish. It's disgusting that someone would try to make money off of that," says Ochman, a strategist who blogs on Internet marketing trends at whatsnext.com.

Even in subtle nods to the attacks, "Our emotions have been played on."

Whether it's a company's trumpeting its Sept. 11 fund-raising efforts in its advertising campaign or a product newly packaged in stars and stripes, Ochman says, "No amount of connection is the right amount of connection."

Now, at the five-year mark, a wave of commemorative plates and coins is washing up on the nation. For $29.95, collectors can buy a new coin featuring a standing imprint of the towers, said to be made of silver recovered from ground zero. Five dollars from each order is said to be donated to "official 9-11 family charities and memorials."

"What are we really supposed to take away from these?" Frankel asked. "To me, it's profiteering. But I'm no more offended by that than I am by Oliver Stone, who is clearly leveraging the public and nation's pain for his personal gain."

Dana Heller isn't sure it's that black and white.

After the attacks, Heller, author and director of humanities at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., was troubled to see the speed with which the event was packaged by American popular culture. She explored the phenomenon in a book of essays, "The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity." The selling of items on eBay, the president's urging Americans to spend, the logos on cable news networks, the beer commercials that referenced patriotism -- "9-11 became part of our consumer culture ... and on the one hand, I found that difficult and disturbing," Heller said. "On the other hand, I saw it as part of a long tradition in our history ... as a genuine process of grieving."

Marketing, consumption and popular culture, she came to realize, "is how we as Americans make sense of things, how we construct meaning and narrative. And we have to see it as a legitimate, unique strategy in our history, something that defines us as a people and our distinctive national character."

Perhaps it's more pervasive in today's mass American culture, but she sees it as no different from the commemorative-statue industry that sprung up after the Civil War, when craftsmen advertised services to sculpt the likeness of fallen soldiers.

"You could look at it as disturbing profiteering, but it does tie to the notion of how we deal with trauma and grief," Heller said.

She no longer sees it in terms of good and bad.

But what of these documented social trends -- the spike in cooking classes, the increase in Botox and collagen injections? Can these purported trends be reasonably tied to Sept. 11? Or have American consumers been sold the notion of an altered national psyche?

"Let's be clear. This wasn't a change," Heller said. "American consumers tend to be very thoughtful when they buy things. ... They're not passive. There's this implication that the American psyche changed on 9-11 and we blindly started to build a fortress of stuff around us.

"But we were a consumer culture before 9-11, and we were a consumer culture after 9-11. Were we incited to continue to act on our consumerism? Of course we were. But there's nothing sinister in that. That's the basis of our economy."

Without a doubt, new industries rose in response to the attacks, particularly in the area of security, says Jerry Wind, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

But, he cautions, "We have to be careful in terms of not attributing everything to [Sept. 11]. ... A lot of these kinds of things are generalizations and not realizing that Americana popular culture is very complex. It's very heterogeneous.

"It's very dangerous to talk about a national psyche. We don't have a national psyche. We have many psyches in the country representing many segments."

So many consumer trends were said to have emerged, it's difficult to sort through, experts say. Some may be anchored in hard data; others are hung loosely on speculation.

Might there be an expiration date on the links drawn, the marketing of Sept. 11?

"When we come to peace with it, which we have not done, and which I doubt will happen -- certainly not in my lifetime," Heller said. "And it will stop when those who market 9-11 feel they can no longer profit from it."

She and other observers predict the years to come will bring more exploration of the day's event's and aftermath, in the vein of Stone's film "World Trade Center" and the earlier film "United 93." As the years pass and the wound grows less raw, says Ochman, "You're just going to see more and more of it.

"I fully expect 9-11: The Soap Opera. In fact, I'm surprised there wasn't a 9-11 toy at McDonald's for any of the movies. It could happen."