On megabrand marketing, rational self-interest and wishful thinking
Following up on our recent posting about the 'Genocide Olympics', we can now predict with some degree of certaincy that a marketer-driven sea change will occur on the ground in Darfur sometime between now and the opening of the Beijing Summer Games in 2008. Our hope is for a U.N.-sanctioned multinational peacekeeping force
The reason: rights activists are on the march and gaining monentum, from Tibet to France, from the campus of Harvard to the players themselves. Their purpose: to link the policy of the world's largest non-democracy (China) with the monumentally obscene behavior of the world's most murderous regime (sudan) toward its downtrodden non-Muslim majority.
News accounts indicate the activists are gaining ground. As publicity for their cause gets traction it will become increasingly unformfortable and embarrassing for those in China who are able to see themselves via outside, i.e., Internet eyes. It was Satchel Paige who said you can run but you can't hide. Now of course there's neither running nor hiding.
Linkage is what it's about, and China doesn't like the low-down way it looks and feels. Nor does the International Olympic Committee, for that matter...nor especially the megabrand marketers who've committed ten$ of million$ of buck$ for the privilege of strutting their $tuff before a billion-$trong primetime audience in a monumental $alute to excellence.
Who can blame any of these entities for fervently hoping, each for its own reason, that the Darfur hullabaloo will somehow just blow away? But of course it won't. Nor will it be drowned out. Because as the heat goes up for the mega-marketers they will have subtle ways of registering their displeasure -- and the Chinese know it.
So look for action to follow the traction. Because the stakes are too high, the issue is too compelling, and the official -- that is to say, the institutional -- Chinese psyche is just too bound up already with the global prestige it stands to gain by being able to play the good and gracious host, not only to the world's greatest spectacle, but to its own long-awaited post-Tianmen Square coming-out party.
We're betting the world will know long before gametime that as the erstwhile purchaser of two-thirds of Sudan's oil exports and as the regime's only major-power ally, China used its leverage to stop the killing, the starvation and the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of non-combatant men, women and children -- and that it did so because it was The Right Thing To Do.
On the other hand, we couldn't care less why.
