Buying In - (Page 21) buying in 21 to stand for nostalgia to one person, fashionability to another, camp to a third, vague subversiveness to a fourth. “Without the mouth, it is easier for the person looking at Hello Kitty to project their feelings onto the character,” explains a Sanrio spokesman that McVeigh quotes. “The person can be happy or sad together with Hello Kitty.” Hello Kitty, McVeigh argues, is a “mirror that reflects whatever image, desire, or fantasy an individual brings to it.” Belson and Bremner return to this theme repeatedly in their book on the business of Hello Kitty. “What makes Kitty so intriguing is that she projects entirely different meanings depending on the consumer,” they write. The cat is “an icon that allows viewers to assign whatever meaning to her that they want.” Many of the consumers that McVeigh interviewed about Hello Kitty complained about corporations targeting them, making them buy things—things like more Hello Kitty products. But as he pointed out, “Capitalist forces do not simply foist knickknacks on the masses, and we must give credit to the individual consumer who, after all, chooses to purchase certain incarnations of Hello Kitty but not others (or chooses not to buy Hello Kitty at all).” After all, if Sanrio’s managers could create dozens of Hello Kittys, they most certainly would—and they are trying all the time. In more than three decades of effort, they have never come close. Not only can logos have meaning, and not only can that meaning be manufactured—it can be manufactured by consumers. Ultimately, a cultural symbol that catches on is almost never simply imposed, but rather is created and then tacitly agreed upon by those who choose to accept its meaning, wherever that meaning may have originated. That’s what Hello Kitty is: a cultural symbol. And a successful brand.
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