What do bearded entrepreneur Alan Sugar and marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno have in common?

One answer suggested by last week’s episode of ‘Junior Apprentice’ is that neither would be much fun on a camping holiday. Lord Sugar set his ‘junior apprentices’ the task of creating a new camping product and pitching it to retailers. The episode is full of mentions of the lucrative size of the camping market, something that Adorno was writing about 40 years ago.

In his essay ‘Free Time‘, Adorno discussed the way that the culture industry takes our real need for ‘freedom’ and brings it back within the capitalist system (through organised hobbies and activities like camping), where money can be made and people controlled (’recharging’ before another busy week at work):

“The naturalness of the question of what hobby you have, harbours the assumption that you must have one, or better still, that you should have a range of different hobbies, in accordance with what the ‘leisure industry’ can supply [...] It is linked to the inner needs of people in the functional system. Camping – an activity so popular amongst the old youth movements – was a protest against the tedium and convention of bourgeois life. People had to ‘get out’, in both senses of the phrase. Sleeping out beneath the stars meant that one had escaped from the house and from the family. After the youth movements had died out this need was then harnessed and institutionalized by the camping industry. The industry alone could not have forced people to purchase its tents and dormobiles, plus huge quantities of extra equipment, if there had not already been some longing in people themselves; but their own need for freedom gets functionalized, extended and reproduced by business; what they want is forced upon them once again. Hence the ease with which the free time is integrated; people are unaware of how utterly unfree they are, even where they feel most at liberty, because the rule of such unfreedom has been abstracted from them.”

I wonder how many of the junior apprentices were questioning their role in profiting from pseudo answers to people’s desire for freedom…

As an aside, Adorno also has interesting views on sun tans as we approach the summer holiday season. This section follows on from his analysis of the camping industry:

“Taken in its strict sense, in contradistinction to work, as it at least used to apply in what would today be considered an out-dated ideology, there is something vacuous…about the notion of free time. An archetyptal instance is the behaviour of those who grill themselves brown in the sun merely for the sake of a sun-tan, although dozing in the sun is not at all enjoyable, might very possibly be physically unpleasant, and impoverishes the mind. In the sun-tan, which can be quite fetching, the fetish character of the commodity lays claim to actual people they themselves become fetishes. The idea that a girl is more erotically attractive because of her brown skin is probably only another rationalization. The sun-tan is an end in itself, of more importance then the boy-friend it was perhaps supposed to entice. If employees return from their holidays without having acquired the mandatory skin tone, they can be quite sure their colleagues will ask them the pointed question, ‘haven’t you been on holiday then?’ The fetishism which thrives in free time, is subject to further social controls.”

If there are marketing lessons to learn from Adorno (and there may well be something in his insight around how an industry can identify deep inner needs and align its products to those – even if it’s not possible to truly answer the inner need), it doesn’t really seem appropriate to think about them. And the fact that we now spend our free time letting ‘the culture industry’ (in the form of programmes like ‘The Apprentice’) train us to be better business-people… well, it’s probably better that we don’t go into that either.

If there’s a lesson to learn from last week’s episode of the ‘Young Apprentice’, it’s that no amount of salesmanship can shift a poor product – and that the difference between a poor product and a good one can be as simple as 5 minutes discussing a target audience.