RMS Titanic: Retro-marketing Writ Large
In his bestselling novel Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004) uses the sinking of the Titanic to
distinguish between two different types of past, the actual past and the virtual past. Whereas
the actual sinking is descending inexorably into oblivion, as eyewitnesses die off and the
wreck slowly disintegrates, the virtual sinking is becoming increasingly vivid, increasingly
voluble, increasingly veridical, thanks to its incessant recycling in films, books,
documentaries and similar cultural representations. “The actual past”, he contends, “is brittle,
ever-dimming and ever more problematic to access and reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual
past is malleable, ever-brightening and ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as
fraudulent” (Mitchell 2004, p. 408).
If Mitchell is correct, 2012 will be the year when virtual Titanic attains its zenith. The
centenary of the sinking is being commemorated like there’s no tomorrow (Eaton and Hass
2011). In Belfast, the city that built the monstrous steamship, a £100-million memorial
centre is opening its doors. In Southampton, the ill-starred liner’s home town, a spanking Sea
City Museum is recounting the tragic story once more. In Cobh, the vainglorious vessel’s
final stop before casting off for New York, a Titanic Trail is boosting the tourist trade, as is
the old port’s Heritage Collection. In the North Atlantic, where the pride of the White Star
Line collided with an iceberg and foundered with fatal consequences, a cruise ship will
retrace Titanic’s original route and re-enact memorable aspects of the maiden voyage (wining
and dining mainly, albeit abandoning ship may be an optional extra). James Cameron,
meanwhile, is re-releasing his mega-successful 1997 movie in 3D, complete with brand new
footage from the rusticle-covered wreck on the sea bed and, doubtless, a new raft of tie-in
merchandise.
The Titanic may be the apotheosis of the virtual past, but it is just one of many manifestations
of contemporary retromania. According to Reynolds (2011), the first ten years of the twentyfirst century should not have been termed the “noughties”, as they often were, but nothing
less than the “Re Decade”. The 2000s, he says, were dominated by the re- prefix: revivals,
reissues, remakes, re-enactments, re-launches, reformations, restorations, rehabilitations,
recapitulations and non-stop retrospection. Every aspect of popular culture, Reynolds goes
on, was afflicted by retro-a-go-go, be it film, television, theatre, fashion, food, drink, music,
design, furniture, architecture, travel, toys, pornography, computer games, ring tones,
fragrances, or indeed advertisements “like the one for Heinz Baked Beans that mega-mixes
snippets from vintage UK ads from the sixties, seventies and eighties, capped off with the
imperishable slogan Beanz Meanz Heinz” (Reynolds 2011, p. xviii). As the decade wore on,
furthermore, the interval between something happening and its revival shrank progressively
until the past finally caught up with the present, the rising tide of history started lapping at
people’s ankles, and our now rapidly sank beneath the icy waters of their then. The future is
past.
Numerous scholars, needless to say, have endeavoured to make sense of the nostalgia boom
in general and retro-marketing in particular. Davis (1979), for example, draws a distinction
between private nostalgia and collective nostalgia; Boym (2000) contrasts restorative
nostalgia with reflective nostalgia; Jameson (1991) separates traditional nostalgia and neonostalgia; Brown (2006) claims that nostalgia brands are not the same as retro brands;
Maclaran (2003), Goulding (2000), Guffey (2006), de Groot (2008) and dozens of others
have plumbed the depths of the nostalgic impulse, using a range of qualitative and
quantitative methods. For the founding father of this field, however, the most remarkable
feature of the 21st-century’s preoccupation with the past is not David Mitchell’s virtual vision
but “postmodern ironic nostalgia”, which mines and mocks the past simultaneously
(Lowenthal 2012). Instead of venerating bygone times, PIM makes fun of them and revels in
anachronism. Thus The Onion satirically declares that, such is the demand for revivals,
America is not only running out of pasts but contemplating retro rationing (quoted in
Lowenthal 2012).
Clearly, there are as many interpretations of latter-day retro creep as there are interpreters of
its features. Rather than seek a conceptual consensus, or tease out nü-nostalgia’s tangled
skein of near-synonyms, such as “antiquarianism”, “remembrance”, “tradition”, “heritage”,
“classic” and “historicism”, the present paper uses Titanic to float some tentative thoughts on
retro-marketing and branding. It adapts Mitchell’s distinction between actual and virtual, and
adds Lowenthal’s emphasis on postmodern ironic nostalgia (it could, of course, be argued
that Mitchell’s tongue-in-cheek dichotomy is itself an instance of PIM). As such, the paper
adheres to the CCT research tradition, which maintains that specific exemplars can provide
general insights, to some extent at least (Peñaloza et al 2012). In this regard, it is noteworthy
that the Titanic was a proto retro product. Although the liner represented the absolute cutting
edge of Edwardian technology, its cabins and public spaces were decorated in period styles –
Tudor, Georgian, Jacobean, Regency, Louis XIV, Second Empire, Queen Anne – and it was
advertised as a cross between old-fashioned comfort and the highest of high-tech spec
(Davenport-Hines 2012). The ship was retro-futuristic before retro-futurism was invented.
Be that as it may, when applied to the Titanic our tentative typology suggests that there are
three salient strands to the unsinkable brand:
First and foremost, actual or authentic objects directly linked to the doomed leviathan. These
include the rusting remains of the wreck, the permanent and touring exhibitions of original
artefacts, the museums, memorials, graveyards and visitor centres in locations with a
connection to the vessel, plus all of the valuable objets that are available to collectors of
Titanic memorabilia. Genuine lumps of coal from its gargantuan boiler rooms, for example,
are readily available on eBay. Postcards, letters and telegrams with provenance fetch
prodigious prices at auction, as do tickets, posters, menu cards, life preservers and
possessions belonging to the victims, the survivors, the rescuers, the White Star employees,
the Harland & Wolff construction workers, the witnesses at the public inquiries, and so forth.
Second, ancillary or associated items that cling like barnacles to the “old canoe” (Biel 2012).
The tsunami of tawdry tie-ins – everything from T-shirts and tea towels to fridge magnets and
fun runs – is perhaps the most obvious component of this category. But it also includes the
countless cultural products that not only perpetuate the Titanic phenomenon but burnish its
on-going image. Innumerable movies, songs, documentaries, musicals, poems, plays, murals,
mini-series, photographic exhibitions and computer games have been produced or curated.
The artwork alone is vast. There are websites, and appreciation societies, beyond number.
More than 2,000 books have been published about Titanic, everything from the story of the
iceberg (Brown 1986) to a vampire novel set on the rescue ship (Forbeck 2012). Narratives,
it’s fair to say, have poured out of the sunken steamship as fast as the North Atlantic poured
in.
Third, analogy or asteism refers to the tropes, ironies and figures of speech that the sinking of
the Titanic tows in its wake. Whatever else it is, Titanic is a magnificent metaphor (Foster
1997). Rearranging deckchairs, lowering lifeboats, the unsinkable sinking, colliding with
icebergs, captaining a prideful vessel and countless other shipshape similes have been a boon
to cartoonists, columnists, commentators, comedians, sub-editors, speech writers, after-dinner
speakers and bandwagon-boarding management consultants who are happy to hawk lifeboat
leadership lessons, iceberg-avoidance strategies and sink or swim scenarios going forward.
The catastrophe is also a crucible of conspiracy theories and tall tales, which range from the
claim that Titanic was cursed by an ancient Egyptian mummy in the cargo hold to eerie
premonitions of the disaster, such as the story of the ship’s cat and its kittens disembarking in
Southampton. There’s no shortage of jokes about the unsinkable ship, either.
These distinctions, admittedly, are not clear cut. Exact replicas of Titanic artefacts – cutlery,
crockery, cut-glass centrepieces, etc. – hardly belong to the same category as baseball caps,
inflatable lifebelts or ice-cube moulds in the shape of the steamship. Tourists visit the
“grave” of Jack Dawson, the fictional character in James Cameron’s multiple Oscar-winning
movie, whose near namesake is buried alongside many other victims in Halifax, Nova Scotia,
and leave tokens of their undying affection. The sinking was being used as a metaphor (and
most of the still-extant myths, legends and conspiracies were in circulation) even before the
survivors reached New York, let alone provided eyewitness testimony (Howells 1999).
Many might consider Belfast’s decision to build its place brand on the biggest new product
failure of all time, to be less an exemplar of exploiting authenticity than a paradigm of
postmodern ironic nostalgia. It’s the urban equivalent, surely, of using the Edsel to sell
Detroit, showcasing Frankfurt with the Hindenberg, boasting of Bhopal’s links to Union
Carbide or emphasising Atlanta’s proud association with New Coke. As a recent work of
fiction set in Belfast’s “Titanic Quarter” acidly observes:
“Look at that,” McKenna said, indicating the stretch of land around the cranes. “They’re calling it the
Titanic Quarter now. Can you believe that?”
Fegan didn’t answer.
“There’s a fortune being made out of that land. It’s good times, Gerry. The contracts, the
grants, all that property they’re building, and everybody’d got their hand out. But, Jesus, they’re
naming it after a fucking boat that sank first time it hit the water. Isn’t that a laugh? This city gave the
world the biggest disaster ever to sail the sea and we’re proud of it. Only in Belfast, eh?”
Neville (2010, p. 20)
Despite its obvious shortcomings, our tentative typology suggests that outstanding retro
brands, akin to the brand icons identified by Holt (2004), do more than draw sustenance from
the cultural sphere. True iconicity – Titanicity, so to speak – seems to occur when brands
either enter the vernacular as a figure of speech (McDonaldisation, Disneyfication, CocaColonisation, to Google, Xerox, Hoover or Skype, Occupy wherever) or are writ large in
some way, often by an arresting advertising campaign or catchphrase that transcends its
commercial function and enters popular consciousness (Volkswagen’s “Think Small”, Nike’s
“Just Do It”, Apple’s i-affectation and Mac attack of 1984). The Titanic, certainly, belongs
to that category. The word speaks volumes. Its three syllables encapsulate the hubrisnemesis myth, the vengeful nature archetype, the end-of-an-era cliché, the nobility-in-faceof-catastrophe philosophy and, arguably, the sad reality of branding, since most new brands
sink without trace not long after they’ve been launched (Brown 2009). Forgotten, they lie on
the sea bed of consumer indifference waiting to be raised from the marketing abyss during
the next round of retromania. Or the round after that. Will retro-marketing research do
likewise?
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