Nivea’s Promise of Milk and Honey

Nivea’s Pure & Natural Milk & Honey Lip Balm

Ever heard of Carl Jung?  They psychoanalyst? The far less lewd contemporary of Freud?  You recall who I mean, yes?  Well, Jung believed in the concept of archetypes.  That there are certain archetypal images that exist in our “collective unconscious.” These images are different between persons, shaped, defined and influenced as they are, by individual circumstance and cultural context, but they hearken to the same concept, if you will, across the spectrum of humanity.  For example, the mother, the child, deluge, creation etc.  are Jungian archetypes.  These notions exist in every culture, are inscribed upon the unconscious psyche of all members of the human race, which then take on a more contextually relevant shape, when they seep into the conscious mind, Jung posited.  (Yes, I just used the word ‘posited’ in a blog, and I’m going on about Jungian archetypes, in a blog, in a blog about marketing tactics no less, what’s what you may wonder, hold on, I’m getting there).

Now Jung had relatively specific notions of the mythical or archetypal images that pervade our common unconscious.  I presume these archetypes are born of those experiences of humanity, which are collective, i.e. exist as common experiences beyond the borders of ethnicity, race, religion, etc.  e.g the mother and child figure, notions of floods, loneliness and other human  concerns and fears.

While Jungian archetypes may not be articulated as such at a scholarly level, my understanding of the matter is that  certain images, certain realities exist that pervade our common understanding as human beings shaped as we are by (and here it comes: drum roll please) the human condition.  For example, (and I suppose had I been a Jungian scholar, I would be able to relate this back directly to Jungian archetypes, but I’m not so let me stick to my own ensuing interpretations), we all understand the image of the beggar and the king, and especially the two in relation to one another.  I would venture that such images are also archetypal.  In an example of another colour of the same suit, the idea of a desert evokes in people the same response, I’d imagine, when such images are conjured alongside images of an oasis of abundance.  That is, we all have a sense of stark poverty in relation to the lap of luxury.  We may not have experienced one or the other, but we can fathom the idea of either.

Now I’d like to propose that marketing involves triggering these archetypes, not by luring them into the conscious mind, but by exploiting them at the subconscious level.

Take Nivea’s Pure and Natural Milk and Honey Lip Balm:  (Here’s what I got out of it).

Now from where is the imagery of milk and honey derived?  The bible.  (I knew you knew that).  The Israelites were promised a land flowing with milk and honey.  And what imagery does such wording evoke in your mind, particularly in relation to a lip balm?—Smoothness, fullness, and lushness.  Interestingly enough, the biblical wording, herein, sparks rather worldly imagery.  We are all aspiring to be beautiful in a world riddled with beauty expectations, and what better way to stir a desire for greater beauty than by associating a product with the realm of the heavenly (on earth).  But ideas, like identities, exist, in relation to their oppositions.  The land of milk of honey was as alluring as it was to the Israelites precisely because they had not known the wealth and health of an oasis for a startlingly long period in their history.  So, in order to appreciate an oasis, one must first associate it with the desert.  A Milk and Honey lip balm sets forth a rather timid but still tangible idea that your lips are lacking in moisture, in softness and lushness, and this lip balm, purely by wording, invites you to bathe them in glory.

Please be advised that the nature of the lip balm is apart from the nature of a lipstick.  A lipstick is designed to entice.  The mirror, other people, whatever, but a lip balm, clear as it usually is, only offering a mild shine, is meant not to entice but to soothe.  The imagery of milk and honey does precisely this.  Forget the historical backdrop of the wording.  Milk and honey are both items that flow, soft and unsaturated, they are an invocation to smoothness and sootheness.  And you, with your sudden but purely subconscious sense of your desert like lips are lured into purchasing an item that offers you the promise of regeneration and rejuvenation by implying your meagre and mild state of affairs.  The packaging is conscious of this, that a lip balm is not a lipstick.  The packaging is a butter yellow colour, (with a white lid) exuding a sense of mellow radiance, of soothing coolness and a humble kind of richness.  Such brilliance.

So the archetypes of the king and the beggar, of wealth and poverty, of the desert and the oasis are kindled by Nivea, not out rightly, but by biblical means and are most gently imposed upon an unsuspecting consumer.  These archetypes are employed in a culturally relevant subtext (the bible), and in a cultural context of abundance (we are a wealthy nation), but evoke the sense of hardship associated with the dry desert not by pulling you into that realm, but by exaggerating a physical state that you are plagued by.  There is no outright declaration, no clear indication of the archetypes that are summoned in the mind, but summoned they are, the beggar and the King, and employed they are as well.

By mere wording, and a cajoling of the unconscious, the product highlights an insecurity, lathers it with a remedy in the form of its own self, and thus lures you in, unto itself.