It's about time I returned to this little side project, and what better way to return than to consider the unqualifed success of Target's branding campaign. And when I say "unqualifed success," I mean it.

I first became aware of the existence of Target stores when I was an undergrad at UNC-Charlotte. In those days, K-mart was solvent, Wal-Mart was emergent, and the field of "discount" department stores was enormous. At the low end of the spectrum were stores like Hills, Discount City, Family Dollar, and Target. Wal-Mart looked like a boutique in comparison.

Then came the 90s, the wild and lawless days of discount retail - and the rootinest tootinest hombre was Sam Walton. Small town shop owners complained that Wal-Mart was ruining the quality of life, rustling customers out of downtowns, and grabbing land that should have been reserved for family farms. Of course, while lamenting the loss of locally owned and operated business, Wal-Mart customers showed a distinct preference for paying Wal-Mart's "guaranteed low prices." Besides, one less hardware store in the center of town didn't seem to make much difference.

It wasn't until the other discount retailers started to drop out that the full scale of the Wal-Mart situation became apparent. And clearly, something had to be done to stop the Walton family fortune exceeding Gross Domestic Product, if for no economic reason, than at least to avoid the geopolitical embarassment of our nation being referred to as the United States of Wal-Mart.

Something has now been done, by Target, no less. What's surprising about this is that in the early 90s Target was a sort of low-rent K-mart - imagine that! To a store, the places were ill-lit, filthy, dirty-smelling trash-strewn dumps. One pronounced the name in a phony French accent, Tar-zhay, on the model of pronouncing "garbage" as gar-bahzh. "I'm going to Tar-zhay to pick up some gar-bahzh." "Will you be taking Le Car?" "No, I think I'll take la transportation publique qui s'appelle le bus." "Ah, oui, c'est vrai, c'est plus 'cheap.'" (Well, anyway, my friends talked like that. Sometimes they were even less coherent.)

Now, suddenly, Target is selling designer home appliances by Michael Graves - one of the principals of the "non-design" school of the late 60s to early 80s. Graves' "non-designed" tea kettles, telephones, clocks, picture frames and so forth occupy several aisles throughout the store. They're eye-catching, weird-looking, and above all cheaply made. Graves' stuff exemplifies Target's entire marketing strategy. Now they really do sell "gar-bahzh"!

In keeping with the updated fancy crapola product lines, Target's ad campaign is eye-catching and weird-looking. They've borrowed a common technique of the highly stylized advertisements that are meant to sell athletic shoes. This category used to be called "soft-sell" because the product name is de-emphasized and the ads don't command you to buy. The similarity I want to note is the flood of images and sounds the ads present. Recent Target ads are visually overwhelming torrential storms of bright colors, I'm sure meant to excite viewers and associate shopping at Target with this thrilling perceptual experience. And while I think the ad works well on this level, and even agree that Target is a visually exciting place (and my lord, are those places brightly lit!), what strikes me about the ads is that they say more than I suppose they are intended to say.

For, you see, the ads bespeak the essential contradiction of Target. Just like Michael Graves' designs, there is something cheap that can't be entirely covered over by decoration. Their lines of pressboard furniture look suspiciously similar to the comparatively expensive stuff sold by Ikea and suchlike - but weighs about half, and tends more often to be boxed without all the parts or hardware.

There are two kinds of Target customers. I'm a member of the category that goes to buy cleaning supplies, and I bought a really great 5 quart porcelain mixing bowl a couple months ago from the store my wife and I call "The Target of Broken Dreams" (for reasons too complicated to go into here). Then there is that category of Target customer who ends up in the cashier line with a cart full of stuff - clothes, jewelry, books, games, home improvement items. Those customers clearly are the aim of Target's ads - they buy the full line of Target merchandise, probably for no other reason than that it's cheap and available.

Are they happy with their $12 jeans and their $5 undies and their plastic chests of 4 drawers for 25 bucks? I can't really say. But they don't usually look happy, and neither does the long line of people at customer service waiting to return taped-shut boxes of teflon-coated cookware and Chinese made DVD players and $12 jeans. And they don't look like the people in the ads.

In fact, typical Target customers have a sort of non-designed look to them. They've come to find their decoration.

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