In Your Face: How American Marketing Excess Fuels Anti-Americanism

Chapter 7. Anti-Americanism and Marketing

The big bully

“What’s marketing got to do with it?” you might ask. “It” is the anti-Americanism thoroughly documented after the war in Iraq by the Pew Charitable Trust’s international surveys.^[1] Many commentators ascribed the negative shift in attitude toward the U.S. to the eagerness of America to go to war without a clear UN mandate. Others blamed the unilateralist rhetoric employed by the Bush administration in the period leading up to the war. Still others saw the anti-Americanism as inspired by the traditional French animosity toward the U.S. and an attempt by the Europeans to mobilize a counterbalance to the now-single superpower. But nobody really blamed American companies or their brands and their ...