“Americans are the biggest consumers of royalty. Why? Because we can never have it. Americans embrace it more than Brits. And clearly, there is a spillover with our love of celebrity.” Cele Otnes
THE GRAND BRAND Strategists argue that monarchies-as-brands need to convey the “five R’s”: they must be regal, relevant, respected, responsive, and royal. Otnes and her coauthor came up with “six F’s” based on consumers’ perspective to explain the appeal of the Royals. “All of the things it taps into are mainstays of consumer culture: fortune, fashion, fiasco, family, fairytale, and fanfare,” Otnes says. “The fairytale element is propagated and supported by Disney. Now we’re in a world where you can watch the Disney movies over and over while you’re in your princess dress, while you have your pop-up book in your lap, and it reaffirms the whole valorization of the goal of becoming a prince or princess.”
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Now, she says, the Royals have their own website, as do William and Kate, though interviews with the press are still rare. “The royals normally don’t do interviews,” Otnes says. “They are not celebrities in their eyes. In the eyes of the people who support the brand, they are above celebrity.”
A DEMOCRATIC BRAND
Princess Diana, she adds, played perfectly into three of the F’s: fashion, family, and fairytale. “Diana was a very crafty woman who understood how the press could help craft her persona,” Otnes says. “She evolved into this sort of supermom, super saint, super model figure. I don’t think anyone would deny she was a devoted mother. And that was a big part of her appeal—many people loved her because she was a good mother. “There was also a lot of attention focused on her fashion, how she glammed up this kind of staid family. Over their lives, brands get certain shots in the arm: Princess Diana clearly reinvigorated the popularity of the brand.” Then there’s the “fiasco” element, which keeps the brand in the public eye, even if the outpouring is tumultuous as it was when Diana died or when King Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry twicedivorced American socialite Wallis Simpson in 1936. “Fiasco and fanfare lets in the people who are interested in the Royals from an historic standpoint,” says Otnes.
THE CURTAIN LIFTED In the 1960s, Prince Philip encouraged the queen to allow a documentary to be made about the Royals. It was the first time the curtain had been lifted to reveal their everyday lives— even to the point of showing them barbecuing. “It was kind of a mixed bag,” Otnes says. “The public loved it, but the Royals understood that it diminished their aura, so the queen never allowed the documentary to be aired again in its entirety.” Concerning the mystery of the monarchy, English historian Walter Bagehot wrote, “We must not let in daylight upon the magic.” In allowing the documentary to be filmed and aired, the queen herself violated this advice, and the paparazzi, modern technology, and social media have acted as floodlights on the royal aura, exposing the good, the bad, and the ugly. “The queen has adopted the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ mentality,” Otnes says. “They still can’t control a lot of the paparazzi, but they have a strong public relations arm.”
The royals may be above celebrity, but they are firmly entrenched as an integral part of the British tourist industry. To celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June 2012, Britons spent an estimated £823 million. “The thing about the Royal brand,” Otnes says, “is it’s so democratic. You can buy a 15-pence pencil or you can buy a £15,000 bottle of Diamond Jubilee whiskey. You can get a Prince Charles coffee mug with his ear as the handle or you can buy fine china, gilded, with the Royal Collection stamp on it so you know it’s sanctioned by St. James’s Palace. And you can take a threeweek tour of the Royal Castles, or you can watch a video on PBS. So the access is an ironic thing. The highest level of the stratum in British society is accessible to any level and at any kind of tone you want—reverential or critical or kitschy.” For the Queen’s Jubilee, you couldn’t turn around in London without seeing something for sale connected to the Royal Family. “There was Royal Beer, Royal Paper Towels, Royal everything,” Otnes says. Hanging on her office wall is a Royal Wedding Sick Bag, signed by the person who designed it. “It was given to me by someone who is very anti-Royal,” she laughs.
“So many businesses clearly benefit from Royal Family events,” she adds. Among those are pottery businesses, tourist packages, souvenir shops, and much more. And in the past 20 years, the Royal Family has opened up their properties for tours, adding greatly to the tourism industry. In 1993, the queen opened Buckingham Palace, in part to pay for the fire damage that Windsor Castle suffered the previous year. In 1997, the Royal Yacht Britannia was decommissioned and opened as a tourist attraction. Last year, when Kensington Palace hosted the edgy “Enchanted Palace” exhibit, 200,000 visitors were expected— and 400,000 showed up, even though much of the palace was closed for renovations. “It’s hard to pin down,” Otnes says of the money generated by the monarchy. “But it has to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
CONTROLLING THE MESSAGE Among three biggest contributors to the brand, she says, are London, Americans, and the tabloids. “The tabloids are one of the huge industries that keep the fuel burning. They push the envelope to sell papers. They once had a whole section in a tabloid about a fake Camilla [Prince Charles’ second wife]. She appeared in that magazine in some undignified and risqué pictures.” It wasn’t Camilla, of course. No matter. It sold plenty of papers. And it underscored the need to manage the brand—the understanding of which, Otnes says, started after Diana’s death in 1997 and accelerated after Charles and Camilla married in 2005.
“The palace has gotten much more professional and strategic about it,” Otnes says. “Since Diana’s death, they have realized that they need to control the messages. And they get help from serendipitous sources such as Hollywood.” Indeed, playing off of Americans’ fascination with the monarchy, Hollywood has produced a steady stream of movies involving monarchs and the monarchy, from Wallis and Edward to The Other Boleyn Girl to Mary Queen of Scots to The King’s Speech to dozens more.
THE BRAND’S STIFF UPPER LIP Otnes sees the brand as stable now, having survived some tumultuous years in the 1990s and early 2000s. “The future bodes well,” she says, “because the Royals are in a stage of the life cycle where exciting things happen” like royal babies and more weddings. And there is admiration for the longevity of the monarchy, and specifically for the current monarch. If Queen Elizabeth II’s reign continues past September 2015, she will become the longest-reigning monarch in British history. It’s this tradition, this history, and the quintessential British sense of occasion that can appeal to those critics who find no fascination with the fashion or the fiasco or the fortune of the Royal Family. And that builds the brand, too. Tom Hanlon
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A PALACE FOR EVERYONE History and curiosity. The royal palaces are sources of both, and the doors to several of them have been opened to the public. Michael Day, chief executive of Historic royal Palaces (HrP), will discuss the reinvigoration of kensington Palace, Princess Diana’s former home, when he speaks at the Spurlock Museum on campus on Thursday, April 25 at 4 p.m. The event is hosted by the Department of Business Administration.
Pe r s p e c t i ve s S P R I N G 2 0 1 3
The romantic appeal of a love story, and the upcoming birth of a prince or princess, builds the brand. It also builds commerce, says Otnes, who has co-authored the soon-to-be-published, Royal Fever: Consuming and Producing the British Monarchy along with Professor Pauline Maclaran of Royal Holloway University of London. “Events like the Royal Wedding or the Queen’s Jubilee create a lot of what we call consumer co-creation,” explains Otnes. On that April wedding day in London alone, it was estimated that almost $1 billion was spent on souvenirs, food, and drink. And who are the people most interested in the Royals? “Americans are the biggest consumers of royalty,” she notes. “Why? Because we can never have it. Americans embrace it more than Brits. And clearly, there is a spillover with our love of celebrity.”
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