The muthos of Vodka
In the early 90s, a small New York ad agency rocked the advertising industry by landing the high-profile Stolichnaya vodka account, a campaign so eagerly anticipated that the New Yorker magazine even published a twenty-page article about the events leading up to its launch. The creative director and client on the account had previously developed the Absolut vodka campaign, the longest-running campaign in advertising history. If the agency could create a campaign for Stolichnaya that matched the success of the Absolut campaign, it seemed this upstart agency was destined to become a major player.
The Absolut ads featured the Absolut bottle with a two-word headline that always started with "Absolut ....", emphasizing the vodka's purity. The bottle was showcased in evocative ways, for example as a swimming pool molded to emulate the bottleās iconic shape in "Absolut L.A.," a silhouette of the bottle in "Absolut eclipse" or the bottle in front of three mirrors in "Absolut narcissist." Sales of Absolut skyrocketed.
The Stolichnaya campaign picked up where the Absolut campaign left off, but this time Stoli was sold as the alternative vodka. The strategy was to associate the vodka with the rise of alternative music and culture, which Madison Avenue was selling at the time as a new kind of freedom of choice. Playing off the fall of the Soviet Union, the agency hired Russian artists to create paintings in the Russian Soviet constructivist style for the ads that prominently featured the Stoli bottle. The headline, "Freedom of vodka," was stenciled across the ads like rebellious graffiti, symbolizing freedom's victory over tyranny.
Creative executives at the agency hoped the new Stoli concept would "have legs," meaning the idea could be repeated in a fresh way over the campaign's length like the Absolut campaign. Coming up with a concept with that kind of extended staying power was like hitting the jackpot in advertising. With the new campaign, they hoped they had figured it out again.
Yet for some reason, the Stoli campaign was a disappointment. Even though the same people were behind the campaign as the Absolut ads and it seemed to follow a similar concept, the result was only a relatively modest increase in sales. And instead of being catapulted to ad agency success, the agency ended up producing radio commercials for a local newspaper. What happened? Let's see if the muthos concept can explain.
Understanding Muthos: Aristotleās Narrative Insight
Aristotle has a lot to say in his Poetics about how the events in a narrative come together. He argues that the "organization of events," or what he terms the muthos, is more important than any other element ā even the narrative's main characters. No matter what people think about the Poetics, almost everyone agrees that Aristotle saw storytelling as being first and foremost about the muthos, and that the best translation of that word in English is "plot."
In fact, a more nuanced analysis of Aristotle's thought shows that he never refers to what we would call "plot." His view of story structure is so different from ours that scholars have entirely missed it until now. Since they assumed Aristotle must have the same idea of plot as we do, they never even considered looking for an alternative in the text.
For us, "plot" typically includes all the events in a story that contribute to the narrative. But unlike "plot" in English, muthos turns out to be an entirely different concept ā one that is far more precise and useful. Aristotle understood narratives better than anyone ever suspected, and we still have a lot to learn from him. But first we must understand the real meaning of muthos.
Aristotle recognized that narratives contain two kinds of events, muthos and episodes. The muthos is a small, limited group of events that are tightly connected by cause and effect (lightening struck the tree, then the tree caught on fine). The episodes are a much larger group of events that are not necessarily connected by cause and effect, or only much more loosely (lightening struck the tree, then it started to rain).
One of Aristotle's key insights is that these key events of the muthos are crucial for producing a specific emotional effect. Since these events are tightly linked by cause and effect, they engage our understanding and emotions far more deeply than the other episode events in the narrative. Aristotle argues that the events of the muthos are in fact the only events that can elicit certain emotional reactions that require deeper understanding. Aristotle famously identified pity and fear as emotions like these in tragedy, but there are a range of deeper, more complex emotional reactions that can only be produced by the understanding we gain from following the muthos events. That is one of the central reasons why these events are so important for a narrative's overall success. As Aristotle says, the muthos is the "soul" of a narrative.
The events in the episodes on the other hand are not necessary, but only plausible, possible or appropriate. They can be flexibly altered within limits because they do not lead by necessity from one to another ā although it should be at least believable or understandable that they could lead to each other. While not as central to the core story, the episodes are in no way less important or interesting. In fact, since they are under fewer requirements of causality, individually these added events are often the most sensational and visible part of the overall message. The difference is that the emotions elicited by these events are in some ways more superficial because they require less understanding. Both kinds of events are crucial for building a narrative that sticks, but they also have to be combined in just the right way. And that is precisely what it turns out the Stoli campaign had gotten wrong.
The Absolut Campaign: A Case Study in Narrative Flexibility
So how does Aristotle's theory apply to the vodka wars? Each ad in the Absolut campaign makes a statement about the vodka's purity: Absolut is not only pure, but also typifies purity and is equivalent to purity. To convey that message, the ads tell a narrative that can be broken down into four distinct steps. I'll describe each of these steps in detail, and then show how Aristotle's theory explains the ads' success.
In the L.A. version of the ad, the narrative starts with the premise that swimming pools exemplify the city. Since the headline tells us that the ad is about L.A., and the image of the swimming pool with palm trees is easily associated with L.A., we quickly understand the ad is suggesting that a swimming pool like this one is what defines L.A., or is pure/essential/archetypal L.A. Having established that premise in the first step, the ad then shows that Absolut could become a pool itself. We may not have noticed it at first, but after reading the headline linking Absolut with L.A. no one will miss that the pool is in the shape of an Absolut bottle. That's the second step.
All of that is obvious enough just by glancing at the ad. But these first two steps don't yet tell enough of a narrative to convince us Absolut itself is pure. To do that, the ad relies on the viewer to put these first two steps together: if a pool is pure L.A., and Absolut is now a pool, then the conclusion is that Absolut is what has been defined as pure in this context. This is the third step in the narrative.
Still, the vodka could be what is pure in this context without being purity itself. This is where the wordplay in the headline comes in. The literal meaning of "Absolut L.A." is "Absolut in L.A.", but of course another connotation is "absolute L.A.", meaning nothing could be more L.A. than this swimming pool. Understood that way, the headline is saying any beautiful pool may be pure L.A., but a swimming pool shaped like an Absolut bottle is an even purer symbol of the city. In this fourth and final step in the narrative, the headline has equated Absolut with purity. It is also a logical conclusion, because if Absolut can be pure in one instance as in the image, then it can also be purity in general. The headline is simply asserting that the example you see in front of you is one of many that could be used to show Absolut is always purity.
This last step in the narrative is now an entirely reasonable and coherent claim that follows from the statements before. The strength of the message is also further reinforced as it is repeated in a series of ads showing how Absolut is pure in every context. Other ads from the campaign that are even less straightforward use the same narrative, and work the same way. The eclipse ad's narrative is: with a dark silhouette being pure eclipse, and Absolut becoming a silhouette, Absolut is what is pure in this case, so Absolut again epitomizes purity.
Now that we've outlined the narrative, how can Aristotle help us understand its success? Across the Absolut campaign, you might have noticed that the last two steps never change. These two steps are what Aristotle would call the muthos of this very simple narrative. That's because they are the only parts that are tightly linked by logical causality. The third step in the ad always establishes Absolut is what is pure in a particular context, then in the fourth step the headline tells us Absolut is purity itself. Put in Aristotle's terms, if Absolut is what is pure as defined in the ad, it becomes probable or necessary that Absolut could typify purity. The headline just makes the small logical jump of broadening the specific statement made in the ad to a general rule.
Just the opposite could be said about the first two steps in the narrative. They change in every ad, and are not particularly logical. In Aristotle's terms it is appropriate that a swimming pool could typify L.A., but many other things might typify L.A., such as movie stars or jammed highways. And it is at least plausible that a swimming pool could be shaped like an Absolut bottle ā though of course highly improbable ā making Absolut what is pure L.A. These steps are not required or linked to each other by any kind of strict logic, but we can still accept them as part of the narrative. Which is why these first two steps are what Aristotle would call the episodes.
By applying Aristotle's theory, we can see the Absolut campaign was a success because it knew its muthos from its episodes. The ads always repeat the same reliable muthos, and as a result always effectively get the message across about the vodka's purity. But the narrative structure also allows for a practically infinite variation in the episodes. The agency could think up endless new ideas of things that typify something else, and then whip up a striking image showing Absolut becoming that thing. The Absolut narrative offered the perfect combination of logical necessity and entertaining plausibility.
The Stoli Campaign: Struggling with an Unsustainable Narrative
The Stoli campaign used a similar narrative, but with a few key differences. As I described above, in these ads "Freedom of vodka" in large stenciled letters was painted over examples of Soviet-style art that featured the Stoli bottle. The slogan over the Soviet art graphically represented the triumph of a new freedom over the old tyrannical order.
The narrative here also has four steps. With the fall of the Soviet Union typifying freedom, and Stoli being Russian, Stoli is what is free in this instance, so the wordplay in the headline "freedom of vodka" (obviously a variation on "freedom of choice") tells us Stoli typifies freedom of choice. The episodes are again the first two steps in the narrative, and the last two steps the muthos.
But far less flexibility is built into the Stoli narrative. Although it would be possible to come up with other things that typify freedom in the first episode, the campaign only included different images that evoked the end of the Soviet Union, because the campaign's only device for linking Stoli with freedom was to make "Stoli is Russian" the second episode. The crucial first muthos part, "Stoli is what is free," is premised specifically on Russian freedom, not freedom itself. In other words, since the first muthos part is based on the vodka's Russian identity, it was far too specific to allow much flexibility in the episodes.
In their zeal to also establish that Stoli was an authentic Russian vodka, the advertisers inadvertently incapacitated their muthos about freedom by chaining it to its Russian roots. That severely limited the extent to which the campaign could be extended in new iterations. That explains why the Stoli campaign only lasted for months instead of years, and why the campaign failed to have the dramatic cultural impact the Absolut campaign did.