CONSUMED BY AFFECTS: Kwentong Jollibee [Jollibee Stories], Happy Objects, and the Formation of Intimate Publics

Abstract

In 2016, the Jollibee Food Corporation, a Philippine multinational company that owns the world’s largest Asia-based fast-food chain Jollibee, launched Kwentong Jollibee [Jollibee Stories], a highly successful digital marketing campaign. Kwentong Jollibee advertisements have a reputation for being able to express the shared sentiments of a diverse collective. Typically simple and highly sentimental narratives, those advertisements promote good intentions and feelings as reliable and facile antidotes to everyday problems, cultivating a commodity culture that encourages an irrational trust in the powers of positive affects. In this paper, I examine the role of positive feelings and affects in synchronizing private and public feelings and in conjoining practices of capitalist consumption with optimistic relations to the future. Drawing primarily from the work of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed, I argue that those advertisements are able to construct an “intimate public,” a process aided by the circulation of “happy objects” that shape low-resolution fantasies of belonging and resilience. I offer readings of representative Kwentong Jollibee advertisements to elaborate on how capitalist structures opportunistically manipulate emotions and feelings to create, address, and expand their market, and even to insidiously commodify experience itself by forming affective communities that offer a respite from a world experienced as compromised, cold, and cruel.