Imagining Marketing: Art, Aesthetics and the Avant-Garde (Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research Series)

322 Pages·2001·4.14 MB·English

by  Stephen Brown

This ebook licensed to CCCCyyyynnnntttthhhhiiiiaaaa WWWWuuuunnnnsssscccchhhh. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this ebook is illegal.
Imagining Marketing
Why do museum visitors prefer the fake to the real?
Imagination is a word that is widely used by marketing practitioners, advertisers
especially, but rarely examined by marketing academics. This neglect is largely due to
the imagination’s ‘artistic’ connotations, which run counter to the ‘scientific’ mindset
that dominates marketing scholarship.
Of late, however, an artistic ‘turn’ has taken place in marketing research and
Imagining Marketing accentuates this turn by arguing that the mantle of imagination has
now passed from the artist to the marketer. It contends, moreover, that the tools and
techniques of artistic appreciation can be successfully applied to all manner of
marketplace phenomena.
Key features include:
(cid:127) The treatment of artistic artefacts as a source of marketing understanding
(cid:127) a detailed discussion surrounding the argument that marketers should adopt more
imaginative modes of academic expression
(cid:127) an analysis of the kind of art that marketing is, and the place of imagination in
marketing’s artistic palette.
Imagining Marketing: Art, Aesthetics and the Avant-Garde provokes a new way of
thinking about marketing, and will prove invaluable to marketing academics,
researchers and practitioners.
Stephen Brown is Professor of Marketing Research at the University of Ulster.
He has written or co-edited ten books and has been published in a wide variety of
prominent academic journals.
Anthony Patterson is a Research Assistant at the University of Ulster, and has
written several papers on the interface between art and marketing.
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Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research
Edited by Stephen Brown
University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
and Barbara B.Stern
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA
Recent years have witnessed an ‘interpretative turn’ in marketing and consumer
research. Methodologists from the humanities are taking their place alongside those
drawn from the traditional social sciences.
Qualitative and literary modes of marketing discourse are growing in popularity.
Art and aesthetics are increasingly firing the marketing imagination.
This series brings together the most innovative work in the burgeoning
interpretative marketing research tradition. It ranges across the methodological
spectrum from grounded theory to personal introspection, covers all aspects of the
postmodern marketing ‘mix’, from advertising to product development, and embraces
marketing’s principal sub-disciplines.
1. The Why of Consumption
Edited by S.Ratneshwar, Glen Mick and Cynthia Huffman
2. Imagining Marketing
Art, aesthetics and the avant-garde
Edited by Stephen Brown and Anthony Patterson
3. Marketing and Social Construction
Exploring the Rhetorics of Managed Consumption
By Chris Hackley
4. Visual Consumption
By Jonathan Schroeder
Also available in Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research series:
Representing Consumers: Voices, views and visions
Edited by Barbara B.Stern
Romancing the Market
Edited by Stephen Brown, Anne Marie Doherty and Bill Clarke
Consumer Value: A framework for analysis and research
Edited by Morris B.Holbrook
Marketing and Feminism: Current issues and research
Edited by Miriam Catterall, Pauline Maclaran and Lorna Stevens
529AF2F1-00B3-4BA9-97B4-F46BDF4FD814
Imagining Marketing
Art, aesthetics and the avant-garde
Edited by Stephen Brown and
Anthony Patterson
London and New York
529AF2F1-00B3-4BA9-97B4-F46BDF4FD814
First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 2000 Stephen Brown & Anthony Patterson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form
or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Brown, Stephen
Imagining marketing: art, aesthetics, and the avant-garde/Stephen
Brown & Anthony Patterson.
p. cm.—(Routledge interpretive marketing research)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-415-23486-7 (Print Edition)
1. Arts—Marketing. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)
I. Patterson, Anthony. II. Title.
III. Routledge interpretive marketing research series.
NX634.B765 2000
700′.68′8–dc21
00–055226
ISBN 0-203-36128-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-37384-7 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-23486-7 (Print Edition)
529AF2F1-00B3-4BA9-97B4-F46BDF4FD814
Contents
viii
List of contributors
xiii
Preface: Ceci n’est pas une préface
1
INTRODUCTION
3
Imago, lago, A-go-go (poem)
5
1 Figments for sale: marketing, imagination and the
artistic imperative
STEPHEN BROWN AND ANTHONY
PATTERSON
SECTION I Art 33
Awakening One Day (poem) 35
JOHN F.SHERRY, JR.
2 Édouard Manet, Calvin Klein and the strategic use 37
of scandal

JONATHAN E.SCHROEDER
3 The endless enigma or the last self-portrait (or, 53

what the marketer can learn from the artist)
IAN FILLIS
4 Marketers wake! A portrait of the artist as a 73

marketing man
ANTHONY PATTERSON AND STEPHEN
BROWN

5 Dealing with death: art, mortality and the 85
marketplace
STEPHANIE O’DONOHOE AND DARACH
TURLEY
6 ‘Trust no one’: science fiction and marketing’s 105
future/present
WARREN SMITH AND MATTHEW HIGGINS
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vi
7 The good, the bad and the jolly: taste, image and 121
the symbolic resistance to the coca-colonisation of
Denmark
SØREN ASKEGAARD AND FABIAN F.CSABA
SECTION II Aesthetics 137
New Shoes (poem) 139
SIMONE PETTIGREW
8 Presenting the past: on marketing’s re-production 141
orientation
STEPHEN BROWNELIZABETH C.HIRSCHMAN
AND PAULINE MACLARAN
SECTION III The avant-garde 185
The Spiral (poem) 187
JOEL WATSON
9 Tupperware, Tommy Moore, Teddy Bear and 189
Tipper Gore—Pete, Jamie, Stew, Oyster and
Morrie’s High School Reunion: titillation and
titivation in entelechic entitulation
MORRIS B.HOLBROOK
10 Going out in a blaze of glory: southern white trash 207
retrospections on my personal relationship with
Jesus, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and a
Pentecostal-Elvis-impersonating-professional-
wrestling-snake-handling-minister-who-sang-
Hank-Williams’-songs
CRAIG J.THOMPSON
11 Suburban soundtracks 225
HOPE J.SCHAU
12 Drove my Chevy to the levee 233
STEPHEN BROWN
13 A cultural biography of my Groucho glasses 241
RUSSELL W.BELK
14 Burning in the bush of ghosts 253
JOEL WATSON
CONCLUSION 269
The Rime of the Ancient Marketer (poem) 271
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vii
DAVID PICKTON
15 Beyond the pleasure principle: the death instinct of 273
pioneer studies in marketing
ROBERT GRAFTON SMALL
INDEX 283
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Contributors
Søren Askegaard was born in 1961. He is Associate Professor of Marketing at
SDU Odense University, Denmark and Professor of Marketing at Lund University,
Sweden. He has a Masters degree in Social Sciences from Odense University, a
post-graduate Diploma in Communication Studies from the Sorbonne University,
Paris and a PhD in Business Studies from Odense University. His research interests
are generally stuck in the field of consumer behaviour analysis from a cultural
perspective, although he finds it difficult to concentrate very long on one particular
topic. He has received two well-deserved (if you ask his wife) Danish research
awards. His work does not appear in most major journals, although he once
contributed to ‘The Flag Bulletin’.
Russell W.Belk is the N.Eldon Tanner Professor of Business Administration and
Professor of Marketing at the David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah.
He received his PhD at the University of Minnesota and has been at DESB for the
past 20 years. He previously had appointments at the University of Illinois and
Temple University, and has had visiting appointments at the University of British
Columbia (Canada), Craiova University (Romania), and Africa University
(Zimbabwe) as well as honorary appointments at Hong Kong City University
(Hong Kong), Edith Cowan University (Australia), and the University of Michigan
(USA). His areas of expertise are consumer behaviour, qualitative research, and
marketing and development. He is past president of the Association for Consumer
Research and president-elect of the Society of Marketing and Development. He
has received two Fulbright grants (1991–2 and 1998–9), is a fellow in the
Association for Consumer Research and the American Psychological Association,
and has received several awards for best journal articles, best journal reviewer, and
best instructor. He is also a recipient of the University of Utah Distinguished
Research Award and has published more than 250 books, articles, and videotapes.
Stephen Brown is an academic installation artist. He made his reputation with the
infamous Double Blind Review, a tent embroidered with the titles of all
the manuscripts he’s trashed under the protection of the peer review system. It was
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ix
more like a marquee, actually. The subversion continued with Desk, a provocative
exhibit comprising the artist’s actual two-drawer university desk, plus modesty
board, strewn with empty coffee cups, Post-It notes, overdue library books, journal
rejection letters and a mound of unanswered memoranda. So outrageous did Desk
prove, that the installation was attacked by two deranged marketing scientists, who
proceeded to tidy it up and almost got as far as sharpening the pencils before they were
physically restrained by security guards. Undaunted, Stephen is currently working
on Nix the Mix, a series of four monumental sculptures in the shape of giant pea
pods. Constructed from discarded copies of Kotler, the works are due to be
installed outside the Marketing Science Institute (Boston), the American Marketing
Association (Chicago), the Chartered Institute of Marketing (Cranfield) and the
European Marketing Academy (Brussels). Unless the Tate gets in touch first…
Fabian Faurholt Csaba was born in London in 1966. He has an MA in Languages
and International Commerce and received his PhD in Marketing and Consumer
Theory from University of Southern Denmark, Odense University in 1999. His
dissertation analysed the commercial and cultural significance of shopping malls. He
currently does most of his shopping and research in Ankara, Turkey, where he is
Assistant Professor of Marketing at Bilkent University’s Department of
Management. He is a founding member of the Center for Research in Transitional
Societies at Bilkent University.
Ian Fillis is Lecturer in Marketing in the Faculty of Management at the University
of Stirling, Scotland. He holds a BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of
Glasgow, an MA in Marketing from the University of Ulster and a PhD on the
internationalisation process of the smaller firm from the University of Stirling. His
main research interests focus on issues at the marketing and entrepreneurship
interface such as creativity and innovation, in addition to exploring international
marketing and export related phenomena. As well as attempting to follow a creative
approach to his research, he also enjoys investigating the world of art history,
visiting galleries, and supporting Liverpool Football Club.
Robert Grafton Small. Prematurely retired after posts in Marketing at
Strathclyde and Organisational Symbolism at St Andrews, Robert Grafton Small
has been damned with high praise and a meagre pension. Currently an honorary
associate of Keele University, he maintains an active interest in original research,
publishing and the occasional academic adventure.
Matthew Higgins is an alumnus of the Dudley Local Education Authority.
Having graduated in Sociology from Staffordshire Polytechnic, Matthew
temporarily escaped the dole queue by pursuing a career in Marketing. Matthew
is currently a Research Associate in the Management Centre at the University of
Leicester. He is still studying for his PhD at Keele University where he is
examining representations of ethics in marketing.
Elizabeth C.Hirschman is Professor of Marketing in the Faculty of Management
at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She has published articles in a wide
variety of social science and business journals. She is past president and treasurer of
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