Lecture Nine: Cultural Research

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Lecture NineCultural Research

• Stephen Brown
• www.sfxbrown.com

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Imagining Marketing Art, Aesthetics and the
Avant-Garde

• Edited by
• Stephen Brown and Anthony Patterson
• Routledge, London, 2000

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The Critics Raved!
Truth to tell, its magnificent
I have seen the future of marketing and its in
focus for once. Stretch your imagination with
Imagining Marketing
Ted Levitt
Shelby Hunt
Morris Holbrook
If you plan to buy one marketing book this year,
plan to buy this one
Avoid anxiety, acquire this book
Malcolm McDonald
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Shopper Typologies

• Stone - Economic, Personalising, Ethical
  Apathetic
• Kotler - Marshallian, Pavlovian, Freudian,
  Veblenian
• Stephenson Willett - Price-led, Store Loyal,
  Convenience, Recreational
• Lesser Hughes - Traditional, Inactive,
  Dedicated Fringe etc.

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The Apathetic Shopper

• Those who have no real interest in or actively
  dislike shopping and who appear to endure rather
  than enjoy the whole experience
• (Brown and Reid 1997, p. 80)

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The Sunday Times10/13/96

• A shopper died yesterday in what police are
  regarding as Britains first trolley rage
  fatality. Gordon Edwards, 71, a retired
  businessman, clashed with another customer in the
  car park of a supermarket in Darlington, Co.
  Durham. A man was helping police last night.

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Sex n Shopping

• We met in Exotic Fruit. I had first seen him in
  green vegetables, our eyes had - possibly - met,
  but we finally spoke over the Honeydew Melons.
  When he stopped by the counter, I had one melon
  in each hand, holding them up as though to
  imitate someone with huge bosoms. I offered them
  to him. How can you tell if these are ripe? I
  asked. He looked at me quickly. I was about to
  ask you that, he replied, giving the fruit
  little squeezes with his thumbs. My
• heart quickened.
• (Lonrigg, The Independent, 5/25/98)

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Cultural Marketing Research

• More insight from cultural artefacts than
  conventional research methods
• Broad definition of culture (low culture
  especially)
• Elevates art over science
• Different methods of evaluation
• Appropriate in post-shopper epoch

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Art for Arts Sake

• art can be a useful way of generating
  knowledge..art has much to contribute to consumer
  behaviourart may be seen to provide an
  attractive alternative to more traditional
  scientific means of consumer research
• (Belk 1986, p. 29)
• Fiction can serve as our reconnaissance into
  all those jungles and up those precipices of
  human behaviour that psychiatry, history,
  theology and sociology are too intellectually
  encumbered to try
• (Mailer 1991, p.159)
• Ironically, fiction is now the closest were
  likely to come to the truth and as such it should
  be loved and cherished
• (Young and Caveney 1992, p. viii)

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Cultural Marketing Research

• Examine works of art
• Explore artists themselves
• Apply tools of artistic appreciation
• Adopt artistic modes of representation

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Works of Art

• Books
• compulsive consumption (Fitzgerald)
• department store (Zola)
• advertising meaning (Lodge)
• salesmanship (Miller, Updike, Mamet)
• Generation X (Coupland)
• too-much-ness (Easton Ellis)
• shopping/brands/obsessive fandom (Fielding,
  Hornby)

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Books Etc.

• Harry Potter
• magic
• mystery
• imagination
• Nicolson Baker
• soda drinking
• shoelaces
• PLC

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Prell Life Cycle

• Prells green is too simple a green for us now
  the false French of its name seems kitschy not
  chic, and where once it was enveloped in my
  TV-soaked mind by the immediacy and throatiness
  of womanly voice-overs, it is now late in its
  decline, lightly advertised, having descended
  year by year through the thick but hygroscopic
  emulsions of our esteem , like the large
  descending pearl that was used in one of its
  greatest early ads to prove how lusciously thick
  it was.

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Scruples

• In Beverly Hills only the infirm and the senile
  do not drive their own cars. The local police
  are accustomed to odd combinations of vehicle and
  driver the stately, nearsighted retired banker
  making an illegal left-hand turn in his Dino
  Ferrari, the teenager speeding to a tennis lesson
  in a fifty-five thousand dollar Rolls-Royce
  Corniche, the matronly civic leader blithly
  parking her bright red Jaguar at a bus stop

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Scruples II

• Content analysis of brand names
• Difference by category
• Difference between books
• Evidence of product placement

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Never Mind the Width, Feel the Quality

• Hedonic consumption
• Obsessive collecting
• Gift-giving
• Shopper apathy
• Shopping addiction

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Shopaholics Anonymous

• There was something which almost relieved her
  constant tension in prowling daily through the
  boutiques and department stores of Beverly Hills,
  buying always buying - what did it matter if she
  needed the clothes or notBilly knew perfectly
  well as she walked into the General Store or
  Dorsos or Saks, that she was falling into the
  classic occupation of rich, idle women buying
  supremely unnecessary clothes to feed, but never
  fill, the emptiness within. Its that or get fat
  again, she told herself, as she walked up Rodeo
  or down Camden, feeling a sexual buzz as she
  searched through the windows for new merchandise.
  The thrill was in the trying on, in the buying.
  The moment after she had acquired something new
  it became meaningless to her.
• (Krantz, 1978, pp.205-6)

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Cultural Marketing Research Artists

• Edouard Manet
• Salvadore Dali
• Andy Warhol
• Richard Prince
• Duane Hanson
• Barbara Kruger

• Jeff Koons
• Mark Kostabi
• Damien Hirst
• Jenny Holtzer
• Komar Melamid
• Matthew Barney

Thomas Kinkade
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W.B. Yeats,Marketing Man

• William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
• Aesthete, Art for Art's Sake
• Wacko Willy/Willy Wacker
• Anti-marketing

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To a Wealthy Man who promised a Second
Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if
it wereproved the People wanted Pictures

• What cared Duke Ercole, that bid
• His mummers to the market-place,
• What th onion-sellers thought or did
• So that his Plautus set the pace
• For the Italian comedies?
• And Guidobaldo, when he made
• That grammar school of courtesies
• Where wit and beauty learned their trade
• Upon Urbinos windy hill,
• Had sent no runners to and fro
• That he might learn the shepherds will.

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Dancer From the Dance

• Family background
• Practical Business Experience
• Positioning in Poetic Marketplace
• Shameless Self-promotion

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Barter That Horn and Every Good

• You will find it a good thing to make verses on
  Irish legends and places and so forth. It helps
  origonality (sic) and makes ones verses sincere,
  and gives one less numerous compeditors (sic)
• (quoted in Brown 1999 64)

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All Changed, Changed Utterly

• Attitude to Work - 'Trade'
• Commerce in Work Itself
• Return of Marketing Repressed
• Fiddler of Dooney

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The Fiddler of Dooney

• When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
• Folk dance like a wave of the sea
• My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
• My brother in Mocharabuiee.
• I passed my brother and cousin
• They read in their books of prayer
• I read in my book of songs
• I bought at the Sligo fair.
• When we come at the end of time
• To Peter sitting in state,
• He will smile on three old spirits,
• But call me first through the gate

For the good are always the merry, Save by an
evil chance, And the merry love the fiddle, And
the merry love to dance And when the folk there
spy me, They will all come up to me, With Here
is the fiddler of Dooney! And dance like a wave
of the sea.
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Chronicle of the Celtic Marketing Circle

• Apocryphal
• Typical of Late 19th Century
• Celtic Order
• 'Marketing' Not Anachronistic

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Chronicle of the Celtic Marketing Circle

• O marketeers in time to come,
• Neath Beal Feirsdes fort fair
• The Saxon comb clasps every one
• Wan hank of wind-weft hair.
• To paradise, away, away,
• To paradise, away.

Still circles turn and turn again, Thro
Clandeboyes gull grey The Celt descend in veils
of rain As Dionysus deigns to pray. To paradise,
away, away, To paradise, I say.
Where Tone and Joy McCracken stood, In light of
days gone by The faery hound, Muirthemmes
brood Boars bustle in the sty. To paradise,
away, away, To paradise, today.
If object be the subject Yet of Sidhe stilld
Triton horn The merchant roiling moon reject On
McArts aureate morn. To paradise, away, away, To
paradise, aweigh.
A carious cave calls out in sorrow, When Dalriada
lifts in song The trading toil atones
tomorrow, Unless a register is wrong. To
paradise, away, away, To paradise, to stay.
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Slouching Toward Northwestern

• CMC, so what?
• Marketing Modalities
• Occult Order?
• Precise Date!

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Cultural Research Exercise

• Consider the Moet Chandon ad
• Who is it by?
• What age is it?
• Which epoch does it depict?
• Where it is set?
• What happens next?
• Why this approach?
• Realism or Magic Realism?

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Literary Theory(Textual Metaphor)

• New Criticism
• Psychoanalytical
• Marxist
• Reader-response
• Russian Formalists
• Structuralism
• Archetypal

• Post-structuralism
• Post-colonialism
• Feminism
• Bakhtinian
• New Historicism
• Autobiographical
• Anxiety of Influence

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Heritage Parks Study

• Retroscapes
• Locations (MoA, UFTM, U-AFP)
• Information gathering
• Conceptual framework
• Fredric Jameson

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Jamesonian Themes

• Absence
• Narrative
• Hyperspace
• Retrotopia
• Connectivity

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Absence

• Preserve way of life
• Preoccupation with whats not there
• Lack of information
• Discourse of non-presence
• Fall Homecoming
• Geneaology
• Whats left out by museums

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Narrative

• Heritage industry Big Bad Wolf
• Heritage park Prince Charming
• Intra-park stories Algeresque
• Spatial trail of tales
• Buildings, people, attendants
• Consumers engagement with park
• Incomplete, not cohere

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Hyperspace

• Decentred, to different degrees
• Disorienting, geography exhibits
• De-differentiation, blurred
• Really real, reality from fake

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Retrotopia

• Attitude to past, ambivalent
• Good old bad old days
• Schizophrenic
• Exactly as was, yet all the same
• Ironic attitude
• Post-tourist?

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Connectivity

• Heritage parks about connections
• Present to past
• People to past
• Family groups
• Marketing of parks
• Nostalgia for marketing
• Marketing makes parks real

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Big Question

• Should we, as marketing researchers, try to be
  artistic ourselves?

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Bigger Question

• How and in what way can we be artistic?

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Artistic Issues

• Creative writing?
• Other forms of artistry?
• Use of introspection?
• Politics of artistry?
• Evaluation of artistry?
• What criteria employ?
• Consider research report - possible to change?

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Judge That Ye Be Not Judged
Art
Criteria
Science