Download Document as a Zipped Word File

Marketing and Literature: The Anxiety of Academic Influence

Stephen Brown
Visiting Professor
Graduate School of Management
University of California, Irvine
Irvine
California

Abstract

Literary criticism, according to the leading theorist, Frank Lentricchia, involves striking texts together to see if they spark. Although many scholars have successfully struck marketing texts together, the sparks they have produced pertain primarily to marketplace phenomena rather than the academic marketing literature itself. Drawing upon Bloom's 'anxiety of influence' thesis, this paper strikes together the published works of two prominent marketing thinkers, Theodore Levitt and Morris Holbrook. It argues that far from being positioned at opposite ends of the academic spectrum - pure versus applied - they are, in literary terms at least, precursor and ephebe, father and son, one and the same.

Marketing and Literature: The Anxiety of Academic Influence

"The business executive should realize that the highest form of achievement is always art, never science, and that business leadership is an art worthy of his own respect and the public's plaudits."

(Levitt 1963: 224)

Introduction

In recent years, marketing and consumer research has been enlivened by the advent of perspectives predicated upon the liberal arts in general and literary theory in particular. Thanks to the pioneering endeavors of Russell Belk (1986a), Elizabeth Hirschman (1990), Linda Scott (1990) and Barbara Stern (1989a) amongst others, it is now widely acknowledged that significant insights into marketing and consumption phenomena may be obtained by means of the tools and techniques of literary criticism. Substantial though these achievements have been, however, there remains ample scope for additional research activity. Just as many aspects of the marketing discipline have yet to be investigated by theorists armed with the apparatus of literary appreciation, so too Literary Studies is replete with theoretical approaches and schools of thought that have not been brought to the attention of the academic marketing community thus far.

The purpose of the present paper is to contribute to this growing ‘marketing and literature’ literature by applying the techniques of literary theory to the marketing literature itself. While some may consider such an objective to be superfluous or unwarranted, the oft-excoriated state of marketing scholarship suggests that an examination of academic writing practices is long overdue. Rather than lacerating marketing researchers for their literary shortcomings, however, this paper adopts a purposely positive perspective by offering a detailed, theoretically informed ‘reading’ of the publications of two of the leading lights of marketing letters.  More specifically, it adapts a hitherto neglected (by marketing scholars) literary perspective, Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ thesis, to the seemingly contrasting yet strangely consonant published works of Theodore Levitt and Morris B. Holbrook.  The paper commences  with a brief summary of the literary literature in marketing and makes a case for literary analyses of the academic marketing corpus.  It continues with a consideration of Bloom’s celebrated ‘anxiety’ hypothesis and seeks to show how it is compatible with the academic publishing process per se.  The essay culminates in a comparative reading of the literary oeuvres of Levitt and Holbrook, coupled with an exegesis of two of their emblematic publications, and it concludes with a brief discussion of some methodological and epistemeological issues.  This paper, it must be emphasized, is not an exercise in righting the wrongs of marketing writing, it merely seeks to interrogate the work of two much-published, ostensibly antithetical marketing scholars and thereby demonstrate the utility of literary analyses of the marketing literature, as well as the potential for future research.

Marketing and Literature

It is now over a decade since Russell Belk (1986a: 25) suggested ‘one can learn more...from a reasonably good novel than from a “solid” piece of social science research’ and in that time numerous literary analyses of marketing and consumer phenomena have been conducted.  At the risk of oversimplifying an intricate and multi-faceted subfield of marketing scholarship, this body of published research can be divided into two broad categories: marketing in literature and literature in marketing.  The former, as its appellation implies, involves analyses of marketing artifacts portrayed in works of literature. Examples include Friedman’s (1985, 1987,1991) longitudinal investigation of brand names in best-selling works of post-war popular fiction; Spiggle’s (1986) studies of social values in comic books and underground comix; Goodwin (1992) and Fullerton’s (1994) examinations of consumption behavior and marketing consciousness in detective stories and nineteenth century pulp fiction respectively; Hirschman’s (1990) use of Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities to illustrate her hypothesis on secular immortality; Belk’s (1996) discourse on diverse novelistic treatments of the magical aura that the marketing system imparts to mundane goods and commodities; McCreery’s (1995) explication of early advertising treatments courtesy of a Dorothy Sayers’ detective story; and Brown’s (1995) comparative content analysis of brand ‘name-dropping’ in Scruples and American Psycho.

The literature in marketing perspective, by contrast, involves applying the tools and techniques of literary criticism to marketplace phenomena, advertising and promotion in particular.  Thanks largely to the close reading skills and, indeed, sheer industry of Stern and Scott, numerous schools of literary theory have been pressed into marketing service.  These include New Criticism (Stern 1988, 1989b), Archetypal Criticism (Stern 1995), Psychoanalytical Criticism (Stern 1990), Feminist Criticism (Stern 1993), Reader Response  Criticism (Scott 1994), Structuralism (Hirschman 1991), Marxism (Hirschman 1993), Poststructuralism (Scott 1992), Deconstruction (Stern 1996), and Bakhtinian (Brown et al 1997), to name but the most prominent.  This ‘lit-crit.’ arsenal has also been trained on marketing targets outside the advertising arena, albeit much less frequently.  To cite but a few high caliber examples: Levy (1981, 1994) has analyzed the ‘stories’ consumers tell about products and demonstrated how family anecdotes concerning food preferences relate to various Levi-Straussian myths - origin, emergence, migration and so on; Floch (1988) has applied Greimasian structuralism to the interview protocols of 400 French supermarket shoppers and used them to develop a new store layout, one which was radically different from the traditional arrangement of right angles, grid lines and serried ranks of monotonous display racks; and Heilbrunn (1996) has demonstrated how the principles of Narratology can be applied to brand loyalty, in so far as the four basic stages of the narrative chain - acquisition of competency, contract, performance and sanction - can be related to the on-going contacts between buyers and their preferred brands.

Despite the manifold achievements of the marketing literati, it is not unreasonable to suggest that much work remains to be done.  As the merest fraction of the western canon has been culled by marketing researchers to date - world literature, in fact, is almost totally untouched - there are ample opportunities to extend the marketing in literature perspective.  The future of literature in marketing looks equally bright since there are many schools of literary theory that have not yet been employed in a marketing context.  These range from such prominent latter-day critical positions as New Historicism (Veeser 1989, 1992) and Postcolonialism (Bhabha 1990, Boehmer 1995) to the recent Autobiographical turn, a stance that seeks to resurrect the author, whose ‘death’ had been precipitously announced by the Deconstructionists (Simpson 1995; Veeser 1996).  Another possibility, and the one that shall be pursued in the present paper, involves what may be termed the literature in marketing literature perspective; that is, applying the tools and techniques of literary appreciation to the academic marketing literature itself.

Clearly, such a suggestion is certain to ruffle a few, possibly many, scholarly feathers.  After all, it raises the specter of “the specter of science being compromised” (Varadarajan 1996: 5), even though marketing’s claim to scientific status is by no means universally acknowledged nor, for that matter, espoused (Anderson 1994; Kavanagh 1994; McDonagh 1995).  More pragmatically perhaps, the very idea of critical self-examination seems somewhat excessive, not to say narcissistic.  While there is undoubtedly a need for literary analysis of the works of, say, Shakespeare, Shelley, Yeats or Emerson, it is not only irrelevant to the academic marketing situation, but it wastes valuable time, energy and resources which would be better spent disseminating the marketing message or investigating practical, cutting-edge issues like networks and relationships.  Marketing academics, as one commentator makes abundantly clear, have better things to do with themselves than study allegory in Aaker, dialogism in Day, emplotment in Parasuraman, humor in Hunt, litotes in Lutz, symbolism in Sheth, versification in Varadarajan and cacophony in Kotler (Brown 1997).

Understandable though this disquiet undoubtedly is, a case can nonetheless be made for literary analyses of the marketing literature.  In the first instance, analogous critical exercises are not uncommon in adjacent academic disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, politics, geography and economics (e.g. Agger 1989; Barnes and Duncan 1992; Geertz 1988; Lukes 1995; McCloskey 1990; Schama 1992).  Such undertakings, admittedly, are comparatively rare in the broad field of Business and Management but, if longer established social sciences consider their writings worthy of study, the rationale for Marketing’s continued reluctance is unconvincing at best and unconscionable at worst.  In fact, failure to do so implies that academic marketing publications are unworthy of close  textual analysis - that they are inferior to those of cognate disciplines - which is simply not the case.

Second, investigations of the physical sciences reveal that, even in a ‘hard’ intellectual domain where expressive excesses are most likely to be ruthlessly expunged, the scientific literature is replete with allusion, metaphor, irony and the manifold tricks of the literary trade (Halliday and Martin 1993; Selzer 1993).  Locke (1992), for example, contends that truly revolutionary scientific papers - Crick and Watson, Einstein, Copernicus, Newton etc. - often adopt a mode of expression that is markedly different from  prevailing textual norms.  This is not to suggest that such papers are ‘merely’ rhetorical confections, as the more extreme proponents of scientific relativism may maintain, but that they endeavor to ‘draw attention’ to their revolutionary nature by means of appropriate literary devices.  The form, in other words, reflects the content. 

Third, it has often been asserted that practicing marketing managers do not read the academic journals and the publications they do peruse contain nothing of value (Denison and McDonald 1995; Mowen and Leigh 1996; Rau 1996). This commonplace critique of marketing scholarship is doubtless grossly exaggerated (each of us can readily testify that practitioners read our publications with profit but they seem to have problems with everyone else’s) and some would argue that the continuing managerial orientation has served to constrain the overall development of the discipline (e.g. Belk 1986b; Hirschman 1987).  If, however, this ostensible practitioner opprobrium is conceded and if, as Kerin (1996) repeatedly avers, “the advancement of science and practice” remains the mission of the marketing academy, then it behooves us to examine, consider and possibly modify the various modes of marketing expression that prevail in the pages of the principal periodicals. 

A fourth important facet of marketing scholarship - and scholarship generally - is the basic fact that the bulk of academic output consists of works of literature.  The companies, institutions, organizations, managers, salespersons, agents, households, shoppers, consumers, samples, surveys, interviews, attitudes, intentions, behaviors, concepts, models and theories that academics typically encounter are entirely textually mediated.  While such literary constructs may ultimately correspond to some phenomena in the ‘real’ world, these marketing artifacts only exist through several by no means transparent layers of textual tissue (published papers, draft papers, data analysis, computer printout, interview protocols, respondent representations, methodological guidelines, existing literature, textbooks and so on).  Marketing scholars, like it or not, are players in the literary game and, given the tools of literary criticism that are readily available, it seems perverse not to apply them to at least part of marketing’s compendious published corpus.

The fifth, final and in many ways most compelling point about the marketing literature is that by ignoring the very literariness of academic writing, or pretending that marketing prose is purely prosaic, we do ourselves a disservice, we undersell our abilities, we hide our literary lights under a banausic bushel. There is, to be sure, a small number of extant analyses of the ‘dark side’ of academic marketing discourse (e.g. Durgee (1991) and Stern (1990) on Ernest Dichter and Thompson (1993) on the notorious ‘realism versus relativism’ debate) but it is important to recognize that there are also some very gifted writers, poets and literary stylists in the marketing academy: Belk, Grafton Small, Hirschman, Sherry, Stern, Zinkhan, and, as shall be considered in detail below, Levitt and Holbrook.  Perhaps it is time to take a positive approach to marketing poetics and celebrate our papers, books, theses, dissertations, articles, essays and monographs rather than continuing to suffer from marketing manuscript myopia.

The Anxiety of Influence

By any reckoning Harold Bloom must be considered one of the foremost, if not the foremost, literary critics in the western world.  Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale, he has written more than twenty books, edited approximately thirty anthologies and, as general editor of the Chelsea House literary criticism series, contributed over 350 introductory chapters.  His meteoric academic ascent commenced at the comparatively early age of 29, when he published a radical reinterpretation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet whose work was regarded by the then New Critical orthodoxy as unworthy of serious consideration, let alone canonization.  This challenge to the critical elite was swiftly followed by a complete reassessment of the Romantic movement, a torrent of theoretical texts in the deconstruction- dominated decade of the 1970s and, of late, a magisterial sequence of mature works, most notably The Western Canon, which engage with the mainsprings of ‘the great tradition’ -  The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare etc. (Bloom 1994).

Variously described as a Deconstructionist, a neo-Gnostic, a Nietzschean, an exponent of psychoanalytical criticism and, not least, accused of  all manner of heinous intellectual crimes from misogyny and misrepresentation to inconsistency and obscurantism, Harold Bloom is all of these things and none.  Unlike the New Criticism that he helped vanquish or the Deconstructionists with whom he enjoyed a spirited sibling rivalry, Bloom has never sought to establish a ‘movement’ or school of literary criticism.  He is sui generis. There are no Bloomites or analogous epigones.  Outside of his own byzantine books, his theoretical framework is almost totally unemployed.  It is unimplemented and (some say deliberately) unimplementable.  Yet Bloom remains enormously influential, a commanding figure, one of the giants of contemporary literary theory.  He is ‘daringly original’ (Eagleton 1996: 183), ‘profoundly insightful’ (Allen 1994: 162), ‘strangely compelling’ (Baldick 1996: 176), ‘radically subversive’ (O’Hara 1985: 56) and ‘the bright particular star of our critical heavens’ (Lentricchia 1980: 345).  Indeed, for someone whose theoretical contributions are supposedly redundant, Bloom has spawned a voluminous secondary literature of commentary and exegesis, including several book-length studies (Allen 1994; de Bolla 1988; Fite 1985).

The principal reason for Bloom’s singular status is that he has taken a commonplace of literary criticism - the notion that authors are influenced by the publications of their predecessors - and completely rethought, reimagined, reinvented and, not least, renamed its basic premises.  Prior to Bloom’s revolutionary reinterpretation, the standard assumption was that literary influence consisted of borrowings from or allusions to the work of earlier writers (Bate 1970; Renza 1995).  By means of close textual study, moreover, it was possible to identify and evaluate the influence of, say, Homer on Virgil, Spencer on Milton, Milton on Wordsworth and so on.  The great tradition thus consisted of a progressive sequence of additions to and assimilations of poetic precursors, a cumulative standing on the shoulders of literary giants which attained its apogee in the Modernist movement of the present century.  Drawing, however, upon an idiosyncratic admixture of Freudian psychology, Nietzschean nihilism and cabalistic codices - what Bruss (1982: 285) rightly terms ‘the subterranean underside of western rationalism’ - Bloom formulated an agonistic, antagonistic, irredeemably antithetical interpretation of the forerunner-newcomer relationship.

In essence, this ‘anxiety of influence’ thesis posits that neophyte poets struggle to define themselves against the crushing weight of their ‘strong’ predecessors.  Suffering the agonies of ‘belatedness’, a primal fear that their precursors have already said all that can be said, thereby leaving no room for literary laggards like themselves, the would-be poets engage in head-to-head conflict, a figurative life or death struggle, with the established, anxiety-inducing titans.   Just as sons are oppressed by their fathers in the Oedipal triangle, and must be symbolically slain, so too the ephebe poet challenges his overshadowing antecedent by a process of  radical ‘misreading’ or ‘misprision’ (literally mis-taking).  This comprises an aggressive assimilation, a drastic distortion, a systematic remolding of the predecessor’s poems in the oeuvre of the novitiate.  The newcomer, then, writes in a way that reshapes, reworks, recasts and ultimately replaces the achievements of the precursor.  All poems, in other words, are misinterpretations of earlier poems, attempts to clear a space in the literary firmament for strong but anxiety-stricken arrivistes.

For Bloom (1973), the belated poet’s bid to best his betters consists of six separate but sequential stages of development.  Termed ‘revisionary ratios’, and aptly described as ‘full of abracadabras’ (Baldick 1996: 177), these comprise: clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonisation, askesis and apophrades.  Clinamen is a poetic misreading or mis-prision, where the ephebe endeavors to correct a perceived ‘error’ in the predecessor’s poem through a revisionary ‘swerve’ or sidestep.  Tessera requires the identification of something incomplete about the forerunner’s corpus which is brought to antithetical fruition in the work of the newcomer.  Kenosis comprises the tyro’s attempt to break with the precursor by disavowing his own and, by implication, the father figure’s poetic powers.  This leads to daemonisation, a movement towards a personalized counter-sublime, based upon a ‘higher power’ than that employed by the antecedent poet.  Askesis commences the return to the predecessor by means of a purgatorial period of isolation and retreat into the self.  ‘Burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism’ (Bloom 1973: 15), the ephebe finally enters apophrades, where the progenitor is transcended and subsumed.  So much so, that it almost seems as if the earlier poet’s work is a subset of the later’s, as though the latter had actually composed, or made possible, the former’s signature accomplishments.

According to Bruss (1982), Bloom’s revisionary ratios involve the three basic stages of affiliation, denial and reaffiliation, which are predicated in turn upon the archetypal triadic pattern of glory-fall-recovery that is a staple of the western literary tradition from ancient myth and medieval fairy tale to television mini-series and blockbuster Hollywood movie.  In the series of books that followed Anxiety of Influence, however, Bloom (1975a, 1975b, 1976, 1982) has remade, remolded and remodeled his revisionary schema to produce a framework of labyrinthine, almost impenetrable complexity.  Parallels, for example, have been drawn between the six original ratios and the six key rhetorical tropes of  irony, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, metaphor and matalepsis, as well as the Freudian defense mechanisms of  reaction-formation, reversal, regression, repression, introjection and projection.  The  complete schema has also been placed within a larger six-phase movement termed (after Freud and Derrida) ‘The Scene of Instruction’ and applied not only to poetic oeuvres, individual poems and the creative life cycle of strong poets but to works of criticism and writing generally.  Key concepts, what is more, have been elided, glossed and massaged to such an extent that they comprise nothing less than an amorphous terminological pudding into which Bloom periodically dips his critical thumb and pulls out a lexical plumb.

Despite its conceptual curlicues, analytical arabesques and latter-day gnostic gargoyles, Bloom’s basic framework is comparatively straightforward and, as several commentators have noted, bears more than a passing resemblance to Popper’s philosophical prognostications concerning bold conjectures and attempted refutations (Baldick 1996; Pease 1994; Spikes 1997).  Indeed, although the anxiety thesis concentrates on pugnacious inter-generational conflict, it is important to appreciate that the poets involved may not see it that way.  The life or death struggle is not only metaphorical but subconscious, in so far as the creative efflorescence of the ephebe is inspired by the accomplishments of the precursor (the inchoate poetic impulse is inside the adept but it is precipitated by outside factors - Bloom describes this epiphanic sensation of discovery-cum-destiny as being ‘flooded’ or akin to a ‘rebirth’).  The neophyte’s attitude to the father figure, furthermore, is essentially ambivalent, an uneasy amalgam of love, admiration and envy, coupled with undertones of rivalry and hate.  Thus the belated poet unthinkingly palisades his own imaginative space by reading the parent poem in a revisionist manner or, strange though this may seem, by not reading it at all.  However, since he cannot avoid the precursor’s influence, not even by ignoring it, the best the ephebe can hope for is to write in such a strong manner that he assimilates the work of the forerunner and creates the illusion of primacy.  In these admittedly counterintuitive circumstances, where the ‘meaning’ of any poem is, in effect, another poem, the place of the critic is to practice what Bloom terms ‘antithetical criticism’.  That is to say, literary critics must read each poem as its author’s misreading of an earlier poem, or of poetry in general, and just as strong poets are doomed to misread, so too are strong critics.  For Bloom, in fact, all criticism is prose poetry and all poetry versified criticism.

The anxiety of influence thesis is undoubtedly complex, unfailingly extravagant and utterly incomprehensible in places, albeit no more so than the author-excising afflatus of the Deconstructionists.  Yet a moment’s reflection suggests that it is not entirely irrelevant to the academic marketing context.  The published reflections of the discipline’s intelligentsia unfailingly draw attention to the inspiration provided by and debt of gratitude owed to an illustrious predecessor (e.g. Bartels 1988; Hollander 1995).  True, these remarks may simply be a rhetorical convention, since failing to acknowledge one’s mentor implies rampant egomania, nevertheless the ephebe-predecessor relationship is a widely accepted aspect of academic life.  Equally ubiquitous, albeit much less frequently discussed, is the profound anxiety that many tyro scholars feel on entering the field.  As ‘everything’ has already been said on the subject of, say, brand choice, impulse purchasing or the internationalization process - or so it seems -  how can they possibly contribute to the conversation or clear a space for themselves in the great marketing scheme of things?  Indeed, some form of intellectual space clearing is a standard trope - arguably the standard trope - at the commencement of almost every published academic paper.  Introductory paragraphs are replete with spatial-cum-positioning expressions like ‘gap’, ‘lack’, ‘silence’, ‘situate’, ‘open up’, ‘lacunae’, ‘caesura’, ‘surprising omission’, ‘strangely neglected’, ‘curiously overlooked’, ‘contribute to body of knowledge’, ‘add to growing stream of research’ and numerous others besides.  More importantly perhaps, failure to employ some form of space clearing literary device suggests that a contribution is not being made and, if that is the case, there is no compelling rationale for publication in the first place. 

It is also an axiom of intellectual life that publications, as Bloom disconcertingly maintains, mean next to nothing in themselves, since they only really exist in relation to others.  As papers are unfailingly positioned relative to the extant body of knowledge (not to do so, again, invites immediate rejection), their meaning actually comes from saying what the existing literature does not say (Agger 1989).  After all, to say what has already been said is to say nothing (hence, the oft-lamented lack of published replication exercises in marketing, albeit from a Bloomian perspective this absence makes perfect sense).  Similarly, to say what has never been said is to say nothing, because there is no body of work - there are, in effect, no standards, no criteria - against which the worth of a contribution can be assessed (hence the outcry and astonishment that greets genuinely original publications, such as Gould’s (1991) notorious ‘self-manipulation’ paper).

If this somewhat tendentious line of argument is accepted, then even the most extravagant aspects of Bloom’s theory no longer seem as far-fetched as they at first appear.  It is arguable, for example, that it is not strictly necessary to have read Philip Kotler’s corpus in order to be cognizant of his massive, overshadowing influence throughout the field (Meamber and Venkatesh 1995).  As the sea of Kotler-clone textbooks amply testify, he has set the ‘terms of discourse’ for that particular component of our discipline’s domain.  His unavoidable authorial ‘presence’ not only determines what can and can’t be said about marketing management but the manner in which what is deemed sayable is in fact said.  (The same is also true to some extent of George Day in the marketing strategy sub-domain, Shelby Hunt in marketing thought and, for those on the interpretive wing of consumer research, the writings of Russell Belk, Elizabeth Hirschman and Barbara Stern).  Likewise, the illusion of primacy, where the present appears to precede the past, is nowhere better illustrated than in the recent, much-lauded Relationship Marketing paradigm shift. According to Sheth and Parvatiyar’s (1993) historical overview, relationship marketing was actually the primal form of marketing prior to the transactional lapse that transpired sometime in the 1960s and 70s.  Their paper is not only a wonderful expropriation of the archetypal glory-fall-recovery schema but, in an interesting endorsement of the ‘marketing and literature’ standpoint, the authors actually employ Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as a key piece of corroborative evidence.

The Marketing Pantheon

Strictly speaking, of course, the anxiety thesis does not apply to broad paradigmatic shifts, or postulated shifts, in the tectonic plates of scholarship.  It pertains, rather, to the literary endeavors of ‘strong poets’, the undisputed intellectual titans of the discipline. In this respect, few would deny that in the century or so of marketing’s academic existence, numerous celebrated thinkers have occupied center stage - Charles Parlin, Paul Converse, Wroe Alderson and Philip Kotler, to name but a few.  However, it is fair to say that only one has been elevated to the dizzy heights of gurudom.  Theodore Levitt, virtually alone among the discipline’s intelligentsia, is routinely referred to in commentaries on management thought as the voice, the personification, the indefatigable proponent of marketing and the marketing concept (Clutterbuck and Crainer 1990; Kennedy 1991; Micklethwait and Wooldridge 1996). Thanks to a string of seminal and much-cited papers, an extended sequence of provocative editorials in the Harvard Business Review and a veritable catalogue of best-selling books and anthologies, Levitt is not simply primus inter marketing pares but almost in an academic league of his own.  According to Kennedy (1991), ‘Marketing myopia’ is, at 500,000 copies plus, one of the best-selling HBR reprints of all time.  His 1983 volume The Marketing Imagination has been translated into no less than eleven languages.  Another anthology, Innovation in Marketing, won the annual Academy of Management Award for best business book and Levitt has had more articles published in HBR than any other management guru, winning four McKinsey Awards for best paper along the way.  For many practicing managers, Theodore Levitt is more than a skillful advocate of the marketing cause, Theodore Levitt is marketing.

If Levitt is the personification of marketing scholarship for numerous non-marketers, Morris B. Holbrook is the personification of scholarship within the academic marketing community.  W.T. Dillard Professor of Marketing at Columbia University, New York, Holbrook is perhaps the discipline’s most outspoken opponent of managerial orientation - the widely held belief that business schools exist to serve the perceived needs of businesspeople - and articulate advocate of marketing research, pure research, for its own sake.  His one-man campaign against the philistinism of practitioners, as well as their manifold academic apologists, has been waged in a series of monographs, reviews, essays and books, most notably Postmodern Consumer Research (Hirschman and Holbrook 1992), The Semiotics of Consumption (Holbrook and Hirschman 1993) and Consumer Research: Introspective Essays on the Study of Consumption (Holbrook 1995).  True, his own arrestingly written accounts of these endeavors suggest that Holbrook has staggered from resounding defeat to resounding defeat - he frequently warns novitiates not to follow in his footsteps - but a long and distinguished record of publication in the premier academic outlets suggests otherwise.  As one cynic has rightly observed, ‘Morris has published more papers on the problems of getting published than most of us have publications’ (Brown 1997: 275)

On the surface at least, Levitt, a Jewish immigrant, and Holbrook, a mid-western WASP, couldn’t be more different.  Sheer productivity, illustrious careers and the admiration of their peers aside, the former epitomizes the pragmatic end of the marketing spectrum.  Despite his august academic base in possibly the world’s most prestigious business school, Levitt writes short, punchy and largely citation-free articles for and about practicing managers in para-practitioner-orientated publications, principally Harvard Business Review (see Levitt 1963, 1969, 1983, 1991).  His carefully crafted textual persona is that of a cracker-barrel management philosopher, a purveyor of  wry, homespun, horny-handed, no-nonsense, seat-of-the-pants, non-theoretical, eminently implementable pearls of marketing wisdom.  One almost imagines him in a rocking chair on a balmy southern porch, idly whittling, chewing tobacco  and expectorating gobbets of practical advice to a circle of admiring practitioners.  Holbrook, by contrast, is not only an erudite exponent of the impractical and unimplementable, but he is the author of long, learned, intellectually challenging, citation-strewn papers about abstruse philosophical, literary and aesthetic issues in a wide variety of non-practitioner orientated journals (e.g. Holbrook 1990, 1991, 1996a).  His equally carefully crafted textual persona is that of the urbane urbanite, a widely read, if sometimes less than worldly-wise, denizen of literary salons, art galleries, bijou restaurants, chic shops, fashionable therapists and avant-garde, off-Broadway productions.  In short, the archetypal east coast intellectual-cum-culture-vulture-cum-art-for-art’s-sake aesthete.

Parallels and Correspondences

Closer inspection, however, indicates that Levitt and Holbrook are not in fact polar opposites but one and the same, precursor and ephebe, father and son.  Interestingly, this parallel is nowhere better illustrated than in their respective textual personae.  The important thing to appreciate about these presentations of self is that they are literary constructs - the ‘real’ person may be quite different, albeit they may find it necessary to play the part for public consumption - but in both cases the authorial ‘self’ is brilliantly constructed out of the most unpromising material.  Levitt is a leading academic authority in a leading academic institution yet he manages convincingly to portray himself as a practical man, an ordinary Joe, one-of-the-guys.  This portrayal, paradoxically, is reinforced by the cerebral milieu from which he hails, thanks to his periodic denigration of woolly-headed academics and their impractical ilk.  Holbrook, conversely, has successfully donned the mantle of the cosmopolitan, high-browed man-of-letters, even though as a marketing academic from a business school he occupies a position that in cerebral circles would be considered irredeemably boorish, unspeakably philistine, the lowest of the literary low.  Marketing may be a noble academicpursuit, with a long and distinguished record of conceptual achievements, but it is not perceived thus by the intelligentsia.

Both Levitt and Holbrook, then, are demonstrably creative writers - characterization is generally regarded as one of the hardest literary effects to achieve (Burroway 1996; Feldman 1996) - nevertheless their ostensibly contrasting authorial personae only serve to divert attention from their often astonishing stylistic similarities.  Prominent among these is the authors’ sheer love of language, incessant wordplay and, not least, vast vocabularies.  Thus, Levitt’s papers are replete with alliteration (‘complex congeries’, ‘fabulous fungibility’, ‘vigorous vacuity’), para-Wildean epigrams (‘clothes may not make the man but they help make the sale’, ‘inaction is the only inexhaustible form of executive energy’, ‘an effective manager develops the ability to hear what others are not saying’) and all manner of arcane-cum-idiosyncratic words (‘protean’, ‘incubus’, ‘abjure’, ‘munificent’, ‘crescive’).  So much so, that he is quite capable of coining neologisms if the cadence of the sentence calls for it (‘vendables’, ‘informational’, ‘ineffectualness’, ‘errorlessly’, ‘vertglomerate’, ‘autonomic’).  The same is true of Holbrook, where in addition to alliteration (‘egocentric eccentricity’, ‘esoteric endeavors’, ‘fantasies, feelings and fun’), aphoristic inclinations (‘ask not what semiotics can do for marketing but what marketing can do for semiotics’) ceaseless sesquipedalianism (‘ailurophobe’, ‘paean’, ‘contrapuntal’, ‘parsimonious’, ‘mein’, ‘aforementioned’) and sheer inventiveness (‘catarche’, ‘ethology’, ‘antibanausic’, ‘kroywen’), etymological considerations and subtle shades of linguistic meaning are a constantly recurring feature of his work.  In truth, Miriam-Webster is probably Holbrook’s single most frequently cited source.

In a similar vein, both Levitt and Holbrook are masters of metaphor.  The latter’s career-spanning passion for animalistic conceits is perhaps his principal literary characteristic, certainly the one for which he is best known.  Amongst other symbolic creatures, Holbrook alludes to and draws inspiration from elephants, birds, gorillas, turtles, fish, dogs, roaches and, above all, cats (Holbrook 1995).  Not only does he playfully portray himself as ‘Morris the Cat’ (Holbrook 1997a), but he has written at length about purported personality differences between cats and dogs and the lessons these contain for scholarly endeavor (Holbrook 1989, 1990a).  Levitt is equally, if much less ostentatiously, inclined to indulge in tropeography.  Although animals appear fairly rarely - albeit he alludes to Berlin’s famous hedgehog-fox distinction, notes Napoleon’s rabbit versus lion leadership analogy and at one point refers to ‘cat-like paws’ -  anthropomorphism figures very prominently in Levitt’s figurative armory.  He often makes insightful comparisons between business organizations and the human body, be it in terms of growth, development, nutrition, disease, mortality or interpersonal relationships (‘the throbbing pulse of reality the data sought to capture’, ‘the industrialization of the service sector industries...is just now crawling out of infancy and seems on its way to adolescence’, ‘companies that don’t metabolize information right will see small problems and discontinuities metastasize into major maladies’). Games and activities are another major source of Levittite allusion - chess, checkers, poker, bridge, dance, music and baseball - as indeed they are to Holbrook, whose climactic peroration in his recent philosophical proclamation was predicated entirely upon a bathetic footballing analogy: ‘One might recapture, however evanescently, that brief but boundless moment of ecstatic insight in which fleeting truth crashes in around us, arrested in mid-flight by the urgent grasp of our wildest lunging embrace’ (Holbrook 1995: 368).

As the above passage suggests, another literary trait that Levitt and Holbrook have in common is hyperbole.  Both are such arresting stylists that their sheer writing ability sometimes seems to get the better of them.  This gives rise to passages of prose that, if not exactly purple, certainly contain more than a hint of mauve.  Levitt routinely makes exaggerated comparisons between the lower-level employees of nondescript marketing organizations and the creative giants of western civilization, as well as the occasional mythical figure (Cellini, Mozart, Michaelangelo, Rubens, Handel, Prometheus etc.).  Likewise, the undeniably laudable achievements of hamburger vendors, insurance agencies, plastics extruders and sheet steel manufacturers are frequently compared, without the faintest trace of irony, to those of Copernicus, Bernoulli, Boyle, Lavousier, Darwin or Newton.  Indeed, during his more extreme passages of essayistic overdrive, Levitt teeters on the brink of tautology and alliterative absurdity (‘the paradox that puzzles and perplexes: precisely as the marketing concept has advanced over the years, so, perversely, has the irritation it’s produced, even among its practitioners’).  Holbrook is no less hyperbolic - if anything moreso - and as someone who has made a convincing case for adopting increasingly lyrical modes of marketing expression, especially when emotional considerations are at issue (e.g. Holbrook 1990), he cannot be accused of failing to practice what he preaches.  To cite but a few far from atypical examples: ‘in an academic world dominated by marketing researchers preoccupied with buying, as opposed to consuming, consumer researchers face a lonely battle if they elect to sing about the tarnished vestiges of the perfect consumption that characterized lost innocence’; ‘They have scraped away the barnacles of utilitarian concerns, have escaped the perilous flood of managerial relevance, and have explored fresh woods or new pastures by developing approaches to the study of consumption that they see as intrinsically worthwhile and even joyful’; Thus...does it offer the beautiful vision of a transcendent moment in which, moved by honest integrity, an audience of music lovers - or students - might sit very still.  And listen.’

While some may consider such expositional effulgences to be almost as far from conventional social science reportage as it is humanly possible to be, they do not do justice to the supreme literary abilities of both scholars and, taken out of context, may conspire to give the impression that the authors are little more than bombastic propagandists.  To some extent, of course, they are - like many creative people Holbrook and Levitt hold very strong views on a range of (marketing-related) issues and are not reluctant to express them - but these opinionated excesses are leavened by their well-developed and immensely engaging senses of self-deprecatory humor.  Holbrook often portrays himself as an uncoordinated, occasionally hapless, incompetent, whether it be in his capacity as sportsman, scholar, handyman, traveler, musician, collector or cat wrangler, and is ever-prepared to proffer amusing asides about the absurdities of life in academia or the Big Apple (the roach invasion, standing in line at airports, McMarketing, the pre-submission rejection letter sent to a colleague, autodriving his cat etc.).  Levitt’s textual self is equally personable thanks to his wry refusal to take himself or his gurudom seriously.  Hence he ‘complains’ about being an underpaid academic, even though his consultancy income must be astronomical (‘as a certified academic, who is paid, however paltry the sum, to think teach and advise’); he attacks professorial prolixity in prolix professorial prose (‘literary obfuscation masquerading as wisdom’); he coins slogans about the mindless sloganizing of management gurus (‘man lives not by bread alone but mostly by catchwords’); and he’s quite prepared to recant on his earlier, vigorously adumbrated opinions - such as the centrality of marketing, the necessity for change or the relative importance of large and small companies - without so much as an apology, let alone a sheepish, gee-guys-I-got-it-wrong grin.  On the contrary, his climbdown position seems to resemble ‘more fool you for taking the advice of an academic, you should have had more sense, you know what professors are like, you have no-one to blame but yourselves’ (e.g. Levitt 1969, 1983).

Alongside hyperbole, humor and well-nigh heroic chutzpah, our literary duo share several other textual characteristics that some more conventionally-minded scholars may find disconcerting, distasteful or indeed disingenuous.  The first of these is sexuality.  Again and again Levitt makes risqué remarks which may have been permissible in decades past but are regarded with much less equanimity today (‘The age of the blind date or the one-night stand is gone.  Marriage is both more convenient and more necessary’, ‘not the cold figures in our intended’s balance sheet but our warm feelings about our intended’s figure’, ‘the middle-aged man today wants to believe that he still has a good fighting chance for the occasional conquest...he does it in part by dieting and by sartorial fastidiousness.  The same is true of women.  They feel forced to remodel themselves into grotesque apparitions of attractive youthfulness, if only to keep their restless husbands from roaming after more gamey prey’).  In fairness, he frequently goes out of his way to venerate the ‘housewife’ and seeks to excuse his parasexism by asserting that the books are written for a predominantly masculine audience, which is true.  Nevertheless these priapic passages can only have served to reinforce the phallocentric propensities that have long pervaded, and continue to pervade, marketing scholarship (Fischer and Bristor 1994).  Holbrook, likewise, is nothing if not libidinous and in addition to his openly-acknowledged acquisition of semi-pornographic magazines and videos, he has volunteered numerous detailed textual analyses of the relationship between consumption and concupiscence (e.g. the Plumtree’s potted meat episode in Ulysses), as well as a lengthy retelling of his infantile Oedipal trauma (Holbrook 1988, 1991, 1993).  Somewhat surprisingly, he also expresses surprise at female academics’ apparent failure to respond positively to his self-proclaimed espousal of the feminist cause (Holbrook 1995).

Holbrook, of course, is likely to take umbrage at such a suggestion, albeit in so doing he merely exhibits another of his and Levitt’s less captivating textual characteristics.  Call it what you will - undue sensitivity, touchiness, paranoia, narcissism, self-absorption, the artistic temperament, rampant egomania - but the personae of both Holbrook and Levitt come across as extremely thin-skinned.  The former repeatedly rails against his maltreatment at the hands of malicious reviewers (e.g. Holbrook 1986, 1996a), those conspiratorial individuals who have gone out of their way to thwart his intellectual ambitions (often quoting them at length), and he rarely misses an opportunity to berate those who fail to pay appropriate tribute to his manifold published papers (cf. Colin Campbell, a very distinguished British sociologist, for his ignorance of Holbrook’s hedonistic paradigm).  Likewise, Levitt has pursued a long, bitter, almost libelous textual vendetta against Tom Peters, the management guru who usurped his conceptual USP of customer-orientated organizations (‘sweaty evangelist’, ‘devout acquisition’, ‘evangelical zealot’), though the snake-oil salesmen of motivational research were given equally slanderous treatment at an earlier stage of his career as management philosopher and pundit (‘imprecise and artless’, astrologers’, ‘untrustworthy’, ‘blind guessing’, ‘rudimentary’, ‘sheer pretentiousness and gross negligence’).

A final literary parallel between Levitt and Holbrook is their inordinate fondness for repetition.  Besides their anaphoric inclinations (that is, using the same words to start successive sentences: ‘I ask...I ask...I ask...I ask’, ‘And it worked, like magic’), both authors continually recycle their own work, albeit with minor editorial adjustments to suit the exigencies of the situation.  Part of this propensity is attributable to the anthologization process  - each has produced a number of  ‘greatest hits’ packages - but it also seems to reflect a shared belief that well-written passages are infinitely recyclable.  Thus Levitt has a repertoire of stock phrases and aphorisms which he repeatedly plunders as the occasion demands (‘what’s new?’, ‘fast history’, ‘what needs to happen for that to happen?’, ‘the solution to a problem changes the problem’).  Holbrook is equally promiscuous with his prose having rehashed his comments on romanticism, defense of subjective personal introspection, explanation of the stereoscopic viewing process and, not least, his celebrated cat versus dog comparison on copious occasions.  So marked is this recapitulative inclination that both authors have developed what can only be described as signature textual stratagems, recognizable rhetorical devices which immediately signal the Holbrookian or Levittite ‘presence’.  The former is characterized by aestheticized epigraphs, poetic inserts and, above all, alliterative triplets (‘ads, artworks and aesthetics’, ‘patience, persistence and perseverance’, ‘bears, Baltimore and baseball’, ‘diversity, divergence or diffuseness’, ‘bombs, burnouts and bigamists’), whereas the latter typically employs bold or outrageous opening statements (‘Greed is boring’, ‘Advertising works’, ‘Never leave well enough alone’, ‘There is no such thing as a commodity’), incomparably racy prose (achieved by the use of ‘dynamic’ adjectives and adverbial clauses like ‘increasingly’, ‘escalating’, ‘relentlessly’, ‘irresistible’) and, as often as not, homioteluton titles ending in ation (‘globalization’, ‘industrialization’, ‘pluralization’, ‘youthification’, ‘Chrystlerization’, ‘differentiation’, ‘imagination’).

Notwithstanding their minor textual peccadilloes - studies of supremely creative people often draw attention to their sensuality, sensitivity and solipsism bordering on monomania (Buzan and Keene 1994; Csikszentmihalyi 1996; Eysenck 1995) - perhaps the most outstanding characteristic shared by Levitt and Holbrook is sophistry.  Now, this is not to suggest that these distinguished marketing scholars go out of their way to mislead or hoodwink their credulous colleagues.  On the contrary, Levitt and Holbrook are unquestionably sincere in their beliefs, are as one in their desire to convince the skeptics of the righteousness of their cause and, indeed, the principal reason behind the above-mentioned textual regurgitation is a shared assumption that their message is sufficiently important to warrant continual repetition and reinforcement.  Nevertheless, after reading these authors’ essays one is left with a sneaking suspicion that sheer style has triumphed over mere content; that rhetorical slight of hand has disguised the perceived shortcomings in the argument, however minor; that they have anticipated any objections and skillfully steered the readers away from such base and ignoble thoughts.  Levitt, for example, often makes statements which seem entirely plausible, not to say compelling, in context but when examined more carefully are inconsistent at best and impossible at worst (he variously stresses and dismisses the importance of packaging, pricing, differentiation, change, stability, youth, experience, small companies, large companies information technology etc.).  Similarly, despite Holbrook’s formidable ability to assemble supporting evidence for his preferred subjective personal introspection procedure, the ‘sample of one’ objection is never quite overcome, a faint air of authorial manipulation remains (see O’Guinn 1996; Uusitalo 1996). Again, this does not mean that Levitt and Holbrook are conceptual charlatans or con-artists - quite the reverse - yet, as with gifted stage magicians, we suspect that these prestidigitators of prose, these textual thaumaturges, these literary illusionists have somehow tricked us, but we don’t quite know how they managed to pull it off.

Precursor and Ephebe

Superb stylists though both scholars are, a parallel reading of their respective literary oeuvres leads to the inevitable critical conclusion that Levitt is significantly better than Holbrook.  Although the latter is widely regarded as the Poet Laureate of the marketing academy, there is nothing in the Holbrookian corpus to compare with Levitt’s brilliantly evocative description of disgraced financier Ivan Boesky, ‘paraded before the public with ill-gotten dollars dribbling from his pockets’ or his affectionate parody of the marketing utopia portrayed in travel brochures ‘gloriously glossy pictures of elegant rooms in distant resort hotels set by the shimmering sea’.  When set against Levitt’s featherlite evocations, especially his magnificent, less-is-more epigrams (‘success comes to those who attack each task with the passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist’), Holbrook’s prose seems ever so slightly ponderous, pretentious, pompous and, on occasion, patronizing.  Whereas Levitt wears his learning lightly and makes frequent allusion to works of scholarship, which his readership may or may not recognize (‘The Marketing Imagination’, ‘Marketing and its Discontents’), Holbrook feels obliged to explain everything, just in case the dullards in his audience don’t get it (‘note that Campbell’s title plays on Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’).  The upshot is a blizzard of citations, quotations and condescending commentary, which only serves to detract from his undoubted literary talents.  True, even in his most poetic moments, Holbrook is prone to opt for an ‘easy’ or derivative image (‘as summer follows spring’, ‘dance with the angels’, ‘soar aloft on beating wings’) but, unlike Levitt, who peaked early and trod literary water for the bulk of his career, Holbrook has improved markedly with the passage of time and, as shall become apparent, eventually eclipsed his poetic precursor.

As a very gifted writer, Holbrook must always have been mindful, either consciously or unconsciously, of the immense creative shadow cast by Theodore Levitt.  Indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that Holbrook suffers, or has suffered, from the anxiety of academic influence.  In describing his Presidential Address at the 1989 ACR conference - a speech, incidentally, which comprised the fullest expression of his aestheticized research agenda - he observes that ‘the structure of the situation was perfectly calculated to give me heavy anxiety attacks, especially because, by the time I got my turn, almost every conceivably worthwhile thing had been said by my many distinguished predecessors’ (Holbrook 1995: 260). This is as clear a statement of the anxiety thesis as one could possibly imagine.  Holbrook, furthermore, has offered a vivid account of the ‘flooding’ process (internal to the poet but brought to fruition by an external stimulus) which precedes the unrolling of Bloom’s revisionary ratios.  During a prolonged period of Freudian psychotherapy in the late 1970s, he relates that he felt deeply frustrated by his academic career, dedicated as it then was to positivistic path analyses of automobile purchasing behavior.  His ordinarily silent therapist asked why he didn’t investigate musical consumption activities - at the time, a non-scholarly yet personally fulfilling sideline - and this proved to be the turning point in Holbrook’s personal intellectual trajectory. 

While the above may be deemed indicative of Holbrook’s anxiety proneness, as does his repeated invocation of the structure, departure, reconciliation stages of the creative process (the same primordial triadic schema upon which Bloom’s thesis rests), it does not establish an explicit connection with Theodore the Father.  Obviously, as Levitt was one of the few strong poets in the academic marketing firmament, there weren’t that many alternatives available to Morris the Son at the commencement of his academic career.  However, there is some substantive evidence of an incipient precursor-ephebe relationship.  When Holbrook completed his PhD in 1975, he applied for an academic position at Harvard, his Alma Mater, but was spurned by the Business School, a rejection that still rankles (Levitt was a lecturer at the time and shortly thereafter appointed head of Harvard’s marketing division).  His very first publication was a vituperative review of one of Levitt’s books on selling, an attack which prompted a mortifyingly amiable response from the maligned author.  For years, furthermore, Holbrook taught a course on strategy which used Levitt’s marketing myopia as a starting point, but then went on to demonstrate that total customer orientation was a recipe for organizational disaster. 

More meaningfully perhaps, it is possible to discern direct textual connections between Levitt and Holbrook. Apart from the broad stylistic commonalties noted earlier, it is noteworthy that Levitt (1983: 49) actually used the somewhat unusual noun ‘consummation’ - the terminological centerpiece of Holbrook’s (1987) aesthetic vision - several years prior to his ambitious ephebe (ironically, in his celebrated paper on ‘globalisation’, a piece that Holbrook (1997b) has recently excoriated).  Similarly, they are both prone to press esoteric words like ‘paean’, ‘avatar’, ‘obeisance’, ‘apotheosis’ and ‘ratiocinated’ into stylistic service, all of which are comparatively rarely encountered in the mainstream academic marketing literature.  One of Levitt’s signature stylistic devices (anadiplosis), which involves ending sub-sections with a word or phrase that provides the starting point for the next sub-section, is also used by Holbrook, most notably in his landmark ‘What is consumer research?’ publication.  Levitt, likewise, led the way with aestheticized epigraphs, matrix thinking (another favorite of the arriviste) and, not least, the alliterative triplet (‘faith, fantasy and new product failures’, ‘moved, manipulated or modified’, ‘the Sphinx that thinks’). However, perhaps the most obvious correspondence between precursor and ephebe is their incessant utilization of the first person singular and plural.  Although this is seldom found -  indeed actively discouraged - in conventional social science writing, the prose of Levitt and Holbrook is absolutely replete with ‘I’ and ‘we’.  The former, interestingly, makes much greater use of  the second person than the latter; and it is this act of addressing ‘you’, the readership, that gives his textual persona the man-of-the-people aspect that Holbrook’s conspicuously lacks.

Be that as it may, the essence of the ephebe-precursor relationship is found in the unfolding of the six revisionary ratios - clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonisation, askesis, apophrades -  which, as previously observed, are predicated on the primordial trichotomous schema of affiliation, denial and reaffiliation.  The first two stages, clinamen and tessera, involve the identification of perceived shortcomings in the work of the precursor and the ephebe’s attempt to bring things to antithetical completion.  In the case of Levitt and Holbrook, these initial stages are very clearly marked.  Notwithstanding his manifold publications on manifold marketing topics, if the life’s work of Theodore Levitt had to be synthesized, distilled and placed in a proverbial nutshell, that nutshell would probably contain the words, ‘the customer is everything’.  The Levittonian mantra, that ‘the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer’, is chanted at some point in almost every one of his innumerable papers.  Granted, he tones the message down on occasion, but from first to last it is clear that Levitt considers the customer to be king.  Holbrook (1997b), on the other hand, has been highly critical of this notion of total customer orientation, recently going so far as to describe it as ‘illogical’, ‘preposterous’ and ‘exaggerated’.  However, his own intellectual preoccupations are not only equally explicit, eminently epigrammatic and endlessly recycled, à la Levitt, but they represent an antithetical extension of the latter’s intellectual agenda.  Whereas Levitt considers the customer to be everything, Holbrook cleaves to the view that everything is consumption.  As far as the ephebe is concerned, everything from chewing a candy bar, through contemplating works of art to conceptualizing the deity’s very act of cosmic Creation, represents a form of consumption activity.  Indeed, he has actually posited a fifteen point scale of consumer ‘durables’ which stretches from those that are consumed in less than a second (nano-durables) to those that last billions of years (megadurables).

It can, of course, be contended that while Holbrook’s ‘everything is consumption’ is analogous to Levitt’s all-embracing customer orientation, it can hardly be described as antithetical (albeit Holbrook (1995: 173) avers that it ‘differs fundamentally’).  Yet a detailed reading of the authors’ respective oeuvres reveals that their stated stances, while broadly consonant, are ultimately oppositional.  Thus Levitt frequently makes the point that, all other things being equal and even allowing for the occasional desire for novelty, consumer behavior is basically motivated by price, by the prospect of picking up a bargain.  What is more, he intones on numerous occasions that people don’t buy products so much as the solutions to perceived problems (people buy ¼-inch holes not ¼-inch drills, hope not perfume, transportation not automobiles etc.).  If, on the other hand, the basic premise of Holbrook’s position had to be summarized in a couple of sentences, it would be that there are certain things beyond price, that there are products, services, consumption experiences and so on which are literally priceless, and which are not solutions to banausic, everyday problems but worthwhile, satisfying and uplifting in and of themselves.  Consuming Hamlet, for Holbrook, is not a solution to the problem of an enjoyable evening’s entertainment (though it can indeed be that), it is consuming Hamlet,and Hamlet alone, one of the incomparable artistic masterpieces of  western civilization.

Despite this marked difference in emphasis, it is apparent that the ‘consumer is everything’ and ‘everything is consumption’ positions are broadly complementary, predicated as they are on some elemental notion of consumer orientation.   In keeping with clinamen and tessera, the ephebe has performed a revisionary swerve and brought the precursor’s work to an antithetical culmination.  However, the second major phase of the anxiety of influence process, comprising kaenosis and daemonisation, is characterized by a complete repudiation of the forerunner’s scholarly stance and the articulation of a personalized counter-sublime premised on a ‘higher power’ than that invoked by the antecedent author.  This too is evident in the Levitt-Holbrook literary dyad.  The former, perhaps more than anyone in the entire marketing firmament, has devoted his career to furthering the everyday lot of the marketing manager and, unlike many academic para-practitioners, can reasonably claim to have succeeded.  Although Levitt has periodically published papers for scholarly consumption, he is the absolute embodiment of a business executive-orientated marketing commentator.  By contrast, Holbrook’s principal claim to fame, or rather notoriety, is his complete and unequivocal repudiation of the managerial cause.  In a series of papers, panel discussions, personal appearances and op-ed pieces during the middle-to-late 1980s, the ephebe ostentatiously eschewed the hitherto sacrosanct managerial ethos, albeit he completely failed to mention Levitt as the primum mobile of this particular intellectual position (an almost inconceivable yet, oedipally speaking, unsurprising omission).  Not only did the aspirant strong poet contend that the concerns of marketing practitioners were no concern of marketing academics, he actually reveled in his irrelevance and celebrated the fact that his research was totally impractical, unashamedly non-functional and, above all, utterly useless.  Indeed, it was this issue that stimulated Holbrook’s seminal categorization of researcher types: obedient, managerially orientated dogs and free-spirited, unabashedly unbusinesslike cats.

Naturally, Holbrook’s wanton abandon of the managerial paradigm did not end with kaenosis.  On the contrary, Morris the Cat contended that a higher position was available to those happy few researchers of a feline temperament who were prepared to endure the obloquy of their more banuisticly inclined brethren.  Primed by his extensive analyses of aesthetics, artworks and diverse forms of popular culture, which embraced everything from movies and Broadway productions to television game shows and rock music, Holbrook (e.g. 1986b, 1993, 1995)   announced that the most meaningful countermeasure to the reductive, narrow-minded managerialism of the marketing scientists lay in Consumer Research in general and scholarship in particular.  As far as he was concerned, the burgeoning sub-field of Consumer Research was separate from, though related to, its parent discipline of Marketing and that, by breaking the ancestral connection, consumer researchers would be free to develop their own academic interests, unfettered by the (understandably) pragmatic demands of marketing practitioners.  Above and beyond his perceived need for a named domain, Holbrook et al (1989) championed a much more scholarly approach than had been apparent hitherto.  Taking its cue from the humanities or liberal arts rather than the physical sciences, this romantic vision of scholarship rested on the assumption that ‘some truths may lie buried at a level of human experience too deep for science to penetrate.’  For Holbrook at least, science was characterized by rigor, detachment and rigid adherence to established methods, while scholarship was predicated upon imagination, involvement, insight and, above all, wisdom.  In short, where science was narrow, scholarship was broad; where science was shallow, scholarship was deep; where marketing was scientific, consumer research was scholarly.  Not everyone, admittedly, accepted Holbrook’s distinction - it seems excessive to insinuate that science cannot be practiced in a scholarly fashion (Pechmann 1990) - but, as far as daemonisation is concerned, Holbrook’s science/scholarship dichotomy is almost as clear as it gets.

Paradigmatic though Holbrook’s denial of his domineering predecessor undoubtedly is, the quintessential instantiation of the anxiety thesis occurs in the third and final phase, which comprises askesis and apophrades.  Askesis, as previously noted, involves a purgatorial period of isolation and retreat into the self; so much so, that it almost seems solipsistic.  It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination, let alone scholarship, to recognize that this is a perfect description of Holbrook’s (1996b) much-touted, and much-debated, technique of ‘subjective personal introspection’.  Unlike established approaches to positivistic and post-positivistic marketing research, with their methodological safety nets of representative samples, member checks, standardized interview schedules and procedures etc., SPI requires the investigator to reflect on his or her own consumer behaviors and bring them together in the form of an extended autobiographical essay.  Clearly, this procedure breaks all manner of ‘good research practice’ guidelines and it has been excoriated accordingly - often unfairly it has to be said (Campbell 1996; Gould 1995; Wallendorf and Brucks 1993) - but for the purposes of the present paper, the rights and wrongs of subjective personal introspection are less important than the fact that it exemplifies the askesis stage of the anxiety of influence.  While it can be argued that Holbrook’s experiments in SPI commenced in the middle-to-late ’80s, and hence coincided with the ‘denial’ phase of the anxiety process, his nomination, articulation and justification of the technique, qua technique, dates from the early 1990s.  Holbrook freely admits, what is more, the purgatorial, Morris-against-the-world character of his introspective ambitions and acknowledges that he has often been accused of solipsism or worse.  Indeed, this preoccupation with self is amply demonstrated by his reaction to Wallendorf and Brucks’ (1993) critique of introspection - they omitted to mention his contributions to the genre, which Holbrook interpreted as a personal slight - even though their attack was primarily aimed, with devastating effect, at another, rather less distinguished marketing scholar, Stephen J. Gould.

After the solitude and self-absorption of askesis, the culmination of the anxiety trajectory transpires.  In apophrates, the ephebe not only surpasses the overshadowing forefather, and thereby takes his place in the pantheon of strong poets, but also succeeds in suggesting that the work of the predecessor is somehow posterior to that of the ephebe.  Paradoxical, not to say absurd, though this possibility appears, it is once again clearly demonstrated in the Levitt-Holbrook literary interaction.  The latter’s return to the former’s fold began in the early 1990s, when he forsook his attempt to declare sub-disciplinary independence for Consumer Research and refocussed on marketing matters, arguing that his ‘scholarly’ approach had as much place in Marketing as it did in Consumer Research.  Having failed, furthermore, to convince the skeptics that a cogent scientific case could be made for the subjective personal introspection technique, Holbrook (1994) effectively let the scientific mainstream go hang and produced by far the most beautifully written paper of his career, one that was short, straight from the heart and just like Theodore Levitt, only better.  Subsequent to ‘Loving and Hating New York’, he has published a series of papers from the ‘margins’ of the discipline, lengthy book reviews, chapters in edited volumes and non-US journals in the main (thereby paralleling Levitt, who, despite his stature among practitioners, has long been confined to the peripheries of academic marketing).  More to the point, Holbrook’s (1996b, 1997c, 1998) latter-day intellectual obsession involves - incredible though it seems - stereoscopic photographs.  Not only does this employ, exceed and eclipse Levitt’s seemingly unsurpassable metaphor of marketing myopia, but Holbrook’s stereoscopic images simply cannot be seen by anyone who suffers from short-sightedness (or, at least, not easily).  Thus, the precursor’s single most significant contribution has been taken, transformed and transcended by the triumphant ephebe, the new strong poet, Morris the Catoptric.

Marketing Catoptrics

Catoptrics is the study of mirror images and it is arguable that this mirror-image quality is perfectly illustrated in our strong poets’ finest literary moments, ‘Marketing Myopia’ and, as noted above, ‘Loving and Hating New York’.  The former was written at a very early stage of Levitt’s academic career and, according to several churlish commentators, it was never bettered (Crainer 1995; Kennedy 1991; Micklethwait and Wooldridge 1996).  In fact, Levitt is occasionally, if unfairly, portrayed as a one-hit wonder of management thought.  Be that as it may, ‘Myopia’ is widely and rightly regarded as a seminal contribution to post-war marketing scholarship.  It is an oft-cited, best-selling, frequently anthologized classic, one that was recognized as such at the time of publication and subsequently by the author himself (Levitt 1975).  Not only did it appear as the lead article in a leading American journal but it was also given the special, this-is-sure-to-prove-controversial-read-it-at-your-peril editorial treatment (Bursk 1960). 

‘Loving and Hating’, by contrast, was a fairly late addition to Holbrook’s compendious (and continuing) literary corpus.  Although it can reasonably be considered a significant milestone in the author’s personal development, the paper cannot be regarded as a major contribution to the marketing literature, not by any stretch of the academic imagination.  It is rarely cited; it has never been anthologized and, in point of fact, even the author seems less than certain about the stature of the piece.  While it is mentioned in passing, ‘Loving and Hating’ was not deemed important enough to merit inclusion in Holbrook’s recent retrospective volume, Consumer Research: Introspective Essays on the Study of Consumption. The paper, moreover, was published in the second of two special issues of a non-American journal, which is indicative of its less than elevated status, as is its position in the journal, neither lead article not lauded by the editors.

‘Marketing Myopia’, then, is a classic ‘classic’, written by someone seemingly determined to pull out all the stops and make a definitive contribution to the field.  In this respect, indeed, it is noteworthy that ‘Myopia’ is one of Levitt’s longest and most heavily referenced papers (only six citations, admittedly, but the piece mentions several other supporting publications).  ‘Loving and Hating’, by contrast, is a classic confessional, written seemingly for private consumption by someone weary of trying and failing to make the field pay attention.  It is one of the shortest papers that Holbrook has ever published and, unlike his usual attempts to swamp the reader with argument bolstering citation, the article is completely devoid of references. Whereas Levitt, so to speak, has everything to prove and proves it, Holbrook has nothing to prove and, for once, doesn’t feel compelled to try too hard.  Therein lies the secret of its greatness. 

This authorial antithesis is also apparent in the intended audiences, overall objectives and principal data sources of the respective papers.  Consonant with his subsequent career trajectory and the then prevailing ethos concerning the overall purpose of marketing scholarship, Levitt is writing for an audience of practitioners or would-be practitioners.  His article is a manifesto, a call to metaphorical arms, and it contains a simple, seemingly implementable message: the customer is everything.  Holbrook’s paper, conversely, has nothing whatsoever to do with the mundane concerns of marketing managers nor, for that matter, the ‘scientific’ aspirations of fellow marketing academics.  It doesn’t so much prescribe as describe.  It is, in fact, an outcome of his previously stated ‘pursuit of scholarship’ agenda, whereas Levitt’s is an ambitious statement of intent, one which he subsequently successfully accomplished.  The irony, however, is that the latter’s practitioner-orientated proclamation is largely predicated upon secondary sources such as Henry Ford’s autobiography, Zimmerman’s history of the supermarket and Schumpeter’s celebrated concept of ‘creative destruction’.  As his condemnation of an entire industry on the basis of a single, special issue of  the American Petroleum Institute Quarterly amply testifies, Levitt’s landmark paper is actually the work of a bookish academic.  By complete contrast, Holbrook’s non-managerially-oriented piece draws almost entirely upon the author’s personal experiences, his own, real-world, anti-practitioner practices on the mean and not quite so mean streets of New York city (being mugged, greeting celebrities, the butcher who knows your name and vagrant who interpellates it).

Fascinating as the thought of Holbrook the down-to-earth artisan versus Levitt the ethereal academic undoubtedly is, another intriguing contrast in these particular papers lies in the underpinning root metaphors.  Despite its title, ‘Marketing Myopia’ is predicated primarily upon a temporal trope, while ‘Loving and Hating’ is predominantly spatial.  Thus Levitt commences with a discussion of the rise and fall of companies, draws copious lessons from business history in general and the petroleum, automobile and electrical industries in particular, and makes a number of confident predictions, all of which have since proved erroneous. Set against this, Holbrook’s essay is confined to a comparatively limited geographical area, though it takes in several other locales (Disneyland, Italy, Utah), and it is almost entirely made up of evocatively described street scenes ranging from the squalor and degradation of Times Square to the sweet smelling, freshly-hosed sidewalks of the Upper West Side.  There is, admittedly, a spatial element to Levitt’s opus, principally its inside-outside dialectic (his contention that strangers and non-initiates precipitate change in self-absorbed, incestuous industries), and Holbrook’s paper contains several temporal allusions pertaining to personal memories, family holidays and the changing of the seasons, as well as reheated anecdotes and quasi-urban myths (the professor and the stolen checkcard).   Nevertheless, as its essentially linear overall structure suggests, the basic thrust of ‘Myopia’ is temporal  (it has a clear beginning, middle and end), whereas the vivid, disconnected vignettes of ‘Loving and Hating’ combine to provide a powerful sense of place.  Indeed, notwithstanding Levitt’s much-lauded espousal of the optical metaphor, Holbrook’s paper is the much more visual of the two.  At times it almost reads like the shooting schedule of a Manhattan-based screenplay.  So much so, that it throws ‘Myopia’s’ complete lack of visual imagery into very sharp relief.   Despite its title, the optical metaphor is comparatively rarely employed in Levitt’s celebrated contribution.  Incredibly, the piece is primarily predicated upon aural analogies - it should really be called ‘Marketing Misheard’ (‘yet the automobile companies do not seem to listen’, ‘a nation of production-orientated business managers refuses to hear the great lesson he taught’, ‘If you had told them sixty years ago’, ‘It was not even a discussible subject, or an askable question’) - and although there is also an aural element in ‘Loving and Hating’ (musical epigraphs, ‘speaking of home’, ‘one hears about the legitimate cases’), it is very much subsidiary to the visual.

If metaphor, according to the prominent literary theorist Roman Jacobson, is one pole of a figural dialectic, metonymy is the other.  And metonymy, where the part stands for the whole, is manifest in both papers.  Levitt, for instance, presents each of his often highly specific, historically contingent case studies as exemplars for businesses and managers as a whole.  Just as the idiosyncratic contents of a single trade magazine are deemed indicative of the production-orientated mentality of a massive, presumably highly internally variegated, industry, so too he contends that his three calamitous case studies contain lessons for all companies, in all places, at all times (by any stretch of the imagination, this is an incredible stretch of the imagination).  Likewise, ‘Loving and Hating’ seems to be very place specific - as localized as it gets - yet the essay also implies, and occasionally states, that New York is the be all and end all.  Everything that happens, happens in New York; everyone who is anyone is found in New York. New York is more than the center of the universe, it is the universe (‘If New York contains everything bad, it is only because New York contains Everything’).

Metonymy, to be sure, is not confined to the content of both papers.  The authors themselves, or rather their authorial personae, perform in an essentially  metonymical capacity.  Holbrook attempts to present himself as an archetypal New Yorker and, in the world of the myopic, where the twenty-twenty visionary is king, Levitt endeavors to play the paradigmatic outsider, the sharp-eyed stranger capable of identifying any industry’s short-sighted shortcomings.  More to the point, it can be contended that, as all of their signature stylistic foibles are on show in ‘Myopia’ and ‘Loving and Hating’, these publications metonymically embody the entire literary corpuses of Levitt and Holbrook.  Both papers, for instance, offer abundant examples of the authors’ fondness for words and word play.  Apart from his lexical elephantiasis (‘vicissitudes’, ‘appellation’, ‘senescence’) and alliterative-cum-neologistic inclinations (‘aggressive ardor’, ‘primal position’, ‘vulgarize’, ‘pridefully product orientated’), Levitt’s epigrammatic qualities are already apparent (‘if thinking is an intellectual response to a problem, then the absence of a problem leads to the absence of thinking’, ‘they kept their pride but lost their shirts’, ‘since words are cheap and deeds are dear’).  Holbrook, similarly, succeeds in strutting his sesquipedalian (‘omphalos’, ‘detrital’),  aphoristic (‘you really can get homesick for New York if New York happens to be your home’) and, above all, alliterative stuff (‘salacious salons’, ‘demented derelicts’, frightening felony’, ‘dangerous denizens’, ‘ceaseless curiosity’, ‘puzzling paradox’).

Metaphorically speaking, moreover, our strong poets are veritable titans of tropefication.  The very first paragraph of ‘Myopia’ comprises Levitt’s trademark figure of anthropomorphism (growth and demise of industries); variations on this ‘pathetic fallacy’ are repeated throughout the paper (marketing as stepchild, gasoline on its ‘last legs’, the entire corporation as a ‘customer-creating and customer-satisfying organism’) and it concludes with the anthropic suggestion that if organizations do not know where they are going, everyone else (i.e. other organizations) will notice it soon enough.  Holbrook, meanwhile, endows New York with human qualities in ‘Loving and Hating’ (‘cold, unfriendly place’, ‘the city’s vast energy’), superhuman qualities on occasion (‘they implode toward the heart of the city, drawn by some sort of ungoverned centripetal force’), though he also indulges in some fascinating ‘pathetic’ allusions (‘fortress of equanimity’, ‘vicious thunderstorm’, ‘blossoming of charity’).

Characteristically, of course, these metaphorical orchestrations segue seamlessly into hyperbole, as for example in Holbrook’s imaginative insinuation that his appendages have minds of their own (‘my legs follow the familiar path to my office uptown’), his fabulous postmodern parallel between being accosted by demented panhandlers and the rides in a dystopian Disneyland, or indeed his depiction of genius loci which would not be out of place in the pages of Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft (‘I feel as if I have wandered onto a terrain that is absolutely pregnant with implications waiting to be plucked from the concrete slabs beneath my feet or from the brick edifices around my head’).  Levitt, likewise, luxuriates in several passages of pixillated prose that hail from the lilac end of the textual spectrum (‘the water wheel and the steam industry were cut to ribbons by the flexibility, reliability, simplicity and just plain easy availability of electric motors’, ‘unless an industry is especially lucky, as oil has been until now, it can easily go down in a sea of red figures’).  By far the most arresting of these is the climactic concluding passage, which in its call to managerial arms, its espousal of visceral entrepreneurial greatness, is the nearest thing to Freidrich Nietzsche this side of Beyond Good and Evil.  For Levitt, at least, it appears that the übermench of management are driven by the will to marketing power (‘No organization can achieve greatness without a vigorous leader who is driven onward by his own pulsating will to succeed.  He has to have a vision of grandeur, a vision that can produce eager followers in vast numbers.  In business, the followers are the customers.’).

Alongside hyperbole, humor is also much in evidence.  Levitt tells the apocryphal tale of a Boston millionaire who insisted that his legacy be invested exclusively in electric streetcars (thereby condemning his heirs to pumping gas at filling stations); judiciously juxtaposes the ‘insanity’ of drinking martinis at 20,000 feet in a 100 ton tube of metal against the once equally ‘insane’ suggestion that the all-conquering railroads might one day decline; draws a witty anadiplotic parallel between the Perils of Pauline and the perils of petroleum; and makes an appropriately crude remark about the oil companies that ‘pooh-poohed the potential of gas’.  In a similar vein, Holbrook revels in pun-ditry (‘if you have a sudden yen for Japanese cuisine’); takes comfort from the fact that, for all its faults, New York ‘does not have avalanches, rock slides, falling boulders, floods, frequent earthquakes, seasonal tornadoes, scorpions, tarantulas, rattle snakes, boa constrictors, tsetse flies or Jesse Helms’; and regales his readers with an endearingly self-deprecating account of a post-conference encounter in 42nd Street, when a malodorous vagrant greeted him warmly by name (‘Who could this person be? Someone from our congregation at Church? An old classmate from Harvard? A former student wishing to express his gratitude for my steering him away from the evils of managerial relevance?).  The answer to this metropolitan riddle, needless to say, is that Morris was still wearing his name-tag from the conference earlier in the day.

Just as the eminently engaging sides of our duo’s textual personae are on display, so too the less amiable aspects of Levitt and Holbrook are manifest in ‘Myopia’ and ‘Loving and Hating’.  Levitt gives an early indication of his subsequent erotic preoccupations by means of a priapic allusion to Hollywood being ‘ravished’ by television, as well as his exaggeratedly mythical depiction of gas station attendants as ‘a handsome Adonis or a seductive Venus’.  Likewise, he contemptuously dismisses the ill-considered remarks of rival commentators, most notably Barzun’s analysis of the travails of the railroad industry (‘even an amateur like Jacques Barzun’) and his colleague J.K. Galbraith’s then current thesis on the Affluent Society (‘Galbraith has a finger on something real, but he misses the strategic point.’).  Holbrook’s text is equally tumescent (‘I amused myself by browsing through several of the pornographic bookstores that line this particular thoroughfare’), alludes yet again to Harvard, the one ostensible blot on his otherwise exemplary academic record, and makes condescendingly light of non-New Yorkers in general and other nationalities in particular.  Not only does he regard New York as the center of the universe where ‘local events are virtually indistinguishable from the affairs of the world’ but the glory that is Spain is spurned with the staggeringly supercilious stereotype, ‘Undoubtedly, the Spanish know how to mount a memorable bull fight’ (indeed it seems that Europe generally is full of thieves, extortionists, con-artists and, worst of all, Europeans).

Last but not least, both papers are suffused with the tiny but quintessential stylistic quirks that we have come to associate with the authors.  Thus, Levitt treats his readership to a provocative opening statement (‘Every major industry was once a growth industry.  But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline’), precociously racy prose (‘explosive demand’, ‘galloping industry’, ‘spectacularly successful’, extravagantly profitable’), nascent homiotelutionism and anadiplosis (‘dieselization’, ‘until it blew over.  It never blew over’, ‘as the railroads have, as the buggy whip manufacturers have, as the corner grocery chains have, as most of the big movie companies have, and indeed as many other industries have.’), not to mention several chants of the ‘customer creating’ mantra.  Holbrook, moreover, sets out his stall with a veritable cornucopia of aestheticized epigraphs (nine quotations from popular songs), proffers what can only be described as an alliterative triple-doublet (‘limping and loitering, lunging and leaping, leering and lurching’) and exhibits his catoptric qualities in the opening and closing paragraphs, which are sublime mirror images of one another (‘I hate New York.  I have lived in the City for over 25 years.  Yet I feel that I hardly begin to understand it.....Yet I know that I barely understand New York.  I have lived in the City for over 25 years.  And I love it.’).  Even Theodore Levitt at his most brilliant never surpassed such heights of marketing poetics.

Holbrook, however, does more than merely exceed Levitt’s literary ability in ‘Loving and Hating’.  He becomes him.  This postmodern transmogrification is not simply a matter of stylistic devices, such as the statement, ‘Tourism is downright dangerous. Everywhere.’, which is Levitt through and through, it is also inscribed in one small but vital difference between these two totemic papers and the remainder of the Holbrookian and Levittonian literary oeuvres.  Although precursor and ephebe both make use of the first person singular, in keeping with the remainder of their corpuses, it is Holbrook and not Levitt who employs the second person on occasion.  The outcome of this is that the textual persona of the former is much warmer, more personable, than that of the latter.  Holbrook, for once, actually comes across as Mr Average, a typical New Yorker, subject to the same pleasures and pains as every other inhabitant of the Big Apple, whereas Levitt’s brilliantly written but bookish slant on marketing practice, coupled with his lofty dismissal of uninformed commentators and often quite acidic denigration of practitioners, is suggestive of ivory tower arrogance (a regrettable trait which he quickly excised).

It is arguable, then, that Levitt and Holbrook metynomically represent the entire academic marketing community, with its antithetical orientations towards pure scholarship and applied practice.  However, this parallel reading of the authors’ emblematic papers and overall publication records, leads to the inevitable conclusion that Holbrook is the practitioner and Levitt the purist. The former’s aestheticized agenda is very much in keeping with contemporary management thought (e.g. de Pree 1989, 1992; Kao 1996), while the latter’s confident prognostications on globalization, marketing orientation and so on have been exposed as the essentially scholarly speculations that they always were.  Holbrook, furthermore, has always been prepared to compromise with the marketing mainstream in order to have his (traditional, quantitative, positivistic) papers published in the premier journals, whereas Levitt has never shifted on his condemnation of undue quantification and supposedly ‘rigorous’ marketing research, even though this virtually guaranteed his exclusion from the foremost academic marketing outlets.  Just as the son is in the father, so the father is in the son.

Discussion

Describing the contents of a recent anthology, the back board blurb states that, ‘No one has ever accused him of writing in a lackluster, flaccid style.  He couches his often controversial ideas in vivid language.  For anyone seriously interested in marketing, this is a book that demands to be read.’  Although these comments refer to Theodore Levitt (1993), they apply equally to Morris Holbrook and this paper has argued that these two authors are more than very gifted stylists, they are locked in an Oedipal intellectual struggle.  Such a contention, suffice it to say, it somewhat unorthodox since Levitt is widely regarded as the embodiment of academic pragmatism and practitioner orientation, whereas Holbrook not only regards managerial relevance as beneath contempt but unapologetically espouses an elitist scholarly ethos.  However, Harold Bloom’s renowned anxiety of influence thesis suggests that these apparently irreconcilable differences are actually an integral part of the father-son relationship.  In literary terms at least, Levitt and Holbrook are very closely aligned and the present paper has sought to show, by means of a parallel reading of their manifold publications, that they share many syntactical propensities, thematic preoccupations and figurative peculiarities.  More to the point, it suggests that Holbrook, in keeping with the anxiety postulate, has cast off the oppressive shadow of his illustrious predecessor and taken his place among the strong poets of the marketing academy.

Clearly this precursor-ephebe connection cannot be ‘proved’ beyond reasonable doubt nor convincingly demonstrated to the satisfaction of conventionally-minded marketing academics.  The suggestiveness of the textual interpretations aside, there is no ‘concrete’ evidence of any kind to link Levitt and Holbrook (in fact, they have never even met).  Hence, it can be contended that this particular paper lacks validity, reliability, objectivity, replicability and completely fails to accord with recognized scientific criteria for marketing scholarship.  This is indeed the case but to dismiss the argument on the basis of these (perfectly understandable) objections is unreasonably precipitate.  The whole point about literary analyses per se is that they are not scientific, they cannot be ‘proven’ as such, and to ask them to meet standard acceptance criteria is to apply the wrong standards.  The question is not whether an exercise like the above is true or false, or right or wrong, but whether it is interesting, whether it is imaginative, whether it is intriguing, whether it is impressive, whether it is inspired, whether it is incredible, whether it is inconceivable beforehand but afterwards inescapable.  As Lentricchia (1980) points out, the purpose of such analyses is to strike disparate texts together to see if they spark.

Of course, this is not to suggest that literary analyses of the marketing literature are sacrosanct or above censure.  Quite the reverse.  Apart from the all-important issue of whether informed readers actually consider the interpreter’s interpretation to be insightful, irresistible, ineffable, inestimable or whatever, the theoretical underpinnings of the investigation are always open to question.  Indeed, the history of literary criticism is littered with once dominant now discarded (note, not refuted or disproved) conceptual frameworks.  The anxiety of influence thesis is no different, in so far as it has been the butt of severe and unremitting disparagement.  Part of this disapprobation is attributable to Bloom’s unending embellishments, not to mention the sheer  outrageousness of the anxiety model itself, but the framework has also been subject to more substantive critiques which, irrespective of their veracity, have significant implications for marketing and consumer research.

The first of these purported shortcomings is the theory’s inherent androcentrism.  Bloom repeatedly states that his anxiety of influence thesis refers exclusively to male poets, to the father-son relationship and he actually goes so far as to suggest that there are no women who qualify as strong poets.  Not surprisingly, this contention has been subject to severe scholarly stricture, especially as Bloom doesn’t have the traditional, if somewhat lame, excuse of writing in a pre-politically correct era.  However, as the principal feminist advocates of the anxiety hypothesis openly acknowledge (Gilbert and Gubar 1984), the unfortunate fact of the matter is that most poets are men and that creative women suffer less from the anxiety of influence than the anxiety of authorship (in other words, a fear of writing in the first place).  As Hirschman (1993), Stern  (1991) and several others (Bristor and Fischer 1993; Costa 1994; Firat 1994) have shown, this particular state of affairs also pertains in marketing, even though marketing, like literary studies, is a broadly ‘feminized’ area of the academy (Brown 1997).  It would be unfortunate, not to say pernicious, if the latter-day advance of feminist marketing scholarship - much of which emanates from the humanities-cum-literary end of the intellectual spectrum - were to be subverted by the lionization of masculinity in general and putative strong poets in particular.  As Gilbert and Gubar (1984) make perfectly clear, however, it is possible to employ the anxiety thesis from a feminist perspective and thus there is no particular reason why it cannot be fruitfully applied within an academic marketing context.

A second important challenge to the anxiety framework is that it ignores the synchronic in favor of the diachronic dimension of literary meaning (Allen 1994; Bruss 1982).  In other words, it is predicated entirely upon the vertical, father-son axis rather than horizontal, brother-sister relationships, and thereby fails to take sibling rivalry into account.  Although ambitious poets, writers, artists and indeed academics undoubtedly struggle under the crushing weight of their predecessors, they also compete against their contemporaries, the diverse other contributors to each particular field of intellectual dreams.  Bloom, admittedly, might reply that because his theory only applies to ‘strong’ poets, the issue of sibling rivalry is a non-issue, since strong poets by definition stand head and shoulders above the rest.  However, in a compelling application of the anxiety thesis to Harold Bloom himself, Lentricchia (1980) contends that the champion of antithetical criticism is locked in a spirited, intra-generational struggle with his Deconstructionist siblings (Bloom, remember, hailed from Yale, the home of American Deconstruction, and was developing his hypothesis at the time of the Deconstructive ‘revolution’ in literary criticism).  Certainly, the sibling rivalry variant seems highly relevant to the academic context in general, where so many talented people compete for a limited number of ‘slots’ in the premier journals, and to Levitt and Holbrook in particular.  It is arguable, for instance, that much of Levitt’s vacillation on the importance of globalization, entrepreneurship and so on, as well as his unprovoked attacks on Tom Peters and Motivation Researchers, represent attempts to differentiate himself from copious competitors in the crowded field of management consultancy and comment.  A cynic, moreover, might surmise that Holbrook’s repeated warnings to marketing researchers about the dangers of ‘feline’ scholarship are designed more to discourage potential rivals than provide avuncular advice to ambitious academics.

Another, and in certain respects the single most disconcerting, aspect of the Bloomian program is that it represents a serious challenge to the marketing discipline’s progressivist ideology.  Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants, of adding to the infinitely capacious font of knowledge, or of getting ever closer to the ‘truth’ about markets and marketing, the anxiety hypothesis intimates that the intellectual shadow of the discipline’s illustrious predecessors grows ever longer, ever-deeper, ever more oppressive with the passage of time.  According to Bloom, it becomes increasingly difficult for ephebe poets to find a voice, make a meaningful contribution or add their names to the roll of marketing honor.  The anxiety of influence postulate, in other words, represents a trajectory of inexorable decline, of regression, of degeneration and, while this may accord with contemporary concerns about marketing’s purported failure, crisis or demise (Brownlie et al 1994; Lynch 1995; McDonald 1994), as well as the prevailing postmodern intellectual climate of ennui, etoliation and exhaustion (Firat and Venkatesh 1993, 1995), it is completely contrary to our discipline’s dominant ethos which has been and remains strongly progressivist, ever-onward, ever-upward in orientation (Bartels 1988; Kerin 1996; Malhotra 1996).  If the Bloomian stance is accepted, then marketing’s greatest academic achievements have already been attained, the field will never again reach the heights it has reached hitherto and marketing scholars are forever condemned to toil in the shadows cast by their prodigious forefathers.  As with the long-departed .400 hitters of baseballing legend (Gould 1996) and, apparently, the titanic theory-mongers of the natural sciences (Horgan 1996), it seems that the likes of Weld, Parlin, Converse, Alderson, Kotler and, above all, Theodore Levitt will never be seen again. 

Clearly this is a very disconcerting, if plausible, thought but it should not be a cause for existential despair or, worse, abject intellectual surrender.  Morris Holbrook, after all, is living proof that it is still possible, given the ability, creativity and sheer persistence, to transcend the transcendent, trump the triumphant, succeed the successful and find a justly deserved place in the academic marketing pantheon.  Not everyone, admittedly, is capable of reaching the literary heights so successfully scaled by Holbrook and Levitt, but as this paper has endeavored to demonstrate, it is possible to study the published works of the marketing literati with profit.  Profit, of course, ‘is a requisite, not a purpose of business’ (Levitt 1983: 6) and it is important to acknowledge that literary analyses of the marketing literature, necessary though they are and neglected though they have been hitherto, are ultimately the means not the end of marketing scholarship.  Without reflecting on the means, however, the end is uncertain at best and unattainable at worst.

Conclusion

If, as Levitt (1963: 224) contends, ‘the highest form of achievement is always art, never science’, it may be worthwhile adopting a more aesthetic approach to marketing research than has traditionally been the case.  Thanks to the sterling work of, amongst others, Belk, Hirschman, Scott and Stern, considerable progress has been made in the ‘marketing and literature’ sub-field.  The foregoing paper has sought to add to this burgeoning body of research by applying the tools and techniques of literary criticism to the marketing literature itself.  Informed by Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ thesis, it offered a detailed interrogation of the literary oeuvres of two much-published marketing stylists, Theodore Levitt and Morris Holbrook.  Despite their ostensible positioning at ‘opposite’ ends of the scholarly spectrum, the paper contended that, in literary terms at least, they are father and son, precursor and ephebe, brothers in alarum. 

Many, admittedly, might postulate that the present paper is a complete misinterpretation of the extant evidence, though it does at least treat Holbrook’s introspections as the scientifically valid representations that they purport to be.  More meaningfully perhaps, any charge of misrepresentation, however accurate or inaccurate, is completely misplaced since the anxiety of influence thesis is predicated on the very premiss that every reading is a misreading.  This paper is a misinterpretation - of course it is - but it can be none other. The issue is not whether it is a misreading as such but whether it is a meaningful misreading, a provocative misreading, an imaginative misreading.  As Levitt (1983: xv) so rightly observes, ‘no amount of marketing science or heavy analysis will work without the protean powers of the marketing imagination.’

References

Agger, Ben (1989), Reading Science: A Literary, Political and Sociological Analysis, Dix Hills: General Hall.

Allen, Graham (1994), Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Anderson, L.McTeir (1994), ‘Marketing science: where’s the beef?’, Business Horizons, 37, 1: 8-16.

Baldick, Chris (1996), Criticism and Literary Theory: 1890 to the Present, London: Longman.

Barnes, T.J. and Duncan, J.S. (eds) (1992), Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, London: Routledge.

Bartels, Robert (1988), The Development of Marketing Thought, Homewood: Richard D. Irwin.

Bate, W. Jackson (1970), The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Belk, Russell W. (1986a), ‘Art versus science as ways of generating knowledge about materialism’, in D. Brinberg and R.J. Lutz (eds), Perspectives on Methodology in Consumer Research, New York: Springer-Verlag, 3-36.

_____________ (1986b), ‘What should ACR want to be when it grows up?’, in R.L. Lutz (ed.), Advances in Consumer Research, Volume XIII, Provo: Association for Consumer Research, 423-4.

_____________ (1996), ‘On aura, illusion, escape and hope in apocalyptic consumption: the apotheosis of Las Vegas’, in S. Brown, J. Bell and D. Carson (eds), Marketing Apocalypse: Eschatology, Escapology and the Illusion of the End, Routledge: London, 87-107.

Bhabha, Honi K. (ed.)(1990), Nation and Narration, London: Routledge.

Bloom, Harold (1973), The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press.

_________ (1975a), A Map of Misreading, New York: Oxford University Press.

_________ (1975b), Kabbalah and Criticism, New York: Seabury Press.

_________ (1976), Poetry and Repression: Revisionism From Blake to Stevens, New Haven: Yale University Press.

_________ (1982), Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, New York: Oxford University Press.

_________ (1994), The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Basingstoke: Papermac.

Boehmer, E. (1995), Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bristor, J. and Fischer, E. (1993), ‘Feminist thought: implications for consumer research’, Journal of Consumer Research, 19, March: 518-36.

Brown, Stephen (1995), ‘Psycho shopper: a comparative literary analysis of the “dark side”’, in F. Hansen (ed.), European Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 2, Provo: Association for Consumer Research, 96-103.

___________ (1997), Postmodern Marketing Two: Telling Tales, London: ITBP.

___________, Maclaran, Pauline and Stevens, Lorna (1997), ‘Mucha do about nothing: literary theory, the Bakhtin Circle and postmodern marketing communications’, paper presented at AMA Conference, Dublin, Ireland, June.

Brownlie, Douglas, Saren, Mike, Whittington, Richard and Wensley, Robin (1994), ‘The new marketing myopia: critical perspectives on theory and research in marketing - introduction’, European Journal of Marketing, 28, 3: 6-12.

Bruss, Elizabeth, W. (1982), Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Burroway, Janet (1996), Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, New York: HarperCollins.

Bursk, Edward, C. (1960), ‘Marketing myopia’, Harvard Business Review, 38, 4: 2.

Buzan, T. and Keene, R. (1994), Buzan’s Book of Genius and how to Unleash Your Own, London: Stanley Paul.

Campbell, Colin (1987), The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Oxford: Blackwell.

__________ (1996) ‘Romanticism, consumption and introspection: some comments on Professor Holbrook’s paper’, in R.W. Belk, N. Dholakia and A. Venkatesh (eds), Consumption and Marketing: Macro Dimensions, Cincinnati: South-Western, 96-103.

Clutterbuck, David and Crainer, Stuart (1990), Makers of Management, London: Macmillan.

Crainer, Stuart (1995), The Financial Times Handbook of Management, London: Pitman.

Costa, Janeen A. (ed.) (1994), Gender Issues and Consumer Behavior, Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1996), Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: HarperCollins.

de Bolla, Peter (1988), Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics, London: Routledge.

de Pree, Max (1989), Leadership as an Art, New York: Dell Publishing.

___________ (1992), Leadership Jazz, New York: Doubleday.

Denison, Tim and McDonald, Malcolm (1995), ‘The role of marketing past, present and future’, Journal of Marketing Practice: Applied Marketing Science, 1, 1: 54-76.

Durgee, Jeffrey, F. (1991), ‘Interpreting Dichter’s interpretations: an analysis of consumption symbolism in “The Handbook of Consumer Motivations”’, in H.H. Larsen, D.G. Mick and C. Alsted (eds), Marketing and Semiotics: Selected Papers from the Copenhagen Symposium, Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, 52-74.

Eagleton, Terry (1996), Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, second edition.

Eysenck, Hans (1995), Genius: The Natural History of Creativity, Cambridge University Press.

Feldman, Ann Merle (1996), Writing and Learning in the Disciplines, New York: HarperCollins.

Firat, A. Fuat (1994), ‘Gender and consumption: transcending the feminine?’, in J.A. Costa (ed.), Gender Issues and Consumer Behavior, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 205-28.

Firat, A. Fuat and Venkatesh, Alladi (1993), ‘Postmoderity: the age of marketing’, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 10, 3: 227-49.

_________ and __________ (1995), ‘Liberatory postmodernism and the reenchantment of consumption’, Journal of Consumer Research, 22, December: 239-67.

Fischer, Eileen and Bristor, J. (1994), ‘A feminist poststructuralist analysis of the rhetoric of marketing relationships’, Inernational Journal of Research in Marketing, 11, 4: 317-31.

Fite, David (1985), Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Floch, J-M. (1988), ‘The contribution of structural semiotics to the design of a hypermarket’, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 4, 2: 233-52.

Friedman, Monroe (1985), ‘The changing language of a consumer society: brand name usage in popular American novels in the post-war era’, Journal of Consumer Research, 11, March: 927-38.

__________ (1987), ‘Word-of-author advertising and the consumer: an empirical analysis of the quality of product brands noted by authors of popular cultural works’, Journal of Consumer Policy, 10, 3: 307-18.

__________ (1991), A ‘Brand’ New Language: Commercial Influences in Literature and Culture, Westport: Greenwood Press.

Fullerton, Ron (1994), ‘Marketing action and the transformation of western consciousness: the examples of pulp literature and department stores’, in R.A. Fullerton (ed.), Research in Marketing Supplement 6: Explorations in the History of Marketing, Greenwich: JAI Press, 237-54.

Geertz, Clifford (1988), Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan (1984), The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Goodwin, Cathy (1992), ‘Good guys don’t wear polyester: consumption ideology in a detective series’, in John F. Sherry and Brian Sternthal (eds), Advances in Consumer Research, Volume XIX, Provo: Association for Consumer Research, 739-45.

Gould, Stephen J. (1991), ‘The self-manipulation of my pervasive, perceived vital energy through product use: an introspective-praxis perspective’ Journal of Consumer Research, 18, September: 194-207.

_________ (1995), ‘Researcher introspection as a method in consumer research: applications, issues and implications’, Journal of Consumer Research, 21, March: 719-22.

Gould, Stephen Jay (1996), Full House, New York: Harmony.

Halliday, M.A.K. and Martin, J.R. (1993), Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power, London: Falmer Press.

Heilbrunn, Benoit (1996), ‘In search of the hidden Go(o)d: a philosophical deconstruction and narratological revisitation of the eschatological metaphor in marketing’, in S. Brown, J. Bell and D. Carson (eds), Marketing Apocalypse: Eschatology, Escapology and the Illusion of the End, London: Routledge, 111-32.

Hirschman, Elizabeth C. (1987), ‘Marketing research: to serve what purpose?’, in R.W. Belk et al. (eds), Marketing Theory: Proceedings of the AMA Winter Educators’ Conference, Chicago: American Marketing Association, 204-8.

____________ (1990), ‘Secular immortality and the American ideology of affluence’, Journal of Consumer Research, 17, June: 31-42.

____________ (1991), ‘Secular and sacred consumption imagery in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol’, reprinted in M.B. Holbrook and E.C. Hirschman, The Semiotics of Consumption: Interpreting Symbolic Consumer Behavior in Popular Culture and Works of Art, Berlin: de Gruyter, 286-95.

____________ (1993), ‘Ideology in consumer research, 1890 and 1990: a Marxist and feminist critique’, Journal of Consumer Research, 19, March: 537-55.

___________ and Holbrook, Morris B. (1992), Postmodern Consumer Research: The Study of Consumption as Text, Newbury Park: Sage.

Holbrook, Morris B. (1986a), ‘A note on sado-masochism in the review process: I hate when that happens’, Journal of Marketing, 50, July: 104-8.

____________ (1986b) ‘I’m hip: an autobiographical account of some musical consumption experiences’, in R.J. Lutz (ed.), Advances in Consumer Research, Volume XIII, Provo: Association for Consumer Research, 614-18.

____________ (1987), ‘What is consumer research?’, Journal of Consumer Research, 14, June: 128-32.

____________ (1988), ‘The psychoanalytical interpretation of consumer research: I am an Animal, in E.C. Hirschman and J.N. Sheth (eds), Research in Consumer Behavior, Volume 3, Greenwich: JAI Press, 149-178.

____________ (1989), ‘Aftermath of the Task Force: dogmatism and catastrophe in the development of marketing thought’, ACR Newsletter, September: 1-11.

____________ (1990a), ‘Holbrook’s reply to Pechmann: prelude and poem’, ACR Newsletter, September: 4.

____________ (1990b), ‘The role of lyricism in research on consumer emotions: skylark, have you anything to say to me?’, in M. Goldberg, G. Gorn and R. Pollay (eds), Advances in Consumer Research, Volume XVII, Provo: Association for Consumer Research, 1-18.

____________ (1991), ‘Romanticism and sentimentality in consumer behavior: a literary approach to the joys and sorrows of consumption’, in E.C. Hirschman (ed.), Research in Consumer Behavior, Volume 5, Greenwich: JAI Press, 105-80.

____________ (1993), Daytime Television Gameshows and the Celebration of Merchandise: The Price is Right, Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

____________ (1994), ‘Loving and hating New York: some reflections on the Big Apple’, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 11, 4: 381-5.

____________ (1995), Consumer Research: Introspective Essays on the Study of Conumption, Thousand Oaks: Sage.

____________ (1996a), ‘The four faces of commodification in the development of marketing knowledge’, Journal of Marketing

Mnagement, 11, 7: 641-54.

____________ (1996b), ‘Romanticism, introspection and the roots of experiential consumption: Morris the epicurean’, in R.W. Belk, N. Dholakia and A. Venkatesh (eds), Consumption and Marketing: Macro Dimensions, Cincinnati: South-Western, 20-82.

_____________ (1996c), ‘On eschatology, onanist scatology or honest catology?  Cats swinging, scat singing and cat slinging as riffs, rifts and writs in a catalytic catechism for the cataclysm’, in S. Brown, J. Bell and D. Carson (eds), (eds), Marketing Apocalypse: Eschatology, Escapology and the Illusion of the End, Routledge: London, 237-59.

____________ (1997a), ‘Feline consumption: ethography, felologies and unobtrusive participation in the life of a cat’, European Journal of Marketing, 31, 3/4: 214-33.

_____________ (1997b), ‘Marketing across or beyond, without or among, and at or on the borders: some literal, littoral and literary ideas whose times definately have, probably have not and maybe might have come’, paper presented at Marketing Academy Conference, manchester, England, July.

_____________ (1997c), ‘Walking on the edge: a stereographic photo essay on the verge of consumer research’, in S. Brown and D. Turley (eds), Consumer Research: Postcards From the Edge, London: Routledge, in press.

_____________ (1998), ‘Journey to kroywen’, in B.B. Stern (ed.), Representing Consumers, London: Routledge, in press.

___________, Bell, Stephen and Grayson, Mark W. (1989), ‘The role of the humanities in consumer research: close encounters and coastal disturbances’, in E.C. Hirschman (ed.), Interpretive Consumer Research, Provo: Association for Consumer Research, 29-47.

___________ and Hirschman, Elizabeth C. (1993) The Semiotics of Consumption: Interpreting Symbolic Consumer Behavior in Popular Culture and Works of Art, Berlin: de Gruyter.

Hollander, Stanley C. (1995), ‘My life on Mount Olympus’, Journal of Macromarketing, 15, 1: 86-106.

Horgan, John (1996), The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age,  New York: Broadway.

Kao, John (1996), Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, New York: HarperBusiness.

Kavanagh, Donncha (1994), ‘Hunt versus Anderson: round sixteen’, European Journal of Marketing, 28, 3: 26-41.

Kennedy, Carol (1991), Guide to the Management Gurus: Shortcuts to the Ideas of leading Management Thinkers, London: Business Books.

Kerin, Roger A. (1996), ‘In pursuit of an ideal: the editorial and literary history of the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing, 60, 1: 1-13.

Lentricchia, Frank (1980), After the New Criticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Levitt, Theodore (1960), ‘Marketing myopia’, Harvard Business Review, 38, 4: 45-56.

____________ (1963), Innovation in Marketing: New Perspectives for Profit and Growth, New York: McGraw Hill.

____________ (1969), The Marketing Mode: Pathways to Corporate Growth, New York: McGraw Hill.

____________ (1975), ‘Retrospective commentary’, in Ben M. Enis and Keith K. Cox (eds), Marketing Classics: A Selection of Influential Articles, Boston: Allyn and Bacon: 20-23.

____________ (1983), The Marketing Imagination, New York: The Free Press.

____________ (1991), Thinking About Management, New York: The Free Press.

____________ (1993), Levitt on Marketing, Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press.

Levy, Sidney J. (1981), ‘Interpreting consumer mythology: a structural approach to consumer behavior’, Journal of Marketing, 45, Summer: 49-61.

__________ (1994a), ‘Interpreting consumer mythology: structural approach to consumer behavior focuses on story telling’, Marketing Management, 2, 4: 4-9.

Locke, David(1992), Science as Writing, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lukes, Stephen (1995), The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Novel, London: Verso.

Lynch, James (1995), ‘The end of marketing?’, in O. Westall (ed.), British Academy of Management Annual Conference Proceedings, Lancaster: Lancaster University, 322-4.

Malhotra, Naresh, K. (1996), ‘The impact of the Academy of Marketing Science on marketing scholarship: an analysis of the research published in JAMS, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 24, 4: 291-8.

McCloskey, Donald N. (1990), If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McCreery, J. (1995), ‘Malinowski, magic and advertising: on choosing metaphors’, in J.F. Sherry (ed.), Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior: An Anthropological Sourcebook, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 309-29.

McDonagh, Pierre (1995), ‘Q: is marketing dying of consumption?  A: yes, and the answer is consumption’, in S. Brown, J. Bell and D. Carson (eds), Proceedings of the Marketing Eschatology Retreat, Belfast: University of Ulster, 48-59.

McDonald, Malcolm H.B. (1994), ‘Marketing - a mid-life crisis?’, Marketing Business 30, May: 10-14.

Meamber, Laurie A. and Venkatesh, Alladi (1995), ‘Discipline and practice: a postmodern critique of marketing as constituted by the work of Philip Kotler’, in B.B. Stern and G.M. Zinkhan (eds), Enhancing Knowledge Development in Marketing, Vol. 6, Chicago: American Marketing Association, 248-53.

Micklethwait, John and Wooldridge, Adrain (1996), The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus, New York: Times Books.

Mowen, J.C. and Leigh, T.W. (1996), ‘State of marketing thought and practice: a panel discussion’, Marketing Educator, 15, 1: 1-3.

O’Guinn, Tom C. (1996), ‘The romantic arbiter: a comment on Holbrook’, in R.W. Belk, N. Dholakia and A. Venkatesh (eds), Consumption and Marketing: Macro Dimensions, Cincinnati: South-Western, 83-6.

O’Hara, Daniel T. (1985), The Romance of Interpretation: Visionary Criticism from Pater to de Man, New york: Columbia University Press.

Pease, Donald E. (1994), ‘Harold Bloom’, in M. Groden and M. Kreiswirth (eds), The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Baltimote: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 94-7.

Pechmann, Cornelia (1990), ‘Response to president’s column’, ACR Newsletter, June: 5-7.

Rau, P.A. (1996), ‘Rigor, relevance, readibility and maybe some rethinking’, Marketing Educator, 15, 2: 3.

Renza, Louis A. (1995), ‘Influence’ in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas Mclaughlin (eds), Critical Terms for Literary Study, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 186-202.

Schama, Simon (1992), Dead Certainties, Harmondsworth: Granta.

Scott, Linda M. (1990), ‘Understanding jingles and needledrop: a rhetorical approach to music in advertising’, Journal of Consumer Research, 17, September: 223-36.

__________ (1992), ‘Playing with pictures: postmodernism, poststructuralism and advertising visuals’, in J.F. Sherry and B. Sternthal (eds), Advances in Consumer Research, Volume XIX, Provo: Association for Consumer Research, 596-612.

__________ (1994), ‘The bridge from text to mind: adapting reader-response theory to consumer research’, Journal of Consumer Research, 21, December: 461-80.

Selzer, J. (1993), Understanding Scientific Prose, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Sheth, Jagdish N. and Parvatiyar, Atul (1993), ‘The evolution of relationship marketing’, paper presented at the Sixth Marketing History Conference, Atlanta, May.

Simpson, David (1995), The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Spiggle, Susan (1986), ‘Measuring social values: a content analysis of Sunday comics and underground comix’, Journal of Consumer Research, 13, June: 100-13.

Spikes, Michael P. (1997), Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Stern, Barbara B. (1988), ‘Medieval allegory: roots of advertising strategy for the mass market’, Journal of Marketing, 52, July: 84-94.

___________ (1989a), ‘Literary criticism and consumer research: overview and illustrative analysis’, Journal of Consumer Research, 16, December: 322-34.

___________  (1989b), ‘Literary explication: a methodology for consumer research’, in Elizabeth C. Hirschman (ed.), Interpretive Consumer Research, Provo: Association for Consumer Research, 48-59.

___________ (1990), ‘Literary criticism and the history of marketing thought: a new perspective on “reading” marketing theory’, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 18, 4: 329-36.

___________ (1991), ‘Two pornographies: a feminist view of sex in advertising’, in R.H. Holman and M.R. Solomon (eds), Advances in Consumer Research, Volume XVIII, Provo: Association for Consumer Research, 384-91.

___________ (1993), ‘Feminist literary criticism and the deconstruction of ads: a postmodern view of advertising and consumer responses’, Journal of Consumer Research, 19, March: 556-66.

__________ (1995), ‘Consumer myths: Frye’s taxonomy and the structural analysis of consumption text’, Journal of Consumer Research, 22, September: 165-85.

__________ (1996), ‘Deconstructive strategy and consumer research: concepts and illustrative exemplar’, Journal of Consumer Research, 23, September: 136-47.

Thompson, Craig J. (1993), ‘Modern truth and postmodern incredulity: a hermeneutic deconstruction of the metanarrative of “scientific truth” in marketing research’, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 10, 3: 325-38.

Uusitalo, Liisa (1996), ‘How to study imaginary aspects of consumption’, in Russell W. Belk, Nikhilesh Dholakia and Alladi Venkatesh (eds), Consumption and Marketing: Macro Dimensions, Cincinnati: South-Western, 87-95.

Varadarajan, P. Rajan (1996), ‘From the editor: reflections on research and publishing’, Journal of Marketing, 60, October: 3-6.

Veeser, H.Aram (ed.) (1989), The New Historicism, New York: Routledge.

_________ (ed.) (1992), The New Historicism: A Reader, New York: Routledge.

__________ (1996), ‘Introduction: the case for confessional criticism’, in H.A. Veeser (ed.), Confessions of the Critics, New York: Routledge, ix-xxvii.

Wallendorf, Melanie and Brucks, Merrie (1993), ‘Introspection in consumer research: implementation and implications’, Journal of Consumer Research, 20, December: 339-59.