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[ Preface ] [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ] [ Notes ] On Marketplace Melodies, Consumer Cantatas and Shopping Serenades
Earlier this year I was invited to give a speech on postmodern marketing. Ordinarily, I don’t accept such invitations, few and far between though they are, since audiences invariably expect a definition, an outline, a goddam explanation of postmodernism. Not only is this far beyond my admittedly limited powers of description, explication and synthesis but it is totally antithetical to the antinomial, anti-encapsulatory, anti-anything-and-everything anti-authoritarianism of the postmodern project1. Worse still, the speech was slated for Stockholm, in the middle of winter, to an expectant gathering of 300 or so Swedish marketing managers.
Now, I have nothing against the Swedes. They invented relationship marketing, after all, and that’s good enough for me. But as someone who speaks with a slight Irish accent, at a tempo verging on the supersonic -- which accelerates to escape velocity when I’m nervous -- and who has been known to inject a modicum of humour into his otherwise insufferable presentations, I was understandably apprehensive about agreeing to go. Scandinavians, let’s be honest, are not exactly renowned for their laugh-a-minute, rib-tickling, thigh-slapping propensities (well, maybe the thigh thing) and marketing managers, irrespective of nationality, are not likely to be amused by what passes for postmodern “playfulness”. I mean, would you pay good money to be told there’s nothing to tell you? Mind you, Jacques Derrida’s been getting away with it for years.
However, it was an old friend who asked – or, rather, strong-armed me into accepting – and you know what it’s like with old friends; you can’t get shot of the blood-sucking, parasitic bastards, let alone say no to them. So, I set off to Stockholm with a song in my heart, a spring in my step and the milk of human kindness flowing in my veins. Or something like that.
On arrival, to my astonishment, I was met by a limousine. A proper limo, let it be known, none of your battered shuttle buses with a fancy moniker that you find at many American airports, the ones that take cheapskates who won’t spring for a cab to their fly-blown motels. This was the real thing: long, black, tinted glass, sliding panels, judiciously-stocked minibar. The lot! What’s more, it whisked me serenely to a star-studded hotel, where along with my fellow presenters – management gurus one and all (okay, all except one) – we were swiftly ensconced in our expensive cut-glass, cut-flowers, cut-the-chocolate-on-the-pillow-crap penthouse suites.
As someone whose idea of conference-going involves slumming it in mildewed Halls of Residence, five flights away from the nearest bathroom, this was way, way, way out of my league. Jeez, I’m impressed by places that fold the toilet paper into an origamisque point and serve free coffee in the foyer. If they chuck in a powdered donut, I’m rhapsodising on a sheaf of customer care questionnaires before it’s time for a refill.
Fool that I am, of course, I failed to put two and two together. Namely, that when conferences are being organised on a money-no-object basis they are likely to expect nothing-but-the-best from their speakers. And it was only the next day, while we were being driven through the streets of Stockholm in open-topped, horse-drawn carriages (holy shit, do I wave or what?), that the penny finally dropped. Not, admittedly, that I’d have stooped to pick it up by this stage of my consumption-sheathed seduction, but something from the depths of my no-such-thing-as-a-free-penthouse-suite subconscious told me that my grubby black-and-white overheads, badly reproduced on a toner-deprived, chew-em-up-and-spit-em-out photocopier, might not quite be up to the mark. Everyone else, moreover, seemed to be equipped with the latest, top-of-the-range, pump-up-the-Powerpoint, Bill-Gates-a-go-go, Industrial-Light-and-Magic, clip-art-Apocalypse style laptop. You know the kind of thing I mean.
Anyway, armed with sufficient battery power to illuminate a small east-African township, we cantered up to the venue. The Natural History Museum, no less. The Swedish Royal Natural History Museum, I’ll have you know. Several constellations, suffice it to say, removed from the concrete-clad, nuclear-strike resistant, toilet cubicle-cum-conference centre facilities I normally frequent. The auditorium was a tastefully refurbished, state-of-the-art lecture theatre in the bowels of this stunning neo-Baroque building. My heart leapt and sank simultaneously. Nothing like dying in the uxorious bosom of oratorical luxury.
The laptoppers, needless to say, were in raptures by this stage and rushed to plug in their Defcon-five-I-spit-on-airport-X-ray-machines machinery. Not needing to run through my presentation – a coat-pocket stuffed with illegible notes never goes out of style, so they say – I wandered through the empty, echoing exhibition halls, alone with my semi-suicidal thoughts. Granted, I’m not exactly what you’d call a cognoscenti of the animal kingdom. Anything bigger or hairier than a pussy cat and I’m cowering behind the sofa, praying that a resident arachnid won’t come over all territorial and decide to make its presence felt. But even I thought the displays were incredible, brilliantly imaginative, a veritable exercise in museological regression therapy. The years fell off me as I made my way past the dinosaurs, the hippopotamus, the giant squid, the albatross, the elk, all safely stuffed thank God, though I’m not so sure about the gorilla. That simian on steroids was staring at me, I swear it.
By the time I reached the cabinet of curiosities - the acorn from which the mighty oak of the collection presumably sprang - I was ten years old, wearing short trousers and using my sleeve as a handkerchief. Still do, come to think of it, but only in emergencies. Captivated by the grotesquery of two-headed chickens, Siamese sheep and the pickled pizzle of a well-hung donkey (and they say curatorship’s no fun), I eventually found myself in a distant corner of the building with only a dark stairwell for company.
As a big, brave, ten-going-on-eleven year-old, I decided to descend, albeit only after calling “Anybody down there?” in the most authoritative whisper I could muster, whilst attempting to maintain a modicum of blue-suited dignity. Tentatively entering a Stygian exhibition hall, I must have tripped some kind of infra-red sensor, because the lights suddenly burst on and I found myself in the maw of a massive blue whale, while the songs of their sidekicks, the Humpbacks, were being broadcast at full blast. Pausing only to palpitate my perfidious Pacemaker, I did what any animal lover would do. Run.
However, after sucking my thumb vigorously for several minutes and mopping a fevered brow with my trusty, ever-present security blanket, I steeled myself, returned to Room 101, Stockholm branch2, and discovered the most wonderful display devoted to whales, whaling and matters cetacean. Apart from the kriller entrance way – yo, Jonah! – there were full-scale mock-ups of the Monstro mob, from belugas to sperm, cabinets chock-a-block with scrimshaw and a perfect replica of a surely-to-Jesus-they-didn’t-put-to-sea-in-that, nineteenth-century whaler.
This leviathan of exhibitions resonated with me for several reasons. First, it was a stunning example of the presentational art, something that my impending speech was highly unlikely to achieve, not in a million years. I should have summoned a cab to the airport, there and then. Second, it was a wonderfully creepy setting for the academic murder mystery I was considering writing. What a place to kill-off Kotler or that other great white whale of marketing scholarship, Moby Dick Bagozzi!
Third, and most importantly, it reminded me of the need to finish this book and the strange, not to say spooky, reaction it has provoked since its inception. I have found that whenever I mention Songs of the Humpback Shopper in casual conversation, as one does, my friends, colleagues and fellow consumer researchers respond with barely disguised bemusement. “What does it mean?” they ask. “What’s it about?”, they say, with a semi-audible sigh of exasperation. “What’s a humpback shopper when it’s at home?” they politely inquire, hoping against hope that I won’t launch into a detailed explanation. And if they’re really curious they’ll contrive to wonder what on earth this cetacean consumer is singing for.
“Call me crazy,” I retort (as if…), “but why does the title of a book have to be about its contents? Does everything we write have to have ‘Marketing’, ‘Consumer’, ‘Research’ or something equally quotidian on the cover? Why can’t we go for something surreal, something evocative, something that merely hints at the material within?”
“And anyway,” I continue, as they rapidly retreat from this wild-eyed proselyte, “the title is about its contents! It’s about people who don’t like, are annoyed by, or simply detest shopping -- humpback shoppers, I call them. The word ‘hump,’ after all, carries connotations of annoyance, displeasure, disability, irritation and, lest we forget, copulation.”
“Indeed,” I humph, though I’m usually talking to an empty room by this stage, “the song of the humpback whale is a perfect symbol of the book’s thesis. It transpires that only male humpbacks “sing” and men are much less in love with shopping than women, as a rule. Their singing, despite its mellifluousness, is a sign of aggression and male shoppers can be aggressive little tykes. It’s also indicative of sexual arousal and sexual arousal looms, er, large in Songs. (That’s hooked you!)3
“Most importantly,” I conclude, to the nice white-coated men taping electrodes to my temples, “the title is different from the norm, from what passes for scholarship in our field. The book tries to be different, to write consumer research in a radically different way. Okay, it might fail miserably but surely the experiment is worth trying. Don’t you agree?”
Ah, the silence of the deep…
My reviewers’ harpoons are doubtless loaded and ready, but before they take aim I’d just like to take this opportunity to say a few words of thanks. The book was written in two short bursts during the summers of 1997 and 1998, when I was based at the University of California – Irvine. Indeed, I’m seriously tempted to blame its admittedly unorthodox approach on the Californian weltanschluung, whatever that is, though there’s not that much difference between Orange County and the Orange Six Counties, truth to tell. I mean, only the other day a bunch of crazy guys with bowler hats, banners, sashes, swords and what have you insisted on their inalienable right to march down Sunset Boulevard. The local residents, needless to say, were outraged – Bruce Willis, Sly Stallone, Tom Cruise, Sharon Stone and many more. It was a dreadful scene; throwing Faberge eggs, burnt-out stretch limos, screaming their hackneyed party slogans (‘we’ll be back’, ‘is that a lambeg in your pocket?’, ‘Ulster says 15% of the gross’). You had to be there, though the studios are already talking about a movie of the incident, I Know What You Did Last Summer Marching Season. Double bill with Crocodile Drumcree, naturally.
Be that as it may, I’d like to thank the Graduate School of Management at UCI, especially Professor Alladi Venkatesh, for inviting me to spend some time in Irvine and the University of Ulster, Professor Richard Barnett in particular, for encouraging -- who said persuading? -- me to go walkabout for a while. A number of other people participated in this game of pass the postmodern parcel, most notably Rob Kozinets, Hope Schau, John Sherry and Marcus Stevens, all of whom kindly read and commented on various drafts of the book, as did the Heretical Consumer Research group at its annual meeting in Montreal. Rhona Reid helped gather some of the empirical data, though the write-up is nobody’s fault but mine4. Above all, however, I’d like to thank my wife, Linda, for coping so brilliantly with our three girls, Madison, Holly and Sophie, while I was off disporting myself in sunny Southern California. Sorry, that should read, working extremely hard with nary a moment’s rest, never mind relaxation, in smog-bound So-Cal. ’Nuff said.
Oh yes, in case you’re wondering, I did make that presentation in Stockholm. A complete nightmare it was too, though the blow to my academic ego was cushioned somewhat by the carapace of sumptuous consumption. Compared to the consuming Hades coming right up, my humiliation in front of 300 Swedish marketing managers must be considered a personal triumph. Are you ready for a Bazaar Ballad or two? Feel free to sing along if you want. Hey, scholarly karaoke! Where will it all end? What’s the world coming to? Are you in or are you out?
Stephen Brown Los Angeles August 1998 |