Marketing Theory current issue

A cinemusicaliterary analysis of the American dream as represented by biographical jazz comedepictions in the golden age of Hollywood biopics: Blow, Horatio, Blow; O, Jakie, O; Go,Tommy, Go; No, Artie, No

Holbrook, M. B. — 2009-09-03

This essay argues that our grasp of marketing theory benefits from an awareness of the rags-to-riches ethos that characterizes the paradigmatic American Dream. In this connection, the essay presents a cinemusicaliterary analysis of how this success-story ideal has shaped some artistic manifestations of the consumer culture in ways that have appeared conspicuously in various literary, cinematic, and musical creations. Thus, beginning with the literary works of Horatio Alger and their reification of the rags-to-riches prototype, the essay traces the evolution of this success-story paradigm through its cinematic embodiment in The Jazz Singer (1927) to its appearance in the underlying musical structures that characterize five comedepictions of jazz heroes during the golden age of Hollywood biopics: The Fabulous Dorseys (1947); The Glenn Miller Story (1954); The Benny Goodman Story (1955); The Five Pennies (1959); and The Gene Krupa Story (1959). The essay ends by considering an instructive counterexample based on the life and writings of a different kind of hero, Artie Shaw, who abandoned $ucce$$ as an enormously popular musician to pursue different artistic goals as an author.

Working consumers: the next step in marketing theory?

Cova, B., Dalli, D. — 2009-09-03

In marketing and consumer research, consumers have been increasingly theorized as producers. However, these theorizations do not take all facets of consumers’ productive role into account. This paper mobilizes both post-Marxist economics and post-Maussian socioeconomics to develop the concept of working consumer. This concept depicts consumers who, through their immaterial labour, add cultural and affective value to market offerings. In so doing consumers increase the value of market offerings, although they usually work at the primary level of sociality (interpersonal relationships) and are therefore beyond producers’ control. However, given certain conditions, companies capture such a value when it enters the second level of sociality (the market). The concept of the working consumer summarizes and enriches extant approaches to consumer (co)production, while challenging widespread developments, such as the service-dominant (SD) logic of marketing, which try to create/construct an ethereal marketscape in which consumers and producers live in harmony.

Marketing and the structuration of organizational learning

Peters, L. D., Gassenheimer, J. B., Johnston, W. J. — 2009-09-03

A new dominant logic for marketing has evolved, one that sees both firms and customers as resource integrators. Proponents of this new marketing logic have called for the refinement and elaboration of this resource integration concept and a more explicit connection to the interactivity and networking literature. We address this need by exploring these literatures and drawing inferences for value creation. In particular, we explore how value creation in marketing is reliant upon organizational learning. To do this we draw upon structuration theory as a means of explaining the relationship between organizational and individual learning. We then explore how this relationship helps a firm to improve its value creation capabilities. We examine three key aspects of the structuration process of organizational learning: (1) the structural properties that enable and constrain learning practices; (2) the ways in which knowledgeable individuals carry out learning practices; and (3) the social processes in which learning practices are embedded. We illustrate these processes with the example of a typical network relationship dilemma in the construction industry. We then conclude by highlighting the ways in which our framework captures the central role that marketing plays in enhancing the organization’s capacity and capability to engage in knowledge management, organizational learning, and value creation and what that means to both the customer and the organization.

Morris Holbrook's jazz and film series: an appreciation

Bradshaw, A. — 2009-09-03

A portrait of Morris Holbrook

Bradshaw, A., Brownlie, D. — 2009-09-03