‘Is there a gap in the market, and is there a market in the gap?’ How advertising planning performs markets

Abstract

This paper explores the performative role of marketing knowledge in advertising planning. It is based on an ethnography within the account planning department of a London advertising agency as it worked closely with a client and a market research agency to develop a new energy/health drink for launch in the UK. The case provides detailed support for the idea that marketing (and other) theories help perform or bring into existence that which they purport to describe. It also shows how such theories are hybridised and streamlined in the iterative battleground of a creative process, framed by the need to create plausible consumption and competitive relations. The main contribution of this paper is to show how the performative power of marketing knowledge is ultimately determined not by its 'truth value', but by its ability to produce compelling stories that stabilize the reflexive relationships between product attributes, consumer profiles and competitive relations.

Capabilities for market-shaping: triggering and facilitating increased value creation

“…Labelling strategies: claiming, disassociating and hedging (Granqvist et al 2013). Performativity of market research (Jacobi et al 2015;Diaz Ruiz 2013). Markets are shaped when new resource linkages become institutionalized (Wieland et al 2017).…”

Markets, infrastructures and infrastructuring markets

“…Finally, the notion of knowledge infrastructures holds promise to study what constitutes marketing expertise, how it is organized, bought and sold as a professional service. Studies such as Diaz Ruiz (2013), Diaz Ruiz and Holmlund (2017), Nilsson (2019, 2021) Jacobi et al (2015 and Hafezieh (2019) on market research, advertising and digital marketing services provide examples of how different aspects of marketing expertise are constructed and enacted in provider-client relationships. These studies provide useful templates to examine the epistemological status of marketing expertise but also how that expertise stands in an infrastructural relation with marketing practices cutting across a variety of sectors, both private and public.…”

Gender categorisation in representational market practice

“…Empirical studies in this tradition have explored, for example, market research (Jacobi, Freund, & Araujo, 2015), industrial market segmentation (Harrison & Kjellberg, 2010), price representation practices in retail markets (Hagberg & Kjellberg, 2014), and the shaping of fashion trends by fabric companies taking part in a powerful trade fair (Rinallo & Golfetto, 2006). A central tenet of these studies is that representations do not merely describe but also contribute to shape markets in important ways.…”