Marketing and Literature: The Anxiety of Academic Influence

Abstract

Literary criticism, according to leading theorist Frank Lentricchia, involves striking texts together tv 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 on Bloom's "anxiety of influence" thesis, this article 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.

A Role for Poetry in Consumer Research

“…As a discipline, we are growing more comfortable with exegesis, the eliciting of meaning from a text by a reader. We are just beginning to wrestle with eisegesis (Mick and Buhl 1992;Ritson and Elliott 1999), the infusing of a text with personal meaning, even though our literature has begun to incorporate theories of reader response (Scott 1994), reception (Stern 1993), and misprision (Brown 1999) that have advanced the field of literary criticism. Olson (1999, p. 22) pronounces the denial of eisegesis in textual production and the polysemy that transparency enables in the creation of local meaning, a "fallacy" in our interpretive quest.…”

“…(Sigmund Freud, in Mackay 1991) Let us focus for a moment on the introspective inflection of poetry. Introspection has had a checkered career in consumer research but remains a practice of considerable interest (Brown 1995;Gould 1995;Holbrook 1995;Levy 1996;Wallendorf and Brucks 1993). Because poetry is so alive to contexture, the texture that surrounds and constitutes our lived experience, it is more suited than prose to capturing the radicalness of the Other (Daniel and Peck 1996).…”

Theodore Levitt: The Ultimate Writing Machine

“…That is to say, great writers are characterized by a desire to challenge convention, to overturn the obvious, to upend the accepted, to flip the field in some way, shape, or form, and indeed to look at things from a radically different perspective (Brown, 1999(Brown, , 2004. As previously noted, arguing against the method of the moment, or buzzword du jour, is a signature Theodore Levitt trait.…”

Representing BtoB reality in case study research: Challenges and new opportunities

“…Representations were simply taken as 'given' (something just there), not something that had to be studied. Since the late 90s, some marketing researchers have been trying to deal with the 'crisis of representation' within the marketing discipline (Brown, 1999), and this has had a huge impact on the way they write and structure their research papers.…”

“…In BtoB marketing, used the notion of simulacra-introduced by Jean Baudrillard-to refer to these layers of simulation or false representation: "simulations are based on other simulations and therefore it is not possible to identify where the real ends and the simulation begins" (Rinallo & Golfetto, 2006:858). Thus, the first question asked by some scholars (Brown, 1998(Brown, , 1999 is how can we possibly represent marketing phenomena without resorting to representation?…”