Raising the dead: on brands that go bump in the night

Brown, Stephen; Patterson, Anthony; Ashman, Rachel

doi:10.1080/0267257x.2020.1839121

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Hollister began and continues branding life as an Abercrombie and Fitch subsidiary, not as a local beach store. Hollister has no connection with beaches anywhere other than a brand narrative literally cut from whole cloth (Brown et al , 2021). As noted, the brand’s founding story and, consequently its past are bogus.…”

Section: Theoretical Background To Brand-pastnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tout casse, tout passe, tout lasse; et tout se remplace: resurrecting declining brands by leveraging brand-pastness

Strutton

Schibik

2023

JHRM

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Purpose The past is important for various known and unknown reasons. This paper aims to reveal and justify unacknowledged reasons why, when and how managers should consider leveraging the pasts of previously successful but currently declining brands to restore their more desirable historical market positions. Design/methodology/approach This conceptual paper combines marketing and branding theory with historical branding examples, anecdotes and inductive inferences to develop and justify brand-pastness as a theoretically-grounded and managerially-actionable repositioning concept that could be applied to resurrect declining brands. Findings The emergent historically-grounded brand-pastness framework generates innovative insights that could be applied in the future. These insights explain when, why and how brand managers could apply brand-pastness to resurrect declining brands. The framework also facilitates the development of a brand-pastness-based research agenda. The agenda is driven by questions structured to address the nature, scope and potential applications of brand-pastness as a new concept and useful repositioning tool. Research limitations/implications This paper’s recommendations are limited by their conceptual and inductive origins. However, a research agenda is developed to guide and structure future empirical investigations of the branding antecedents to and consequences of a prospective brand-pastness construct. Originality/value This paper introduces, conceptualizes and justifies the potential value of a historically-grounded concept called brand-pastness. The concept may prove beneficial when marketing managers use brand-pastness to reposition and resurrect declining brands by re-instilling targeted consumers’ historical perceptions of brands’ past superiority.

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Section: Theoretical Background To Brand-pastnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tout casse, tout passe, tout lasse; et tout se remplace: resurrecting declining brands by leveraging brand-pastness

Strutton

Schibik

2023

JHRM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…It tends to be greatly speculative or even outright fictitious. They might be called dystopian stories (see Bradshaw and Brown, 2018; Brown et al, 2021; Molesworth, 2020), but as they are not ‘predictions’ based on actualities, they remain open-ended rather than conclusive. If anything, for us they may have the potential to mirror our consumer society better through the fantasies they account for.…”

Section: The Tendencies Of Terminal Marketingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bleak signs of our times: Descent into ‘Terminal Marketing’

2022

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Marketing theory has twisted and turned with the introduction of many theoretical innovations. Yet, despite being influenced by various critical perspectives, the general marketing discourse remains remarkably optimistic about contemporary consumer culture, its capability to produce meaning and individuality, and its potential to overcome the existential threats of the 21st century, or at least its capacity to be transformed for the better. This paper discerns a countervailing current within critical marketing thought; a smattering of scholars that resist the therapeutic urge to tell that all will be well, producing a proliferation of papers that are deeply pessimistic about conventional marketing concepts like meaningful experience, agency, and the sovereignty of the consumer ‘self’. Against the current of convention, this research seeks to address an increasing zeitgeist of bleak cultural aporia, an atmosphere of apolitical apathy where the future has increasingly been ‘cancelled’ and all that remains is a carnivalesque consumer culture that has resigned itself to extinction, even if on the semiotic surface it is increasingly ethical and ecological. The present paper catalogues this development and draws together some of its tendencies. Chief amongst these is the tendency to see the consumer as a desiring intensity immersed in vast networks of techno-capitalism and thus reduces the idea of the agentic and individualistically creative consumer into a myth at best. We propose the term Terminal Marketing to describe this pessimistic theoretical attitude, but we consider its mood as potentially producing more critical interventions than the generally critical-yet-optimistic tone of interpretive marketing.

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“…Marketing scholarship has long reported on consumer culture’s fascination with relics from its own past (Brown, 2007; Cantone et al, 2020). Recent accounts have drawn upon Jacques Derrida’s (2006) hauntology to offer an onto-affective conceptualisation of: the ‘haunted’ status of our late capitalist moment (Ahlberg et al, 2021); the mournful retrospection of its most iconic brands (Brown et al, 2021); and the temporal disjunction of its consumer subjects (Takhar, 2021). These applications of hauntology to marketing scholarship emphasise consumer culture’s collective realisation that its best times are behind it, or as Ahlberg and colleagues suggest, recent market developments are characterised by ‘a half-lost remembering that we no longer participate in the optimisms of the past’, and ‘the happy days of marketing have increasingly evaporated’ (2021: 169).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revenants in the marketplace: A hauntology of retrocorporation

James,

Cronin,

Patterson

2023

Marketing Theory

Self Cite

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Drawing upon a cultural-historical reading of the witch, we discuss how modern capitalism is chronically haunted by obstreperous vestiges of what preceded it yet remains proficient in assimilating all that returns to challenge it. By adapting and extending a theoretical toolkit informed by Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher, we trace market and state administrators’ co-optation of the primeval witch figure and her ideological trappings: initially, to expropriate those who threatened incipient modernising structures; later, to provoke increasingly secularised subjects towards consumption; and eventually, to calibrate rather than obviate capitalist expansion so that it remains aligned with consumer interests. Introducing the new concepts of ‘retrocorporation’ and ‘marketplace revenant’, we discuss how long-foreclosed, ancient imaginaries become re-invoked and re-programmed to perpetuate capitalism’s dominance. Our message for the nascent tradition of ‘Terminal Marketing’ is that the collision and collusion of past and future has the potential to ossify capitalist realism in the present.

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Raising the dead: on brands that go bump in the night

Cited by 9 publications

References 27 publications

Tout casse, tout passe, tout lasse; et tout se remplace: resurrecting declining brands by leveraging brand-pastness

Tout casse, tout passe, tout lasse; et tout se remplace: resurrecting declining brands by leveraging brand-pastness

Bleak signs of our times: Descent into ‘Terminal Marketing’

Revenants in the marketplace: A hauntology of retrocorporation

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