Postmodern Marketing Two: : Telling Tales

Meet the Ancestors (r) BBC 2 9.00 p.m.

The scene is Waterstones Bookstore, Glasgow (the biggest in Europe, naturally), the coffee lounge. A virtual reality seminar is being conducted by that well‐known marketing dinosaur, M.J. Thomas. His audience ‐ cardboard cut‐outs of fellow gurus Doyle, Wensley, Baker, Buttle, Brownlie and McDonald (Brown, 1998, pp. 17/18). The subject ‐ Brown field sites and the bones buried in them …

Thomas’ forensic skills (a.k.a. a self‐appointed academic authority who reads all the book reviews) allows him to say this about the assembled bones.

His name is Stephen Brown. Unedited, uncertified, and unrivalled, our hero has arrived. He is armed with some novel weapons that the bad guys have not seen before: a razor‐sharp wit, an encyclopaedic knowledge of the marketing literature, and his favourite and most lethal weapon ‐ postmodernism … Readers might hate Postmodern Marketing but they must read it. It is superbly written, immensely entertaining, sharply critical; comprehensively researched and highly informative …

So said the Journal of Marketing reviewer of Brown’s Postmodern Marketing (Vol. 62 No. 1, January 1998, pp. 121‐3).

Thomas himself said “This is an important book, and I hope that it is read widely both in this country and in the USA … I congratulate the publishers on their decision to invest in it, and I am looking forward, with eager anticipation, and as is Brown no doubt to the sequel ‐ Postmodern Marketing Two” (European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 31 No. 2, 1997, pp. 150‐2).

As you watch this programme you may well ask is this not self‐fulfilling prophecy? Here is Postmodern Marketing Two and in this world of empty television space, the programme makers have conspired to fill 30 minutes of our empty lives with an exposition (as in exposure) of Brown’s work.

Make no mistake. This is archaeology. Look at the chapter headings in Postmodern Marketing Two.

1. 1.

   Hello, hello it’s good to be back (who says?)

2. 2.

   We’re on the road to nowhere, come on inside.

3. 3.

   Wild thing, I think I love you.

4. 4.

   Are you ready for this thing called love?

5. 5.

   Bakhtin the US, Bakhtin the US, Bakhtin the USSR.

6. 6.

   I’ve got a rocket in my pocket.

7. 7.

   Hey no, let’s go.

8. 8.

   I rock, therefore I am.

The last chapter “How can a poor man stand such times and live?” consists of 54 pages of bibliography, a veritable Aaker to Zaltman of the marketing literature.

So, what is it all about, why should we bother to dig and delve? Here are some reasons:

1. 1.

   The message of this book is (I think) “that if academic marketing is to move forward intellectually, if it is to attract practitioners back into the fold, if it is to transcend its current crisis of representation, if it is to enter the twenty‐first century with renewed confidence, it must abandon its futile fixation with science and it must abandon it forthwith … We are never going to attain the ultimate fruits of our labours, the bright and shining Science of Marketing … It is time to join Markaholics Anonymous, to confess our hopeless addiction to the academic narcotic known as Science and, having acknowledged a dependency, to set out on the rough and rocky road to recovery. It is then that we will be able to come to terms with the side of ourselves that we have tried to suppress ‐ the fact, the glorious fact, that marketing is an Art, it has always been an Art, it will always be an Art. And the sooner academic marketers acquaint themselves with the tools and techniques of aesthetic appreciation, the sooner marketing scholarship will make a quantum leap forward (if you’ll pardon the scientific expression)!” (pp. 255‐6).

2. 2.

   Typically for Brown, he finishes this section and chapter with a rhetorical flourish:

OK, then, let me leave you with one last postmodern thought (just for old times’ sake). More than anything else in the world, I believe it is time to sweep aside marketing’s self‐appointed academic authorities, the big brothers, the thought police, the brains trust of our discipline. These people have destroyed academic marketing with their Ur‐scholarship, Ur‐objectivity, Ur‐rigour, Ur‐quantification, Ur‐models, Ur‐relationships, Ur‐paradigm shifts, Ur‐science, Urs‐holes if you ask me … (p. 257).

1. 1.

   You should buy the book to reward Francesca Weaver, Routledge (and International Thomson Business Press) Commissioning Editor. By deconstructing Brown’s text, you know that he is afraid of her penetrating intellect, and that is good enough for me. (Stephen, what does it feel like to be hoist by your own leotard?)

2. 2.

   Because Brown continues to be brilliant in his pursuit of sacred cows ‐ for example, he quotes his own priceless review of Kotler’s Marketing Places (pp. 64‐70). Not priceless, but certainly worth the price of Brown’s book.

3. 3.

   Because Brown is honest. I quote:

In this disconcerting situation, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that one of the principal reasons why marketers cannot make an original contribution to knowledge is because they are mesmerized by a mirage called Science. It is marketing’s short‐sighted scientism that lies at the heart of the problem, not our overly applied bent or belief that the intellectual grass is always greener on the other side of the disciplinary fence. If truth be told (and, as you know, you can rely on me to tell the unvarnished truth), the bulk of modern marketing scholarship has proved to be a complete waste of time and effort, an heroic but utterly wrongheaded attempt to acquire the trappings of “science”, a self‐abusive orgy of mathematical masturbation that has rendered us philosophically blind, conceptually deaf and spiritually debilitated (p. 42).

1. 1.

   I quote again:

It is arguable, however, that the most cogent explications of the nature and practical implications of postmodernism have been made by marketing practitioners. In a resonant reminder of the pre‐modern marketing era, when practitioners regularly contributed cutting‐edge papers to prominent academic journals, Ogilvy (1990) has contended that whereas modernity was characterized by the march of western‐style progress, the rise of science, mass‐production technologies, bureaucratic hierarchies and the emergence of the nation‐state, proponents of postmodernity ostentatiously eschew the idea of a one‐path trajectory of development, maintain that there is no such thing as value‐free scientific enquiry, have moved beyond mass to flexible form of production, seek to subvert established hierarchies, be they organizational, social, cultural, political or psychological, and anticipate the withering away of the nation‐state and its associated institutional apparatus.

… Marketing practitioners may not be familiar with the terminology ‐ though there is mounting evidence to suggest that this is changing ‐ but like the hippopotamus of legend that is impossible to describe yet remains instantly recognizable, they invariably respond positively to the eccentric, reflexive, tangential, idiosyncratic, paradoxical postmodern way of looking sidelong at the world. The Oakies of modern marketing scholarship may be reluctant to abandon their sterile intellectual allotment for academic pastures new, but postmodern practitioners have long since departed our disciplinary dustbowl. Indeed, and at the risk of further mixing my agricultural metaphors, it appears that the fellaheens of marketing science are left to shut the stable door after the, er, cliché has bolted and, if the “mid‐life crisis” literature is any indication, appear to be running around like the proverbial chickens whose decapitation has not yet registered (pp. 49, 50, 51).

1. 1.

   Because when you went to see Riverdance, you would have been unaware that it is a supreme example of postmodern marketing practice. Brown explains why (pp. 156‐67).

2. 2.

   Because Brown argues that relationship marketing “is an elaborate postmodern joke played by European marketing academics on their credulous American cousins”, (p. 175) and that RM “is the scrapie of scholarship” (p. 178). I do not agree with Brown, but I like his cheek in taking on the Swedish establishment and its Cranfield colony.

3. 3.

   Because chapter 5 (title: “I’ve got a rocket in my pocket”) contains (the list is not exhaustive) a discussion of the relationship between marketing academics and practitioners; an analysis of the postmodernisation of anthropology, and in particular ethnography; an attack on the aesthetic self debasement of academic marketers; a long discourse on what is wrong with the peer review process in academic journals (Table 5.1 “Hey, Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?” lists ten helpful hints for would be journal authors) which concludes “that the whole reviewing process is hopelessly compromised and should be dispensed with entirely”; an excursion into genre theory; detailed advice on style in academic papers (your title must contain a colon (“semi‐colons are for wimps …”); another contretemps with Francesca Weaver; a report on Stephen Jay Gould’s paper on self manipulation, cited because it almost cost Gould tenure (and because it is the only work of marketing scholarship that has shocked Brown, shocked as in “the shock of the new”) yet managed to survive the review process; and finally in a long section entitled “Saturday morning fever”, Brown shares with us in every zany detail his weekly excursion, with kids, to Crazy Prices’ Abbey Centre store, where he does battle with an array of unspeakable commodities including the Dean of Faculty ‐ all of course done to further our understanding of the service encounter.

4. 4.

   Where else in the marketing literature can you find a chapter with such a sweep? (That is what you do with detritus).

This is a splendid book, but my fear is that Brown, in his Coleraine fortress, and despite his weekly excursion to Crazy Prices, is neither targeting nor segmenting. Brown has powerful contentions and arguments to share with us, but he is carried away by his own brilliance. Geriatrics like me can find the time and patience to work through his prose and his arguments, but many punters will pick up this book, look at the chapter headings and conclude that this is a comic book mightily short of comic strips. Brown needs to write a volume with graduate and doctoral students in view and mind. He needs to challenge them, and in turn their mentors and supervisors, to rethink the methodology of marketing. He needs to excite them about Art in Marketing, he needs to show them why postmodernism is essential to understanding the hyper real world of marketing. I do not want to see Brown marginalised.

Here’s one for you, Stephen:

He who confronts the paradoxical exposes himself to reality! (Friedrich Durrenmatt).

That’s in my Little Zen Calendar, Monday, 9 February. And that’s my problem in reviewing this book and recommending it to a wider public.