Promotional Culture and Convergence

Markets, Methods, Media

Helen Powell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136474378
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The rapid growth of promotional material through the internet, social media, and entertainment culture has created consumers who are seeking out their own information to guide their purchasing decisions.

Promotional Culture and Convergence analyses the environments necessary for creating a culture of collaboration with consumers, and critically engages with key areas of contemporary promotional development, including:

• promotional culture's primary industries, including advertising, marketing, PR and branding, and how are they informed by changes in consumer behaviour and market conditions
• how industries are adapting in the digital age to attract both audiences and advertising revenue
• the evolving dialogues between 'new consumers' and producers and promotional industries.

Ten contributions from leading theorists on contemporary promotional culture presents an indispensable guide to this creative and dynamic field and include detailed historical analysis, in-depth case studies and global examples of promotion through TV, magazines, newspapers and cinema.

Part I

Methods in Context

1

Consumers, Markets and Marketplaces

Helen Powell

Knowing the consumer

Introduction

The contemporary consumer is fundamentally Janus-headed. On the one hand, the amount of choice now available and the means to access it points towards a highly individualistic, authentic consumer who sees themselves as the architect of their own consumption patterns. And yet, as Simmel observed back in 1904, we continue to use fashion and trends as a mechanism by which we may secure group belonging. The majority of e-commerce sites, for example, allow us to rank search results by the ‘most popular’ in terms of other consumers’ previous choices or the ‘like’ facility on Facebook, which allows users to independently display their allegiance to a brand and which functions as a purchasing security blanket in terms of managing adherence to the taste cultures of those closest to us.

A second paradox that this chapter will address is that of the issue of consumer empowerment. Jenkins (2008: 3) addresses how technological changes inform consumption, specifically the ways in which ‘consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content’. And yet, one could argue that while we may be more informed in terms of making choices, those choices are always framed within the context of a capitalist system, with the pursuit of profit remaining that system’s raison d’être. Today consumers are no longer simply seen as ‘a market’ to sell into (Jenkins and Deuze 2008: 9), but rather as the principal drivers of what is supplied and, ultimately, consumed. Furthermore, they are also active in shaping the marketplaces, physical and virtual, in which such transactions take place. However, while evidencing such activity, this chapter also considers whether consumer participation is engendering a sense of belonging as information is shared online, thus enhancing the decision-making process; or is it turning the consumer into a market researcher, working for free in the cultivation of a more transparent marketplace with businesses then drawing upon this information to provide themselves with a more competitive edge based on consumers’ comments and findings? In this context, the chapter asks, is the rise of online ‘prosumer’ activity a positive outcome of convergence culture in that the fusion of participatory culture and collective intelligence now allows the marketplace to be shaped for the benefit of all, or only for the enhancement of a minority?

Convergence in the context of a neoliberal agenda

Under the traditional marketing paradigm, the producer and the consumer were positioned as complementary entities brought together in business through the intervention of the promotional industries. Communication flowed through a chosen set of media to a consumer who would be informed as to what was available, where it could be purchased and why such purchase was necessary. In the case of the latter, throughout the last decades of the twentieth century we witnessed a significant cultural turn away from the functionality of material goods towards their symbolic value, coupled by their promotion in more creative and potentially abstract ways. In the twenty-first century, the promotional industries are acutely aware that much promotion commences with the construction of the consumer as a desiring subject who makes purchases in order to fulfil the lifestyle choices made available to them through marketing and advertising. In this way, advertising creates sign value to enhance the use and exchange value of every product, conjuring up degrees of personalization and differentiation within the context of a mass market. Developing Raymond Williams’s (1980) argument that advertising functions as a ‘magic system’ (1980) through the symbolic imagery that connotes a whole range of additional qualities that the product can seemingly bring to the consumer (e.g., ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’), McAllister (2011: 152) argues that the ability of the magic system to construct commodity signs located within complex referent systems is now enhanced by digitality. The ‘blurring’ (McAllister 2011: 152) of commercial messages into social network pages, coupled with the degrees of interactivity made available between the consumer and the brand online, makes the Internet an enhanced promotional environment.

How, why, what and where we consume have all significantly been shaped by an increasingly neoliberal agenda that began in the latter decades of the twentieth century and has seeped through into the early decades of this millennium. Constituted on the basis of the deregulation of markets and the adoption of the monetarist policies of economist Milton Friedman as a means to both curb public spending and harness inflation, it took shape on the back of the Thatcher–Reagan alliance of the 1980s and offered itself as a new paradigm for late twentieth-century capitalism. Following the floatation of publicly owned enterprises such as British Telecom and British Gas, further attempts were made to cultivate new markets in the belief that the ‘commodity market is the best way of distributing resources and to that end as many goods and services must be available for trading, and at as many sites and in as many markets as possible’ (Lister et al 2009: 180) nationally and internationally. In essence, neoliberalism blossomed as the marketization of everyday life, with consumers finding their daily shopping forays enhanced by the introduction of new technologies, and more recently the introduction of apps that allow 24/7 shopping to become a reality (even if the delivery of those goods remains, at present, somewhat problematic and at odds with a culture of instantaneity). Transactions increasingly take place based on greater amounts of information accrued – not just from traditional advertising but from online research and peer-to-peer reviews. Trust is highly valued and consumers have concomitantly become highly sceptical of the opinions of experts. To gain their trust, brands must be sensitive to these trends but also remain highly transparent in their activities: ‘fake blogs’ or ‘flogs’ are very quickly detected, as was the case with Sony, L’Oreal and Wal-Mart, and are only ever met with derisory comments once the lack of authenticity has been made public.

Andrew Wernick’s (1991) Promotional Culture sought to explore through a postmodern lens the strategies adopted by the promotional industries – namely, plundering all of culture for their own gain and developing inter-textual references across their range of communications. As noted, promotion becomes more important following the turn to sign value as the predominant means through which consumers tap into the value of goods, with functionality no longer being a primary reason to consume or a mechanism through which competitive advantage can be gained. As consumers look to construct their identities through marketplace adventures, so Wernick (1991: 188) draws our attention to a new phase of capitalism and a concomitant promotional turn: ‘From the clothes we wear, to the parties we vote for at election time, wherever in fact a market of some kind operates, everything mirrors back the same basic signifying mode.’ Yet, it is the ways in which the concept of promotion permeates the interstices of our daily being that fascinates Wernick (1991: 192), as a result, engendering a culture of self-promotion: ‘from dating and clothes shopping to attending a job interview, virtually everyone is involved in self-promotionalism which overlays such practices in the micro-sphere of everyday life’. In this context brands become ‘symbolic resources for the construction and maintenance of identity’ (Elliott and Davies 2005: 155). This commences and is most prolific in youth when brands, as carriers of cultural meaning, are utilized to manage friendships, and to demonstrate points of similarity with and difference from other subcultural groupings. And, yet, it is up to brands ‘to fit into the complex identity of youngsters today rather than the other way around. Brands aren’t dictating styles or image anymore’ (Van den Bergh and Behrer 2011: 23).

As the teenage years progress, so brands move in and out of vogue, speaking to different stages of adolescence and utilized as one moves from a position of ‘“who Iam” to “who I want to be”‘, but more often than not a third position emanates – namely, ‘“the self in-between”‘, emphasizing the lack of stability and certainty involved (Elliott and Davies 2005: 167–168). Indeed, Generation Y (aged 13 to 29) are insecure and ‘seek reassurance for what they perceive to be a chaotic world’ (Van den Bergh and Behrer 2011: 33). Global brands such as Coca-Cola appeal in this context and they are prepared to pay more for them ‘because they have proven to be able to survive’ (Van den Bergh and Behrer 2011: 33). Another brand that has used social media effectively to tap into the ‘ordinary’ 16- to 24-year-old male seeking reassurance is Lynx, who use it to engage with young men on their own terms by creating a persona for the brand that the target market can identify with. In this way, Lynx embeds itself within the project of identity construction, which increasingly is taking place online within the youth market. Through promotion, brands more widely position themselves as facilitators in the construction of an ‘autobiography of the self’ (Giddens 1991) that consumers work through via the choices they make, evidencing as they mature a more individualistic turn in relation to its maintenance. But choice is not without its detractions, producing anxiety around the decision-making process (Schwarz 2004; Elliott 2008), with the brand as confidant and the arm of reassurance stepping in here.

However, the notion of consumption as inextricably tied to identity construction and manifesting itself only as an integral part of the neoliberal agenda is challenged by Trentmann (2009: 211), who argues that ‘people’s attachments to things are older than the post-war age of affluence and fixation on growth’. He draws attention to the sixteenth century, for example, and the development of trade which engendered both a reflexive interest in other cultures and a turn towards self-fashioning. As a result, he argues, we should acknowledge:

… that a consuming lifestyle is far more deeply entrenched than often thought, and for reasons that are often ignored or misunderstood in mainstream critiques of consumerism. To target primarily external agencies as responsible for the creation of new desires – be they corporations, or governments calling on citizens to be patriotic consumers – is to miss the internal attractions that have led people to use, want and find themselves in things in the past. Our material self has been growing for a long time.

(Trentmann 2009: 211)

The new consumer

While the ‘consuming lifestyle’ may have taken many guises over time, it is in relation to the identification of a specifically ‘new consumer’ that this chapter now turns, and which becomes prevalent, not coincidentally, I would argue, within the literature of consumer studies at the same time as The Cluetrain Manifesto (Levine et al 2000) was published. It is worth taking the time to map the emergence of this specific subject position, with the first wave of writers under discussion here recognizing a ‘new consumer’ whose identity was being shaped by the Internet, allowing for more informed choices within the marketplace to be made. As a consequence, there arose a responsive recognition that how such consumers are marketed to, going forward, needs to change.

Writing a decade ago, Frank Shaw, then director of the Centre for Future Studies, identified a new type of consumer that at that point made up 35 per cent of the adult population of the UK (Shaw 2002: 5). They comprised a cohort with ‘higher educational qualifications; who lives in a household with discretionary income; who has access to new technologies’ (Shaw 2002: 5) and, as a result, constituted a new category in the typology of consumer subjectivities based on how they utilized the information made available, predominantly online, to inform their purchasing decisions. They had become notable, argued Shaw, as the increase in number was promulgated by more and more young people going to university and using their education to make commercial decisions. He began to map particular characteristics of this ‘new consumer’ that would impact future communication strategies between brands and their target markets. The ‘new consumer’ would:

1. Prefer choice: they will examine a wide range of choices when making purchasing decisions.
2. Demand tailored information and communications: time-starved consumers look to dedicated sites that provide the information that they need. Quality not quantity of information is important here.
3. Sceptical of brands: due to their ability to carry out research, a brand name is not enough to warrant purchase. Brand value becomes a critical steer on choice. If better value is attached – for example, to a supermarket own brand – then they will switch to that label.
4. Willing to experiment: cash-rich but time poor, new consumers will test products that they feel have the potential to allow them greater control over their lives.
5. Value convenience: they are also prepared to pay for services that give them more leisure time.
6. Expect superior service: new consumers value their time and are not prepared to put up with poor service.
7. Skills for catering to the new consumer: the new consumers will challenge traditional marketing thinking over the next decade. Uncertainty levels will rise as it becomes increasingly challenging to meet individual customer expectations and needs.
   (Shaw 2002: 7)

The shift from purchasing on the basis of needs to that of wants is perhaps the most prevalent characteristic of this ‘new consumer’. Increasingly, material goods and the forays into the marketplace to buy them become one of the mainstays of leisure time and a principle mode, as noted above, of self-actualization. The emotional investment that comes with both the anticipation and realization of the experiences that are inextricably linked to consumption is not to be underestimated, as is the disappointment when expectations are not met and when the perceived psychological benefits (happiness, popularity, belonging) are not realized (Dittmar 2008). Much of this disappointment emanates from the scarcities of the New Economy, for while ‘Old Consumers’ were ‘beset by scarcities of cash, choice and availability, those confronting the New Consumer are shortages of time, attention and trust’ (Lewis and Bridger 2001: 6). In contrast with ‘Old Consumers’, dictated to by manufacturers and suppliers, in order to ameliorate disappointment, ‘New Consumers dictate not only what they buy but how and where those purchases are made’ within a marketplace that is increasingly fragmented (Lewis and Bridger 2001: 2). As a result, in terms of how their wants are satisfied, they seek out ‘original, innovative and distinctive products and services … that can claim to be in some way authentic’ (Lewis and Bridger 2001: 4). This explains the growth of the ‘long tail’, discussed in depth later in the chapter, and the use of objects to establish a point of difference; but it also accounts for a growing distrust in traditional (mass) advertising.

In 2006 and 2008, Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang returned to the consumer typologies that they had originally mapped out in 1995. During the intervening period, they recognized that it was virtually impossible to generalize about the consumer, seeing the consumer now as ‘unmanageable’ both as ‘concept’ and ‘entity’ since ‘no one can pin it down to one specific conceptualisation at the expense of all others, and as an entity, since attempts to control and manage the consumer lead to the consumer mutating from one impersonation to another’...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction Promotion in an Era of Convergence
• Part I
• Methods in Context
• Part II
• Media in Context
• Index