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Marketing and American Consumer
Culture
Arthur Asa Berger
Marketing
and American
Consumer Culture
A Cultural Studies Analysis
Arthur Asa Berger
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, California, USA
I would like to thank all the scholars and writers who have written about
marketing and advertising, and related concerns, from a cultural studies
perspective over the years. They have provided me with insights of con-
siderable value—often shown in the epigraphs but also in quotations in the
chapters. They have helped turn the book into a literary documentary of
sorts and their voices have been extremely valuable. I also want to thank
some people who have helped me with the table on media preferences of
the four lifestyles: Tom Maxon, Hans Bakker, and Dirk Vom Lien. Finally,
I would like to thank my editor, Shaun Vigil, and his assistant, Glenn
Ramirez, for their support, and the copy-editors and production editors,
whose names I do not know, who have helped publish this book.
v
CONTENTS
vii
viii CONTENTS
References 153
Index 157
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ix
x ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Decoder
Man
Berger spent a year touring Europe after he got out of the Army and then went
to the University of Minnesota, where he received PhD in American Studies in
1965. He wrote his dissertation on the comic strip Li’l Abner. In 1963–64, he
had a Fulbright to Italy and taught at the University of Milan, where he met
Umberto Eco and socialized with him and his colleagues. He spent a year as
visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the
University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1984 and two months in
the fall of 2007 as visiting professor at the School of Hotel and Tourism at the
Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He spent a month lecturing at Jinan
University in Guangzhou and ten days lecturing at Tsinghua University in
Beijing in Spring 2009. He spent a month in 2012 as a Fulbright Senior
Specialist in Argentina, lecturing on semiotics and cultural criticism, a month
ABOUT THE AUTHOR xi
Down the hall from my office . . . is an equipment room with more than 100
cameras. Eight-millimeter video cameras, direct to hard drive, digital,
even a few ancient Super 8 time-lapse film cameras. . . . In that same
equipment room are piled cases of blank eight-millimeter videotapes, two
hours per tape, five hundred tapes to a case. Across the world, we have now
shot more than fifty-thousand hours of tape per year. We also have dozens of
handheld computers, or PDAs, on which we painstakingly jot down the
answers from the thousands of shopper interviews we conduct. . . . Even with
all that high-tech equipment, though, our most important research tool for
the past thirty years remains a piece of paper we call the track sheet, in the
hands of individuals we call trackers. Trackers are the field researchers of
the science of shopping, the scholars of shopping, or, more precisely, of
shoppers. Essentially, trackers stealthily make their way through stores
following shoppers and noting everything they do. Usually a tracker begins
by loitering inconspicuously near a store’s entrance, waiting for a shopper to
enter, at which point the “track” starts. The tracker will stick with the
unsuspecting individual (or individuals) as long as he or she is in the store
(excluding trips to the dressing room or restroom) and will record on the
track virtually everything the shopper does.
Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
Abstract Marketers are similar in nature to the Martians in War of the Worlds
who studied human beings carefully with an eye toward using them for their
own purposes: the Martians to suck people’s blood, the marketers to sell
people goods and services. Several definitions of marketing are offered and
marketing is contrasted with advertising and it is suggested that there is a
symbiotic relationship between the two. A case study of the relationship
between marketing and advertising is offered by Fred Goldberg in his analysis
of the California Cooler campaign. This is followed by a discussion of the
amount of media spending on advertising and a list of speculations about the
impact of marketing on American culture and society. Finally, there is an
exploration of some different academic disciplines and the way they look at
marketing and advertising.
As men [and women] busied themselves about their various concerns, they
were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man
with a microscope scrutinizes the transient creatures that swarm and multi-
ply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men [and women] went to
and fro about this globe about their little affairs serene in their assurance of
their empire of matter.
Shortly after, Wells described the creatures that were studying us, and
wrote another interesting passage:
Across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts
that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth
(and earth’s shoppers) with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their
plans against them.
1 INTRODUCTION: MARTIANS AND MARKETERS 3
Wells was writing about Martians but what he wrote about Martians can
also be applied to market researchers like Paco Underhill and a host of
others. They want to know why we buy this automobile and not another,
this bottle of mustard and not another, Coca-Cola and not Pepsi-Cola,
this anything and not a competing brand.
Henri Lefebvre
The United States is a country where marketing has reached its apotheosis.
There is no aspect of everyday life in the country that has not been affected
by marketing and advertising. Henri Lefebvre, a French Marxist, explains
one aspect of advertising and marketing, in his book Everyday Life in the
Modern World (1971:105):
Lefebvre and many other scholars seek to explain to people the role that
marketing and advertising plays in their lives and in their societies. For
Lefebvre, advertising is not just a nuisance but one of the most important
institutions of modern capitalism society and plays a major role in main-
taining capitalism and the political order.
WHAT IS MARKETING?
In Kalman Applbaum’s The Marketing Era, we find some useful defini-
tions of marketing. He quotes the American Marketing Association Board,
which defines marketing as (2004:24) “the process of planning and
executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas,
goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organi-
zational objectives.” He also quotes Theodor Levitt who describes mar-
keting (2004:24) as “The idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by
means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with
creating, delivering, and finally consuming it.”
Then Applbaum offers his own definition of marketing (2004:25)
The big question that marketers face is how do they find ways to separate
their customers from their loose change? A number of years ago, I spent
three weeks at an advertising agency in San Francisco, Goldberg Moser
O’Neill, and it had a marketing director and a staff of marketing research-
ers. From what I got out of my time there I concluded that, roughly
speaking, the marketers are the strategic thinkers who search for informa-
tion about the needs, desires, and interests of potential customers for a
product or service and the copywriters and creatives are the tacticians who
create print advertisements and television commercials based on the infor-
mation provided by the marketing people. Their relationship, roughly
speaking, can be seen in a table of oppositions:
Marketing Advertising
Strategic Tactical
Theoretical Applied or Operational
Motivations Behavior
The disease The symptoms
Fred Goldberg was kind enough to write a case study showing the rela-
tionship between marketing and advertising. It deals with a campaign his
advertising agency, Goldberg Moser O’Neill, ran that was very successful.
It follows in a boxed insert.
Fred Goldberg
Marketing and Advertising: A Symbiotic Relationship
Advertising is but one element of marketing. There are other
critical components like packaging, distribution, product place-
ment, sales, pricing, promotion, public relations, and more. But it
is advertising that is generally responsible for generating fast,
broad, and efficient awareness, interest, and trial of a product or
service and doing so in an affordable manner.
Marketing a product without the benefit of advertising is sub-
stantially more difficult: takes far longer to generate expected sales
volumes and there is much less control over the way the product or
service is perceived and received by the intended customer.
6 MARKETING AND AMERICAN CONSUMER CULTURE
SEMIOTICS
Feminist Ethical
Theory Criticism
Aesthetic Literary
Theory Theory
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
The importance of signs and symbols has been widely recognized, but only
a handful of consumer researchers have developed theory and research
programs based on semiotics, the science of signs. This article outlines the
emergence and principal perspectives of semiotics and then discusses its
applications and implications for consumer research. Among its
strengths, semiotics positions meaning at the nucleus of consumer
behavior, provides a rich metalanguage for consumer research, and
recommends a multiparadigm philosophy of science.
David Glen Mick. “Exploring the Morphology of Signs, Symbols, and
Significance.” The Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 13, no. 2
(Sept. 1986), 196–213
Product meanings are not simple labels affixed to goods in advertising but
are created against a backdrop of culture at large. Consumers are practicing
semioticians with a considerable expertise in reading and manipulating the
meanings circulating in their society, not just rational decision-makers in
the economic sense or slaves of social convention or psychological
impulses.
Semiotic ethnography accounts for tensions between the codes that struc-
ture cultural norms and the messy, unpredictable nature of human beha-
viour. On the one hand, semiotics brings a degree of objectivity and science
to ethnographic research inasmuch as it is rooted in linguistic science and
the theory of codes. It draws from Lévi-Strauss’s . . . famous structural
approach to culture, which exposes the underlying code system structuring
the meaning of goods and consumer experiences in field sites. Semiotic
ethnography accounts for the multiple code systems at play in the ethno-
graphic situation, including consumer speech as well as non-verbal signs
such as designs, consumer rituals, social interactions, and the disposition of
goods in the lived environment. Since semiotic ethnography seizes consu-
mer behaviour in action, it also exposes the unique ways that consumers
perform these codes in everyday practice.
With these insights in mind, we turn to the ideas of the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure, and the American philosopher C.S. Peirce. They
are the “founding fathers” of the science of semiotics. I begin with the
ideas of Saussure.
Saussure
16 MARKETING AND AMERICAN CONSUMER CULTURE
THE SIGN
The central concept of semiotics is the sign and semiotics is a word that
comes from the Greek term sēmeȋon and means sign. Saussure defines a
sign as follows:
SIGN
Signifier Sound-Image
Signified Concept
Words are important kinds of signs, but there are many other kinds of
signs such as facial expressions, haircuts, body language, clothes, ad
infinitum. This notion that the relation between signifiers and signifiers
is arbitrary, is basic to semiotics, though there is one kind of sign, the
symbol, that Saussure suggests is never wholly arbitrary.
He offers the example of the symbol of justice. He argues that we
cannot replace the conventional symbol of justice, a pair of scales,
with another symbol, such as a chariot. Some semioticians would
not agree with Saussure on the nature of symbols, I should add. He
2 THE SEMIOTICS OF MARKETING: SELLING WITH SIGNS 17
Concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but
negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most
precise characteristics is in being what the others are not. . . . Signs function,
then, not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position.
This leads him to summarize his position (Saussure 1966: 120, 121):
“Everything that has said to this point boils down to this: in language
there are only differences. . . . The entire mechanism of language . . . is
based on oppositions.”
Charles Sanders Peirce, the other “founding father” of the science,
wrote many complicated books on language and semiotics. He is
known for his trichotomy in which he suggested that there are three
kinds of signs: icons, indexes, and symbols. They are discussed below.
As Peirce explained:
Every sign is determined by its objects, either first by partaking in the
characters of the object, when I call a sign an Icon; secondly, by being
really and in its individual existence connected with the individual object,
when I call the sign an Index; thirdly, by more or less approximate
certainty that it will be interpreted as denoting the object, in consequence
of a habit (which term I use as including a natural disposition), when I
call the sign a Symbol. (cited in Zeman 1977, p. 36)
certain number of ounces and comes with a certain sauce (unless you don’t
want the sauce). The connotative meaning of a Big Mac is that is stands for
certain aspects of American culture such as the fast food industry, the
industrialization of food, and related matter. Connotation is tied to our
cultures. I once wrote an article called “The Evangelical Hamburger” in
which I tied McDonald’s to important aspects of American character and
culture and suggested it resembled evangelical religions in certain respects.
We can see the difference between denotation and connotation in the
following chart.
Denotation Connotation
Signifier Signified
Literal Figurative
Evident Inferred
Describes an object Suggests an object’s cultural significance
Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and
action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and
act, is fundamentally metaphoric in nature. The concepts that govern our
thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday
functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what
we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other
people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our every-
day realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely
metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do
every day is very much a matter of metaphor. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 3)
"Ei ole ihme, jos ihmiset teitä sanovat 'Teräkseksi'", sanoi hän
melkein valittaen. Häntä värisytti ja hän sulki silmänsä aivan kun ei
hän olisi voinut katsoa Brannoniin kauemmin.
Kolmastoista luku.
Pitkä mies oli nuori. Hän saattoi tuskin olla viittä- tai kuuttakolmatta
vanhempi, mutta hänen piirteistään näki selvästi, että hän oli
tarmokas ja pystyvä mies. Hänen suunsa oli suuri ja voimakas,
hänen silmänsä olivat syvät ja tiukkakatseiset ja vaalean siniset,
joten ne muistuttivat kotkan silmiä. Hänen katseensa hänen
pysähtyessään ja katsoessaan Brannoniin ilmaisi kunnioituksen
sekaista vihamielisyyttä.
"Ei minun aamiaistani, Brannon. Mutta jos joku Triangle L:n mies
pyrähtäisi tuolla tavalla Callahanin pöytään, niin luulen, että hänen
aamiaisensa häiriytyisi. Vaan Callahan ei ole täällä nyt. Hän on
Laskarissa."
"Luulen, että jos sinä olisit joku muu mies, niin me hirttäisimme
sinut tuossa paikassa ilmoituksesi johdosta", sanoi Meeder sitten.
"Mutta kun tiedämme, mikä sinä olet miehiäsi ja muistelemme, että
sinun ja Callahanin välit eivät olleet hyvät, niin aiomme kuulla mitä
sinulla on asiasta sanottavaa ennenkuin lähdemme tästä liikkeelle.
Sinulla on puhevuoro."
Neljästoista luku.
Tai ehkä Brannon oli valehdellut! Ehkäpä hän oli syyttänyt jotakin
muuta henkilöä murhasta. Ehkä oli hän tavanmukaisella
välinpitämättömyydellään toisten mielipiteistä, ylemmyyden ja
voiman tietoisuudessaan, kieltänyt tietävänsä koko rikoksesta
mitään!
Hän tunsi, että hänen täytyi puhua totta. Hänen tietääkseen oli
Callahan ollut syytön. Hän ei edes ollut puolustautunut, ei edes
vetänyt asettaan esille, sillä kun Josephine oli katsonut häntä, kun
hän makasi oudosti vääntyneenä kuistilla, oli hän nähnyt hänen
aseensa kiiltävän hänen vyöllään.
Sittenkään ei Josephine osannut vastata asettamaansa
kysymykseen. Brannon oli kohdellut häntä kuin lasta ja hänen
käytöksensä oli nostanut hänessä raivoisan vihan häntä kohtaan.
Sittenkin oli Brannon suojellut häntä Bettyn poissaolon aikana,
uskaltaen henkensäkin vaaraan kun hän aseettomana oli ottanut
Denverilta pistoolin eikä hän ollut millään tavalla käyttänyt
hyväkseen Josephinen yksinäisyyttä. "Hän on mies", puhui
Josephine itselleen, seisoessaan akkunassa ja katsoessaan
henkeään pidättäen Brannonin asuntoon "Betty tiesi sen. Hän on
mies!"
"Enpä luule", Meederin ääni oli askelta matalampi. Siihen oli tullut
hyvä mitta kunnioitusta lisää. "Näette, ma'am, tämä ei ole mikään
vieraskäynti tavallisessa merkityksessä. Olemme tulleet tänne
saamaan selville, minkä vuoksi Brannon tappoi meidän isäntämme.
Kysyn teiltä, mitä te asiaan tiedätte."
Viidestoista luku.
Osana Brannonin suunnitelmaa oli ollut ilmoittaa Josephinelle, että
hän oli tekaissut jutun Callahanin kuolemasta, pelastaakseen
Josephinen joutumasta kuulustelun alaiseksi. Hän olisi kertonut sen
hänelle ennen lähtöään Stariin, ellei hän olisi pelännyt, että
Josephine asettuisi vastahankaan ja siten pilaisi koko suunnitelman.
Ja vietyään sitten Starin miehet asuntoonsa aikoi hän nyt mennä
päärakennukseen kertomaan Josephinelle mitä hän oli tehnyt,
varoittaakseen häntä puhumaan samaan suuntaan. Meederin
äkillinen raivo, nähdessään Callahanin ruumiin, oli kuitenkin tehnyt
hänen aikeensa mitättömäksi.
Sen olisi Brannon voinut estää. Nyt sen sijaan oli hänen vaieten
kestettävä kaikki ne myrkylliset ja pilkalliset huomautukset, joita
hänen ystävänsä ja vihamiehensä suvaitsivat tarjota.