Marketing as Communication

Abstract

I want to continue exploring the image of the consumer as a member of the audience at a performance, with another brief example of almost-but-not-quite, off-the-cuff marketing. Like the Dr Dre example in Chapter¹, this one can be seen, on the face of it, as merely a minor piece of promotional fl air, perhaps the digital equivalent of P.T. Barnum blustering about his latest exhibit, or “Colonel” Tom Parker selling signed photos of Elvis at the stage door while the main man wowed the crowd in Las Vegas. The arch marketing chutzpah of both these iconic hard-sellers was unorthodox, but I think it would be wrong to dismiss them as purveyors of petty promotional wheezes on the periphery of real marketing. Likewise, the efficacy of Dr Dre’s intrusion into Olympic swimming and Oeros’ exploitation of a dud plug at the Superdome were probably over-hyped in the marketing trade press, but it would be similarly mistaken to dismiss them as outliers to the real story of marketing management analysis, planning and control. In fact, I’d argue that the role of communication in marketing has been consistently played down in the managerial marketing textbooks in favour of a much simpler, and less accurate, mechanistic model of the marketing process. After all, what is a market but a forum of communication? The interesting thing about both the Dr Dre and the Oreos examples is that picking them apart reveals layers of context without which neither initiative would be any richer in significance than a product fl yer blown down the street off the side of a bus shelter. The fact of creating