Jonathan E. Schroeder

Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images

Through explication of a visual research method, this paper theorizes how masculine identity interacts with consumption—of imagery, products, desires, and passions in advertising and consumer culture. We analyze the male body as a discursive “effect” created at the intersection of consumption and several marketing discourses such as advertising, market segmentation, and visual communication, balancing between brand strategy—what the marketer intends—and brand community—the free appropriation of meaning by the market. The paper’s contribution rests in extending previous work on male representation into historical, ontological, and photographic realms, providing a necessary complement between understanding advertising meaning as residing within managerial strategy or wholly subsumed by consumer response. We argue that greater awareness of the connections between the traditions and conventions of visual culture and their impact on the production and consumption of advertising images leads to enhanced ability to understand how advertising works as a representational system and signifying practice.

Mapping Consumer Power: An Integrative Framework for Marketing and Consumer Research

To help shape a more cohesive research program in marketing and consumer research, this paper presents a systematic effort to integrate current research on consumer empowerment with highly influential theories of power. We develop a conceptual overview of power consisting of three dominant theoretical models onto which we map existing consumer empowerment research. A synthetic review focuses on three perspectives of consumer power: consumer sovereignty, cultural power and discursive power, drawing from sociological, philosophical and economic literature. These models are then applied to consumer research to illuminate research applications and insights. Research of consumer empowerment has grown significantly over the last decade. Yet, researchers drawing from a variety of intellectual and methodological traditions have generated a multitude of heuristic simplifications and mid-level theories of power to inform their empirical and conceptual explorations. This reviews helps clarify consumer empowerment, and offers a useful map for future research. Researchers in consumer empowerment need to understand the historical development of power, and to contextualize research within conflicting perspectives on empowerment. The paper makes several contributions: 1) organizes a currently cluttered field of consumer empowerment research, 2) connects consumer and marketing research to high-level theorizations of power, and 3) outlines specific avenues for future research.

The artist and the brand

This paper argues that greater awareness of the connections between the traditions and conventions of visual art and the production and consumption of images leads to enhanced ability to understand branding as a strategic signifying practice. It forms part of a larger call for inclusion of art historical issues within the marketing research canon and joins in the contention that art history can provide a necessary contextualizing counterpoint to information processing views of brandings interaction with consumer behavior and visual perception. Artists offer exemplary instances of image creation in the service of building a recognizable look, name, and style - a brand, in other words. Successful artists can be thought of as brand managers, actively engaged in developing, nurturing, and promoting themselves as recognizable products in the competitive cultural sphere. Brands are inherently visual - brand logos, product design, packaging, brand identity, and brand marketing campaigns each draw upon visual materials to create distinctive brand images - yet marketing scholars have seemed reluctant to embrace art history and visual studies as critical fields with potential contributions to branding knowledge. In this paper, several prominent, successful artists serve as case studies to illuminate the potential for insights into the interconnections between art, branding, and consumption. This article places brands firmly within culture to look at the complex underpinnings of the branding, linking perceptual and cognitive processes to larger social and cultural issues that contribute to how brand images work.

Understanding value co-creation in a co-consuming brand community:

Recent research has suggested that consumers collectively co-create value through consumption practices. This paper provides additional insights into value creation by demonstrating how individual consumers play distinct roles in the value creation process. By focusing on microdimensions of co-consuming groups, we show how individual consumers engage in value creation processes in the context of brand culture. We bring together concepts of value creation, working consumers, and double exploitation to demonstrate the roles played by consumers and communities in value co-creation. We focus on value creation in a particular type of co-consuming group: an online football fan community. Results show that co-consuming groups are platforms for value creation. We argue that double exploitation is not necessarily a threat to consumers because it may instead enable them to play active roles in value co-creation and gain power against brand owners. This paper contributes to the existing literature on brand community and the value co-creation paradigm by: (1) demonstrating the dynamic roles played by consumers in the value co-creation; (2) revealing new forms of consumer organization; and (3) illustrating how working consumers work among themselves in managing brand communities.

The cultural codes of branding

Recent research has shifted attention from brand producers and products toward consumer response and services to understand brand value creation. Often missing from these insights, however, is a focus on cultural processes that affect contemporary brands, including historical context, ethical concerns, and representational conventions. A brand culture perspective reveals how branding has opened up to include interdisciplinary research that both complements and complicates economic and managerial analysis of branding. If brands exist as cultural, ideological, and political objects, then brand researchers require tools developed to understand culture, ideology, and politics, in conjunction with more typical branding concepts, such as equity, strategy, and value.

Critical Visual Analysis

This chapter presents qualitative methods for researching images, including advertising images, websites, film, and photographs. I draw on a theory of visual consumption to show how cultural codes and representational conventions inform contemporary marketing images, infusing them with visual, historical, and rhetorical presence and power. Critical visual analysis offers researchers an interdisciplinary method for understanding and contextualizing images - crucial concerns, given the cultural centrality of vision. If marketing depends upon images, including brand images, corporate images, product images, and images of identity, then research methods in marketing must be capable of addressing issues that such images signify. By connecting images to the cultural context of consumption, researchers gain a more thorough - yet never complete - understanding of how images embody and express cultural values and contradictions. To illustrate how theory informs critical visual methods, I invoke an analytical concept of consuming difference to describe a relational framework of contemporary branding campaigns. I discuss how marketing communication draws upon the ideology of the group portrait as a visual technique for representing identity. I treat advertising imagery much the way an art historian treats pictures as I analyze illustrative examples through the classic art historical techniques of formal analysis, compare and contrast, and interpretation - framed within representation understood as a cultural practice.

An ethics of representation for international marketing communication

Purpose – This paper offers an ethical analysis of visual representation that provides criteria for and sheds light on the appropriateness dimension of marketing communications. It provides a theoretically informed framework for recognizing and understanding ethical issues in visual representation.Design/methodology/approach – An interdisciplinary conceptual review and analysis focuses on four representational conventions, synthesizing ethical concerns, to provide a broader context for recognizing and understanding ethical issues in marketing representation: face‐ism, idealization, exoticization and exclusion. This framework is discussed and applied to marketing communications.Findings – It argues that valuations of communication appropriateness must be informed by an awareness of the ethical relationship between marketing representations and identity. It is no longer satisfactory to associate advertising solely with persuasion, rather advertising must be seen as a representational system, with pedagogica...

Borderlines: Skin, tattoos and consumer culture theory:

In addressing skin this paper seeks to illuminate current research within consumer culture theory. Framing our discussion within a consideration of tattoo culture, we explore the double-sidedness of skin, its ambiguity and ambivalence. In this way, we examine the relationship between identity and consumption and throw into question many of the received ideas concerning embodied identity within consumer research. Utilizing three skin metaphors (skin as container, projection surface, and cover to be modified), we generate a series of insights into intercorporeality, embodiment, and body projects.

Aesthetics Awry: The Painter of Light™ and the Commodification of Artistic Values

Thomas Kinkade is America’s most commercially successful and wealthy artist, with an annual turnover in excess of

Corporate Communication, Ethics, and Operational Identity: A Case Study of Benetton

100 million. Many artists and art dealers are business focused; Kinkade may have just taken this commercial concern to its logical extreme by extending his lifestyle brand into galleries, real estate, and equities. Like brands, art circulates within commodity culture, largely outside the artist’s control once it leaves the studio. Yet management theory often clings to an appreciative, aesthetically elevated conception of aesthetics and art, combined with an essentialized, glamorized notion of The Artist, ignoring art’s historical role in selling pictures, celebrating power, and serving patrons. In this paper, I present a case study of aesthetics gone awry, as a warning about applying excessive aesthetics—or at least a romantic, historically uncontextualized vision of aesthetics—to management and marketing research, and to provide an important reminder of the intellectual risks of aestheticizing management: critical perspective often slips away, and aesthetics is once again elevated to a higher spiritual plane than commerce.