Kent Drummond

Accomplishing interpersonal relationship: The telephone openings of strangers and intimates

Message‐extrinsic perspectives on relational communication, those treating communicative interaction as consequential to interpersonal relationship‐states, cannot account for the details in the first few seconds of telephone calls. Message‐intrinsic perspectives consider how telephone partners, in the details of talk itself, achieve alignment on relationship‐states and offer an edifying addition to message‐extrinsic perspectives. We argue for a reflexive stance toward the concept of relationship‐state‐one that allows description of message details, and that conceptualizes relationships in terms of communicative accomplishment as well as social categorization. From this stance, we consider how telephone partners accomplish relationship‐states within the first few seconds of telephone conversations. We show some uses to which speakers put these accomplishments.

The queering of Swan Lake: a new male gaze for the performance of sexual desire.

ABSTRACT This essay argues that, by re-gendering the ballet classic Swan Lake, choreographer Matthew Bourne has also queered it. He thrusts center stage an unstable relationship between two male characters, and in so doing, de-centers the conventionally fixed categories of sex, gender and sexual desire. He also forces a long-simmering relationship between homosexuality and dance out of the closet and into mainstream popular culture. Applying Mulveys theory of spectatorship and Butlers theory of gendered performance, the essay describes how viewers may be intrigued, rather than repulsed, by the ambiguities surrounding Bournes portrayal of sexual identity.

Rock and roll.

ABSTRACT As a means of demonstrating rock and roll’s enduring iconicity, the author offers a personal narrative of a relationship he had with a well-known rock group. This narrative is then used as data to locate four sites of rock and roll iconicity: the private, the public, the communal, and the kinetic. A fifth site of iconicity, the nostalgic, is identified as an inevitable outcome of the first four. The author concludes that rock and roll achieves its iconicity in the marketplace by offering a text against which consumers can monitor changes in their own preferences and behaviors.

Shame, consumption, redemption: reflections on a tour of Graceland

In this auto‐ethnography, the author recounts a day spent at Graceland with other consumer researchers. During the tour, the author attends to a specialized set of details about Graceland Mansion that both reflects and amplifies his interior state. Biographical details of Elvis’s life are attended to in similar fashion, forming a narrative of shame, alienation, and despair. After the tour, the author is prompted to confront details of his own life that may account for this perspective. A chance meeting with a merchant, followed by a deliberate act of consumption, prove liberatory for the author, enabling him to complete an angst‐filled legal assignment, then begin writing this paper.

Climbing a stairway to heaven: Led Zeppelin's Celtic embrace

Carry the book, Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored (2002), onto a plane and you’ll be amazed at the responses you get. The studied detachment of the middle-aged flight attendance breaks down as she hands you your Cheez Nips. ‘Led Zeppelin?’ she asks with an arch of an eyebrow. The young man sitting next to you, who’s said nothing for most of the flight, suddenly pontificates: ‘Don’t you think it’s sad that Led Zeppelin couldn’t tour in 1975 after Robert Plant’s automobile accident on the island of Rhodes? Still, I guess we should be grateful, or they wouldn’t have released Presence the next year.’ Even the pilot, standing in the doorway of the cockpit as you deplane, switches gears. ‘Thank you for fly—... Led Zeppelin?! Yessss!’ he exclaims with a discrete fist pump. At the macro level, Zeppelin remains deeply embedded in the fabric of popular culture. Surf the radio stations while you drive anywhere for 30 minutes, and you’ll dependably hear one of three Zeppelin songs: ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ or ‘Kashmir’. Sit through the two-hour countdown special on VH-1 entitled, ‘The 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Bands of All Time’, and you’ll find Led Zeppelin at #1. Watch Cadillac’s new ad for its Escalade, and hear ‘Rock and Roll’. Or read an article hyping M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, The Village, and you’ll learn the movie’s characters will be wearing ‘some cool Druid-style robes that look like they were modeled off a Led Zeppelin album cover’ (Rothenberg, 2004). It has been 25 years since John Bonham’s death, yet reference to Led Zeppelin still raises things: eyebrows, voices, fists, ratings, brand awareness, and questions. (‘Led Zeppelin? Didn’t he die?’ your mother-in-law asks.). Interest in and recognition of the group transcends gender, class, age, race, and occupation. And while the three surviving members of Zeppelin have all enjoyed successful musical careers since the group’s demise, consumers’ preoccupation lies with the group and how it used to be in the 30 years ago, when Led Zeppelin ruled the album charts, airwaves, and concert halls as rock’s biggest act. Of relevant interest to marketing scholars and practitioners is the question: What accounts for Led Zeppelin’s astounding success in the 1970s, and what continues to make the group so memorable today? This essay identifies a Celtic identity as the primordial creative, managerial, and performative force critical to Led Zeppelin’s success. Beginning in 1970 and disseminating into other creative forces by 1976, Led Zeppelin’s Celtic embrace galvanized the group’s poetic impulse, serving as resource and inspiration for endless allusion, imagery, and energy.

“My Entire Body Was Shaking”: Consumers Respond to Wicked

This chapter turns to the consumers, analyzing depth interviews with 75 interviewees who had seen a live performance of Wicked. We enabled them to talk extensively about their experience of the show. Their responses were both broad-ranging and surprisingly consistent. From this data, we were able to draw several significant findings about why Wicked has been such a success, from consumers’ intensely personal connection with Elphaba to their emotional response to the show’s music. These findings show that Wicked provided many consumers with a soul-stirring, life-changing experience.

Of Living Rooms and Libraries: Oz’s Journey from Fairy Tale to Myth

This chapter introduces the annual broadcast of MGM’s Wizard of Oz in the context of Cold War America, the rise of television culture, and corporate program sponsorship. We then examine how the ritualized viewing of The Wizard of Oz both shaped the baby-boom generation and embedded Oz in the cultural imaginary. We analyze the conflict between librarians, educators, and fans over L. Frank Baum’s legacy and Oz’s literary heritage. On the one hand, librarians sought to pull books from the shelves; on the other, educators and Oz fans researched, preserved, and defended Baum and his works. As a result of their efforts, we conclude, Baum became an American mythic figure in print and on screen.

The Wonderful Wizard of Marketing: L. Frank Baum as Producer and Promoter

This chapter examines L. Frank Baum’s transformation of Oz from story to brand in the context of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century shifts in markets and consumption patterns. We discuss Baum’s long career in sales, his contributions to the fledgling marketing profession, and his use of state-of-the-art marketing strategies and technologies to sustain Oz. For 20 years, Baum was the brand manager of Oz, until his death in 1919. We conclude with an analysis of what Oz offered its original consumers, speculating how—given the historical and cultural circumstances in which it was first produced and consumed—Oz achieved such unprecedented success during Baum’s lifetime.

Pulling Back the Curtain: Wicked Experiences

This chapter discusses the experiential marketing techniques that have helped to sustain Wicked for so many years. We analyze six key data points: New York’s “Behind the Emerald Curtain Tour,” the traveling mall-show “The World of Wicked,” “A Special Performance of Wicked Songs,” “Witches’ Night Out,” the Broadway Green Alliance, and the “BullyBust” initiative. Taken together, these Wicked events keep the show in the public eye, reinforce its brand, and provide consumers with multisensory embodied experiences. They attract new consumers to the show while fostering an emotional connection with established consumers.

Expanding the Map: Oz in the Public Domain

This chapter discusses several Oz productions—including “The Land of Oz,” from Shirley Temple’s Story Book Hour, and Journey Back to Oz, starring Liza Minnelli—that sought to capitalize on The Wizard of Oz once the Oz books started to come into the public domain during the television broadcast years (1956–1998). We then examine how marketing and promotion set the The Wiz on its unlikely journey from flop to hit, and conclude with an analysis of the revisionist Ozes produced at the end of this era: Walter Murch’s Return to Oz (1985), Phillip Jose Farmer’s A Barnstormer in Oz, Geoff Ryman’s Was, and Gregory Maguire’s novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.