Stephen J. Gould

Product Placements in Movies: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Austrian, French and American Consumers' Attitudes toward This Emerging, International Promotional Medium

Abstract This paper reports on a cross-cultural study which tests the robustness of the approach developed by Gupta and Gould (1997) concerning use of product placements in movies. Using their American data as a comparison point, additional data using the same questionnaire were collected in Austria and France. As an international medium in which movies freely cross borders, product placement is also a less adaptable one, relative to commercials since it remains in the movie regardless of the nation where it is shown. Applying a three-pronged framework which considered country, product and individual differences and their interactive effects, the results of this study indicate the ways in which all three have an impact on the acceptability of product placements and on potential purchase behavior. Finally, implications for managing and further researching product placements based on this framework are drawn.

Collectivist and Individualist Influences on Website Design in South Korea and the U.S.: A Cross-Cultural Content Analysis

When websites are constructed to appeal to various cultures, designers must ensure that those sites are easily navigated by members of those various cultures. The integration of design features into company-sponsored websites may differ between cultures with different communicative predispositions. This content analysis examines collectivist and individualist cultural influences on the design of organizational websites originating in South Korea and the U.S., and particularly how temporal and communication differences are revealed through the decisions designers make to use certain kinds of interactivity and rich media tools. Findings confirm that South Korean websites are more likely than U.S. websites to conform to polychronic time-management tendencies and preferences for high-context communication. Implications for both researchers and Internet marketing communications managers are discussed.

COME ON DOWN: How Consumers View Game Shows and the Products Placed in Them

Game shows and the products placed in them as prizes are part of the broad mediascape that both advertisers and consumers inhabit. However, reflecting a dearth of research in this area, this paper reports on two interpretive studies of game show viewers to uncover the meanings they apply to the products placed as contest-puzzle subjects and/or prizes in these shows. A model emerged consisting of three interacting sites of constructed meaning--(1) consumers, (2) game shows, and (3) products placed--each with their own emergent themes. Implications are drawn that apply not only to game shows and the products placed in them, but also to related promotional mediascape meanings in general.

The Buddhist perspective on business ethics: Experiential exercises for exploration and practice

While Buddhism focuses on the same ethical concerns as Western ethical traditions, it provides a distinct perspective and method for dealing with them. This paper outlines the basic Buddhist perspective and then provides some experiential exercises which offer insight for self-understanding and ethical practices in business. Implications for business and ethics research are provided.

Globally integrated marketing communications

This paper applies the concept of integrated marketing communications to international communications and develops a modified concept, globally integrated marketing communications. To define globally integrated marketing communications, three definitions of integrated marketing communications are considered and modifications are offered. The major extension provided by the new definition is a focus on the horizontal (across countries) dimension of marketing communications. This merges the integrated marketing communications approach with the international marketing strategy and communications perspectives. Based on the derived definition and analysis of the standardized adaption issue in global communications, a contingency approach to globally integrated marketing communications is provided which incorporates both horizontal (across countries) and vertical (across promotion disciplines) factors that impact on global communications strategy decisions. Applications are developed and implications are drawn ...

“Postmodern” versus “long‐standing” cultural narratives in consumer behavior: an empirical study of NetGirl online

In recent research, two views of the possible postmodern consumer have emerged. One view, advanced by Firat and Venkatesh, postulates that the consumer has increased expressive flexibility and is therefore liberated from prior ideologically‐created restraints. A second view, provided by Thompson and Hirschman and based on an empirical study of bodily‐related consumption, is less sanguine and argues that “long‐standing cultural narratives” continue to inhibit the consumer. To further consider these two contrasting perspectives, this paper analyses downloaded, discussion texts which express the emic views of consumers who participate in NetGirl, a gender and relationship‐oriented, online forum. The results provide some evidence supportive of both perspectives, i.e. the Net is more a mental, “hyperreal” and therefore more flexible phenomenon than the body, yet it also manifests the long‐standing need of people to tangibilize online phenomena in “real” terms. Implications are drawn which reflect this finding, as well as the idea that online cyber‐narratives and offline, real life narratives tend to mirror and be inscribed in each other.

Cooptation Through Conflation: Spiritual Materialism is Not the Same as Spirituality 1

Spirituality as embodied in the so‐called New Age and described by Rindfleish (2005) is a complex phenomenon subject to all sorts of problematization. Here, I problematize the arguments advanced by Rindfleish and perhaps supported by others as a misconstrual and mis‐situating of the phenomenon. Many take spirituality and conflate it with spiritual materialism. This can be seen in the “consumption” of spiritual meanings and practices with a materialistic propensity such as within the self‐care paradigm Rindfleish applies to the New Age writers she considers. Moreover, to consider the Eastern practices present in the New Age without drawing on the former directly is to disconnect light rays from their source. Drawing on this view, I resituate “New Age” spirituality where I think it is situated, namely in the larger context of a global paradigmatic shift in consciousness which may involve consumption but which is not consumption.

Revelations of cultural consumer lovemaps in Jamaican dancehall lyrics: An ethnomusicological ethnography

We believe that dancehall music’s more sexually explicit lyrics, labeled “slack” and maligned as evocatively misogynist, homophobic and xenophobic, mirror historically discordant social and economic tensions that entangle men and women in contested couplings, and thus render sexuality an instrument of socioeconomic power. Applying an ethnomusicological analysis, this paper fills a void by situating the slack Jamaican dancehall/ DJ lyrics within a revitalizing indigenization socialization perspective. By probing the cultural roots of this increasingly popular yet disparaged musical tradition that disturbs moral etiquette, we hear sexual bravado and counsel on love that betray important gender codes. For a particular social class, gender socialization nurtures a cultural consumer lovemap inscribed by a harsh economy during a particular point in time.

Avoiding Throwing out the Baby with the Bathwater Critically Deconstructing Contested Positions on Social and Macromarketing in the Health Domain

The recent article by Gurrieri, Previte, and Brace-Govan provides an earnest, existential challenge to both social and macromarketing in the health domain, as well as more generally. Their research deals with such serious issues as obesity, breastfeeding, and exercise. Yet, while the authors draw most impressively on theoretical thinkers and perspectives, they also misconstrue what they find and contend so one-sidedly that much of what is understood as social marketing becomes obviated and consumers are ironically situated in the hands of various food and medical interests. This commentary provides a much different reading of these issues. It critically deconstructs the authors’ view and then offers a quite divergent one that takes a more balanced, if paradoxical perspective regarding health issues. While health issues are complex, and a certain problematizing indeterminacy sometimes enters in when solutions are proposed and tried, the present critique delineates the necessary roles social and macromarketing can and indeed must play in the provision of good health for all.

The Intertextual Construction of Emerging Consumer Culture in China as Observed in the Movie Ermo: A Postmodern, Sinicization Reading

Summary The rapid development of consumer culture in China is chronicled and caricatured in particularly revealing ways in the movie Ermo. It concerns the story of a rural Chinese woman, Ermo, who undergoes a metamorphosis in seeking to make enough money to buy a television set. Since popular culture texts, such as movies, often serve to mirror a culture back to itself, we conducted a discourse analysis of this film. We found that cultural intertextuality, that is the hybridizing construction of global and local meanings, was central. This intertextu-ality had two emergent themes: (1) longstanding versus postmodern narratives and (2) a Sinicization or Chinese indigenization of meanings. Managerial and research implications are drawn which direct marketing efforts toward the needs of Chinese consumers embodied in their indi-genized and particular local expression of new postmodern lifestyles.