Rethinking Marketing: Qualitative Strategies and Exotic Visions

Citation

Clarke, I. (2001), "Rethinking Marketing: Qualitative Strategies and Exotic Visions", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 18 No. 6, pp. 534-542. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.2001.18.6.534.4

This book, of primary interest to marketing academics, provides an extremely well‐written study of the humanities and qualitative social sciences, in search of insights into marketing thought. The author makes the forceful argument that both scientific and humanistic analyses are legitimate and useful in marketing research and marketing management. Most importantly, the book explains the benefits of humanistic analysis and provides a rich grouping of essays which illustrate the potential gains to marketing from the unique viewpoints that humanistic methods provide.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section provides a taste of the methods that typify the humanities, presented in three chapters which investigate works of classic literature and the books of the Bible, to find lessons relevant to marketing managers. The final chapter of this section attempts to clarify the importance and contribution of humanistic empiricism. Humanistic analysis is proposed to provide marketers advantages to deal with a small number of events, human responses, and making inferences from diverse forms of evidence. The second section of the book describes specialized critical theories and methods of humanities and their explanatory values for consumer response. The goal is to link these analytical styles to marketing research and management theories.

Section 1 begins with a comparison of The Virginian and The Aeneid and the lessons and applications that can be drawn for marketing communications. The author does a masterful job of highlighting the historical perspective of each book and showing how marketers can use these same themes in modern marketing communications. Without question, this is the strongest and most compelling essay in the book on the use of humanistic analyses for marketing thought. The next chapter uses the books of the Bible to find parallels with modern globalization and technology. The adapted marketing message of Paul is suggested to show marketers the advantages of localized messages in the global marketplace. In the third chapter, the four Gospels of the New Testament are interpreted as highly successful promotional materials which marketers could use as benchmarks for the writing and assessments of campaigns. These chapters combine to provide a compelling case for the use of the techniques prevalent in social science as a guide for marketing analysis. The only disadvantage is that the first section of the book is so well presented that the subsequent chapters appear a bit redundant and offer little by way of for the argument to “rethink marketing.”

Section 2 presents a series of specialized analytical techniques so that marketers will better understand the potential contribution. Essays on John Wayne, Joe Camel, The Ugly American, religion, and technology all serve as fertile backdrops to the use of these techniques. The author shows that the foundations for each of these analytical techniques embody a depth of substantive knowledge that marketers need to embrace to avoid counterproductive analysis. Each analytical strategy is contrasted to rival and conflicting philosophies. Improper uses of specific qualitative techniques are criticized and befitting examples are highlighted. A wide variety of qualitative methods derived from humanities, such as literary criticism and deconstructionism, are discussed. As the reader progresses through the seven chapters devoted to these humanistic techniques, some lessons become apparent:

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  applying humanistic methods without a firm understanding is counterproductive;

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  borrowing from humanistic methods is more complicated than using quantitative methods;

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  we must recognize the tradeoffs between specific methods and apply them only in context;

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  marketers need to give back, across the disciplines to which we are indebted;

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  the current state of humanistic thought in marketing is still developing.

Overall, this book offers an attractive inquisition into the use of the humanities in marketing management. A wealth of examples, presented in a series of very interesting, easy‐to‐read essays, effectively illustrates the benefits of adding these tools to our research toolbox. The author wisely avoids the mistakes of prior authors in attempting to condemn the use of quantitative methods in marketing research. Rather, the author effectively shows how marketers can gain from the new vantage point provided by these alternative forms of investigation. Although the book does not offer many actionable insights for marketing practitioners, and sometimes suffers from the lack of clear marketing application of critical theories, it does succeed in obliging academic researchers into rethinking the ways in which we gather consumer knowledge. This book is certainly thought provoking and robust enough that the reader will consider the lessons, applied from social sciences and humanities, to have a meaningful place as complements to the traditional scientific method and quantitative analysis of modern marketing thought.