Football – marketplace icon?

Football has always been an important part of consumer culture, in many countries producing a global audience for World Cups and millions of people celebrating annual football competitions. It was once described by iconic Liverpool Football Club (FC) football manager Bill Shankly as follows, “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don’t like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.” This marketplace icon contribution puzzles over whether football truly represents a marketplace icon and if so how does this effect the world’s most popular sports game? The commentary explores the significance of the beautiful game asking the reader to consider that it is not only a marketplace icon but much more than that, likened here to a “supra socio-cultural phenomenon” which rises above market logic or as Foer argues Football explains the world.     

The electric guitar – marketplace icon

The electric guitar is an ubiquitous part of contemporary consumer culture. In this Marketplace Icons contribution, we illuminate the iconicity of the electric guitar and what lies behind its thick layers of distorted riffs, mad soloing escapades and eccentric onstage performances, specifically within the rock genre. The genesis of electric guitar playing involves a series of technological alterations of the guitar that freed it from a mere background instrument allowing for new musical roles. It quickly became apparent that all the technical solutions designed to get rid of what was defined as unwanted noise could be turned “against” the clean tone and instead be used to create a unique sound. The control of these noise elements, such as feedback and distortion, became a core element of mastering the modern electric guitar. Rather than just being a marketplace icon, we argue that the electric guitar is fetishized because both its audio quality – the loudness and the potential roughness of the sound – and its visual looks and onstage performances symbolizes youthful rebellion, the essence of rock and roll.     

Ad agencies

This article highlights advertising agencies as marketplace icons. The role of ad agencies in creating iconic brands can sometimes be obscured, yet ad agencies are central to how the contemporary marketplace works. While ad agencies are no longer the hegemonic instance of consumer culture that they were from the 1950s to the 1990s, they have adapted to today's democratic advertisingscape by shepherding cultural content produced elsewhere to market. Ad agencies have remained the engine behind significant shifts in consumer culture, such as the warming of relations between music and advertising, by acting as the ‘midwife’ between art and commerce, facilitating new cultural practices in the process.     

Denim

This article introduces denim as a marketplace icon, and argues that blue jeans’ ordinariness and ubiquity transcend marketing practices. A brief history of blue jeans is presented to illuminate their engagement with cultural practices, world trade, and technology, in the form of color dyeing. The article invokes the notion of the post-semiotic – the notion that it is possible to have consumer culture objects that do not necessarily signify anything.     

Tattoo: marketplace icon

ABSTRACT

The tattoo may be considered iconic in terms of its ability to reflect and contribute to consumer culture. It encapsulates contemporary tensions between the paradigm of plasticity that has engulfed the body and skin and a disavowal of that paradigm by marking the body in a permanent fashion. Tattoos also manage to articulate discourses of deviance and the mainstream, difference and sameness. Further, the “invariant processual contour” of tattoo remains the same across cultures and histories while also managing to evidence differences in emphasis. Similarly, the functions of tattoo in terms of decoration, ritual, identification, and protection continue to trace the boundaries of their possibilities. Ultimately, in a culture that values individuality, these coordinates of tattoo offer a clear opportunity to (re)story the self in infinitely customizable ways.     

Royalty: marketplace icons

The term “royalty” connotes people who either occupy the role of monarchs in society, or who are related to these figures by blood or marriage. Although many royal houses around the world occupy a symbolic/ceremonial rather than a political role, royalty and the “human brands” royal families contain remain important sources of aspirational and conspicuous consumption. In this essay, we focus on how the British Royal Family Brand (BRFB; Otnes, Cele C. and Pauline Maclaran. 2015. Royal Fever: The British Monarchy in Consumer Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.) has remained the most visible and impactful royal variant in the world, even as its economic and political influence, and that of Britain, has waned. We discuss the influence of the BRFB in fueling consumption practices pertaining to commemorative purchasing and collecting, heritage management, perpetuating mass and social media narratives, supporting and perpetuating brands, and spawning and maintaining touristic trends. We observe that successful royal influence is due in part to the ability to leverage key universal narratives (e.g. the triumph of the underdog) and to tap into consumers’ desires to vicariously or actively engage with lifestyles typically accessible only to people who occupy the highest social stratum in their respective cultures. We discuss the implications of royalty on consumer culture, and suggest areas of future research.     

High heels

Regarded by some as women's power tool and by others as instruments of torture, high heels constitute one of the most polarizing marketplace icons today. Why did the noblemen's footwear of choice become one of the most celebrated icons of femininity, and how? This article attempts to shed light on these questions by focusing on the actors and practices that have influenced the development of cultural meanings we come to associate with high heels.     

A willing slave: reflections on e-books

This text is a personal confession projected at the background and history of e-books. Like with any new technologies, their introduction evoked hopes and fears. As technical problems vanish, and new habits are forming, the readership of e-books grows.     

Mobile phone: marketplace icon

The mobile phone is an essential component of early twenty-first century societies, markets, and economies. The mobile handset in particular has become the synechdocal symbol of major socio-economic transformations the world over. Through an abbreviated history of mobile handsets, touching on each of the first three generations of mobile phones, this Marketplace Icon installment traces the evolution of the look, feel, and function of mobiles from the earliest analog “bricks” to the latest digital smartphones. Based on this history, the frictions of technologies, bodies, individuals, and institutions emerge as key forces in the construction of mobiles and mobility. In light of these, the possibility of an end to the iconic mobile phone era is augured and some contours for a new era of mobility are suggested, one in which handsets are less prominent and consumer embodiment is taken more seriously as the true heart of mobility, mobile technologies, and mobile markets.     

Money: communicative functions of payment and price

ABSTRACT

Money is rich in semiotic potential and its capacity to express social identity and collectivity is well established. This essay explores a range of communicative functions of money, focusing in particular on the ways in which payments and prices may serve as cultural signals. It asks how the communicative significance of money might change as a result of the introduction of new types of currency, payment systems and pricing techniques, and suggests that such developments are likely to involve revisiting two key tensions: between state or corporate power on the one hand, and individual autonomy and privacy on the other; and between money’s power to generate collectivity and its power to divide and exclude.     

The iconicity of celebrity and the spiritual impulse

Celebrity has a powerful material presence in contemporary consumer culture but its surface aesthetic resonates with the promise of deeper meanings. This Marketplace Icon contribution speculates on the iconicity of celebrity from a spiritual perspective. The social value or authenticity of contemporary celebrity, and the social processes through which it emerges, are matters of debate amongst researchers and competing approaches include field theory, functionalism, and anthropologically inflected accounts of the latent need for ritual, myth and spiritual fulfillment evinced by celebrity “worship.” We focus on the latter area as a partial explanation of the phenomenon whereby so many consumers seem so enchanted by images of, and stories about, individuals with whom they, or we, often have little in common. We speculate that the powerful presence of celebrity in Western consumer culture to some extent reflects and exploits a latent need for myths of redemption through the iconic character of many, though by no means all, manifestations of celebrity consumption.     

Curry

Marketplace icons are often markers of transnational transactions engendered by commercialization and dominance of the West. Curry as a marketplace icon helps to identify these constituents of iconicity. This article briefly examines the historical roots of curry or spicy Indian food and its implication in the project of colonialism. Curry as a signifier of Indian food was invented in British colonial narratives and shaped by commercial interests and racial prejudices. Because of the way forces of colonization and commercialization create international circulation of goods and ideas through globalization, curry as a marketplace icon signifies hegemony and global hierarchies that shape ideas of consumption and markets.     

Marketplace icons: shopping malls

ABSTRACT

This article considers shopping malls as marketplace icons. We suggest that shopping malls can be regarded as a significant symbol of consumption in an age of late modernity, and highlight key aspects of their development. The role of the shopping mall as an agent of creative destruction, influencing the nature of the retail landscape (especially with regard to the implications of – stereotypically suburban – malls for traditional urban retail provision), is discussed. We also consider the implications for notions of “place” (in terms of authenticity and meaning, etc.) arising from the fundamental characteristics of shopping malls, and end by suggesting that the shopping mall, as a marketplace icon, continues to dynamically and iteratively define and refine the ongoing interactions between consumers, the act of consumption, and place and space     

Mess: on domestic overflows

Many homes in affluent Western societies have an ongoing battle against domestic mess, because of the steady inflow of new acquisitions. This essay looks at the ways in which mess has travelled through modern history and has ended up as both a powerful metaphor and a constant everyday worry in consumer life. In this process, mess has often been defined as a problematic condition, often reflecting the moral shortcoming of messy individuals. It has also created new market opportunities, services and solutions for de-cluttering. Mess illustrates some of the tensions in contemporary patterns of consumption and highlights the understudied aspects of how commodities are transformed during their domestic life cycle. The focus is on the ways in which materiality and affect are linked in these processes. The paper draws on an ongoing research project, “Managing Overflow.”     

The theme park: Hey,Mickey, whistle on this!

The theme park, some say, is the quintessence of consumer society and roller-coasters, others maintain, are its foremost symbol and signifier. True or not, exaggerated or otherwise, there is no doubting theme parks’ iconicity – Disneyland above all – nor their continuing ability to “amuse the million”, academicians among them. Although the scholarly literature on theming in general and Disney in particular is nothing less than prodigious, it misses much of what makes the icon iconic. Extrapolating from ample personal experience of the often meretricious theme machine, the present essay strives to set the record straight.     

Teddy bears

This is a story of an iconic toy, the Teddy Bear. What makes Teddy Bears so special? The paper ponders this question by way of reflecting the author's lifelong relation to her own Teddy. The result of this reflection is that it is Teddies’ cuteness, bearness and softness as well as their unique role as intimate bedmates that makes them so special. Altogether, it seems that the secret behind Teddy Bears’ success is that they manifest and embody human vulnerability.     

Movies

ABSTRACT

The movie has been with us in a variety of forms for over a century. During that time the movie as an artefact has played a number of roles from pure entertainment to political propaganda to a way in which we preserve or pass down memories. The movie moves. Getting its name from the innovation of having moving pictures, with the first film showing a horse galloping as the camera recorded a series of stills in quick succession; the movie is about physical motion, but also about emotional provocation and films have always been implicated in the market, in creating market demand and marketing ideology. So, movies show moving pictures and they serve to move us emotionally. This paper reflects on the development of the movie as a storytelling device, the role that they play in our lives, and why the movies can be viewed as a marketplace icon.     

Nostalgic collections

Nostalgia has been transformed by the consumer market. With the emergence of ephemeral novelty goods – popular music, TV serials, kitsch, automobiles, and especially playthings – nostalgia has become less about identification with past communities, ideologies, or regimes than associated with fast-changing consumer goods, especially those encountered in childhood and youth. Reappropriating those goods later in life in nostalgic collecting has become a big business, producing narrow cohorts of consumers sharing common consumer memories. I explore this phenomenon through the history of collecting toys, dolls, and Disney collectibles in the USA.     

American Glamour 2.0: architecture,spectacle, and social media

In this article, I argue that the layered notion of glamour, a term familiar from mid-twentieth-century film, architecture and popular culture, has increasing relevance in today’s hyperpublic world of social media, internet image-construction, and market segmentation. The creation and consumption of Hollywood images and slick advertising copy has long involved processes of narrative construction, projection, performance, and self-assessment that hold significant parallels for our culture of customized Instagram feeds, “Facebook envy” and other forms of digital communication, reception, and surveillance. Increasingly, contemporary public space is being shaped as a platform for the production and consumption of such data; a concomitant increase both in the development of techniques for surveillance and in the creation of defensible private spaces – both domestic and spiritual – creates new challenges for designers of both physical and online environments.     

Whiskey: marketplace icon

Brands are potent and efficient vehicles to diffuse and reproduce ideologies. This article revisits over a decade of research on Jack Daniel’s as an iconic brand, and provides a behind the scenes look at the process of researching cultural brands. It describes whiskey as a marketplace icon that reflects particular cultural ideologies, and updates the Jack Daniel’s story in the context of the craft liquor movement. Iconic brands, cultural icons, and marketplace icons are discussed. Further distinctions between iconicity at the category, segment and brand level are made. The article is transcribed and edited from an interview with Consumption Markets & Culture editor Jonathan Schroeder in June 2015.