The use and value of qualitative research studies

Qualitative research provides rich insights into many marketing problems and, with appropriate interpretation, will provide detailed solutions. This article describes the benefits of conducting qualitative research and cites its appropriateness to specific marketing questions. Examples of qualitative research and its application to marketing and business decisions are provided.     

‘Murketing’ and the rhetoric of the new sincerity

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that marketing scholars should be paying a lot more attention to the rhetorical form which the economic historian Philip Mirowski – following the novelist David Foster Wallace – calls murketing. Combining philosophical, historical, economic and fictional resources, the paper first produces a synthetic account of what murketing is. Blurring calculated dishonesty with impassioned sincerity, murketing operationalises a double-truth dialectic which treats consumers as both subjects and objects within the process of their own persuasion. In order to indicate how murketing works, the paper then considers recent examples from murketing practice where allusions are made which are both cynical and gnostic, both conceited and intimate, and both earnest and ironic. The paper closes by indicating how its account of the theory and practice of murketing might inform the future study, consumption and regulation of advertising and marketing communications.     

Wallace C. Peterson: A Post-Keynesian Institutionalist

Wallace C. Peterson was an exemplary post-Keynesian institutionalist. He wrote about the foundations of economics in a manner that paved the way for today’s post-Keynesian institutionalism. He analyzed the U.S. economy with a keenness that not only shed new light on the macroeconomic issues of his day, but also put him decades ahead of other economists on the problem of United States’ silent depression. Furthermore, he identified policy issues that continue to spark widespread public interest and discussion. I examine his contributions in each of those areas (foundations, analyses, and policy).     

From Civil War to Civil Rights

Summary

Alabama sold its Old South heritage by commemorating the Confederacy and celebrating the wealth produced by slave labor through pilgrimages. Yet in the 1980s, the state cut a new course by marketing African-American heritage and the sites of civil rights conflicts. Joining other groups in memorializing the movement, Alabama successfully commodified its controversial past as heritage tourism. Ironically, Governor George Wallace initiated the marketing strategy to alter Alabama's negative image. Selma captured the idea with its “From Civil War to Civil Rights” advertising campaign. The juxtaposition of apparently incongruous events points not only to the mixed motivations behind heritage tourism but also to the potential that exists as the public engages and confronts contested pasts.