Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Marketing history'

This research investigates the social organization of Corvette clubs and their membership in order to examine the wind of social change in community structures in American society during the period following industrial expansion. Specifically, this project examines the decline of traditional communities based on social ties formed through locale or productive work that have been replaced with communities based on common interests centered on consumption and leisure practice. Fragmentation of social ties among neighbors, families, and work, combined with the decline of participation in voluntary associations, reflect intensifying individualism. In spite of this age of social disconnection, the desire to find meaning and purpose through collective life remains. Today, much of the American individual’s social life occurs in relationships that are mediated by markets and products that are consumed individually and collectively. This ascendance of leisure and the expansion of consumer markets as core social institutions in modern life offer opportunity structures for social connections and involvement for informal groups of people with similar interests. Building off America’s preoccupation with cars as status symbols that are representative of progress, mobility, and individuality, this research explores the social world of Corvette owners. The cultural significance of the Corvette as America’s sports car is reflected in this mixed methods study of a brand community and its role in creating social capital and civic engagement for its members. The Corvette community reflects a strong social network built around the mystique and history of the car and is organized by rituals of consumption and productive activity that construct identity and cement relationships among fellow car enthusiasts. Early life experience and sentiments of nostalgia and patriotism are important in this car culture as they are a means by which the car becomes valuable to the owner as an individual, and in turn, strengthen the social ties that knit this community together. The subjective meaning of the car as related to generational influence, consumer advertising, aspirations, and collective identity will be explored in order to understand the consumer’s relationship with this cultural icon. Membership based around the emotional affect and sentiments produced by the Corvette will serve as a basis of analysis for consumer objects as potential liaisons for renewed civic engagement and social forms of citizenship in broader society.

This dissertation presents an analysis of the reconstruction of urban folk arts as cultural heritage in China. Focusing on material culture and folk performances revived in two Beijing folklore markets, the dissertation discusses the neoliberal marketization that coincides with urban commercial zoning in China since the 1980s. The dissertation examines the intertwined cultural and economic dimensions of collective nostalgia, urban marketization and heritage developmentalism. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Beijing from 2010 to 2015, the dissertation addresses China’s collaboration with UNESCO in world cultural heritage program. It looks closely at the process of cultural heritage marketization, which is geared toward a developmental agenda. Such a heritage construction appears in conjuncture with the rise of the new Chinese cultural industry and cultural entrepreneurship, reconfiguring the sociopolitical role of folk arts and folk artists in China.

Through the ethnographic lens, the dissertation focuses on depicting the everyday life in contemporary Beijing surrounding folklore marketplaces. In particular, it describes material engagements established by connoisseurs and collectors in two major folklore markets, the Shilihe and the Panjiayuan market, demonstrating a new Chinese folklore connoisseurship that ascends and reconfigured in contemporary Beijing. This dissertation argues that the desire, and the collective effort, to overcome the post-Mao social and cultural transformation have materialized in the revival of folk traditions as marketized cultural heritage. It contends that the ascending cultural market propels the hope of national rejuvenation while bringing about a new form of possessive individualism alongside the process of privatization.

During the mid-to-late 19th century, Roxbury, Massachusetts experienced a dramatic change from a rural farming area to a vibrant, working-class, and predominantly-immigrant urban community. This new demographic bloomed during America’s industrial age, a time in which hundreds of new mass-produced goods flooded consumer markets. This thesis explores the relationship between working-class consumption patterns and historic advertising in 19th-century Roxbury, Massachusetts. It assesses the significance of advertising within households and the community by comparing advertisements from the Roxbury Gazette and South End Advertiser with archaeological material from the Tremont Street and Elmwood Court Housing sites, excavated in the late 1970s, to determine the degree of correlation between the two sources. Separately, the archaeological and advertising materials highlight different facets of daily life for the residents of this neighborhood. When combined, however, these two distinct data sets provide a more holistic snapshot of household life and consumer choice. Specifically, I examine the relationship between advertisers and consumers and how tangible goods served as a medium of communication for values, social expectations, and individual and group identities.

Ultimately, this study found that there is little direct overlap between the material record from the Southwest Corridor excavations and the historic Roxbury Gazette advertisements. The most prevalent types of advertisements from an 1861-1898 Roxbury Gazette sample largely did not overlap with the highest artifact type concentrations from the Southwest Corridor excavations. This disconnect may be the result of internal factors, including lack of purchases or extended use lives for certain objects. External factors for disconnect include archaeological deposition patterns, as well as the ways in which the archaeological and advertising data is categorized for analysis. Most importantly, this study emphasizes that the lives of Tremont Street and Elmwood Court’s residents cannot be neatly summed up by the materials they discarded. Only through the consideration of material culture, documentary resources, and other historic information can we begin to understand the experiences these individuals endured.

The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyze the process of creating of the marketing mix model as well as to investigate whether the participation can be a possible new concept for this model. The empirical material is based on eight interviews conducted on Gotland with the companies that have contributed with their views on the issue. The respondents were selected due to their background in the professional marketing field. The method is qualitative and is based on semi-structured interviews. The conclusions of the research demonstrate that the concept participation could be ranked as the most important concept in comparison to the four concepts of the marketing mix model. The authors consider the most interesting suggestion for the future studies to be the investigating whether the concept Participation can be considered to be the fifth P in the traditional marketing mix model.

The movie Dogville (2003) provides viewers with a rare and provocative twist on differences between on the one hand the rigorous, Old Testament Jehovah, characterized by rules, and by rewards or punishments in this life, and on the other hand the loving, forgiving Christ and God of the New Testament and later Christianity who are characterized by forgiveness, and by rewards or punishments in an eternal afterlife. The movie, especially its ending, challenges the forgiving nature of the New Testament God and Christ, and makes a case that the Old Testament, rigorous Jehovah is more appropriate, at least for humans who respect themselves as responsible grown-ups. Earlier than these two views of God and man, and still alive and kicking, is a third view, the "Heroic." God is irrelevant here, either as a source of rules or as a source of forgiveness and redemption. Rather, man generates his own meaning by accepting his fate and struggling to do the best he can; this life is all there is and the struggle, i.e. living it is the only meaning. The three views can be seen on a continuum with the Heroic on one end and the forgiving Christ on the other, and the rigorous Jehovah in between and closer to the heroic than to the forgiving. The Dogville point of view, preferring a rigorous God to a forgiving one, is very rarely found in literature (the Grand Inquisitor episode in The Brothers Karamazov is similar to some extent) but both the Heroic and the forgiving Christian views appear everywhere, in all kinds of non-fiction, and either explicitly or as metaphors or parables in fiction. The Heroic view is taken here to include not only classic Greek and Roman heroic writings (e..g. those of Homer and Virgil) but also more modern schools of thought including Nietzsche, the existentialists, and other "God is dead" points of view. The paucity of the first view in literature is mirrored by the small number of its followers: all self-identifying Jews are less than 0.5% of the world's population and the orthodox are a minority within that. In stark contrast, about one-third of individuals world-wide self-identify as Christian. Followers of the Heroic view, roughly measured by self-identifying atheists and perhaps including agnostics, are between 15 and 20 percent of the population of the USA. Focusing on the United States, the data show that the number of adherents of each of the two extremes of an expanded continuum, i.e. the Heroic view on one hand and the born-again Protestant version of the forgiving view on the other, has been growing while the numbers of followers of everything in the middle, i.e. Judaism (excluding its New Age, non-religious variants), Roman Catholicism, and mainstream Protestantism have been declining. The waxing and waning of these different views are evaluated in the lights of literature, philosophy, psychology, marketing, and the idea that ideas ("memes" as coined, described and popularized by Richard Dawkins) evolve, endure or disappear according to the Darwinian principle of natural selection. The conclusion is that there are important, long-term reasons for the observed trend, and that therefore both born-again Protestantism and atheism are likely to continue to take market share from their competitors in the middle.