Special Issue: Screening Marketing: Videography and the Expanding Horizons of Filmic Research
Journal of Marketing Management, Volume 34, 2018, Issue 5-6
Editorial:
Screening Marketing: Videography and the expanding horizons of filmic research
Joonas Rokka, Joel Hietanen and Douglas Brownlie
Articles
Envisioning consumers: how videography can contribute to marketing knowledge
Russell W. Belk, Marylouise Caldwell, Timothy M. Devinney, Giana M. Eckhardt, Paul Henry, Robert Kozinets and Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki
“Based on a review of the past 30 years of videographic research and outputs in the field of marketing, we highlight the key contributions that videography has made to the marketing literature and identify the key issues facing videographic research today. We develop a typology that identifies four ways that videography can contribute to theory development and verification, presenting new criteria for assessing academic videographies. We note that making theoretical contributions is one of the most difficult issues facing videographic researchers and that this is an area in need of significant developments to help the field progress. Finally, we envision what the future of videography might look like and consider the implications of new forms of videographies …” Read more>
Focusing ethnography: theory and recommendations for effectively combining video and ethnographic research
Niklas Woermann
“Building theory with ethnography and filmic research increasingly requires focussing on key practices or settings, instead of painting a broad panorama of a culture. But few authors discuss why and how to focus. This article provides a systematic discussion of the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of focusing ethnographic research by comparing different schools of thought and suggesting a practice theory-based approach. It argues that many research projects are focused but do not reflect on the process of focusing, describes how to identify focal settings or practices, and introduces sequential analysis as a tool for studying them. Analysing videos, documents and language are discussed in turn, and methods for ensuring quality in focused ethnography are suggested. Finally, the article provides recommendations for publishing focused ethnography as text or film …” Read more>
Need for narrative
Tom van Laer, Luca M. Visconti and Stephanie Feiereisen
“What do consumers need from a narrative? How can videographers satisfy those needs? Through semi-structured interviews with 55 Eurostar passengers from 14 countries, this film documents how people define narratives, why they need them, and how they experience the effects of need for narrative. The adjoining commentary contributes to the development of videography as an attractive method by introducing the videographer’s perspective and elucidating key story elements that can help satisfy viewers’ needs for narrative. The suggested approach maintains the vivid quality of videography and respects itsmethodological rigour, while increasing its effectiveness in close alignment with a consumer society that visual communication increasingly permeates. As such, the commentary and the film jointly unveil videographers’ etic and viewers’ emic use and evaluation of the videographic method …” Full video-article> Read the blog>
Mapping the extended frontiers of escapism: binge-watching and hyperdiegetic exploration
Scott Jones, James Cronin and Maria G. Piacentini
“Through a micro-ethnographic engagement with consumers’ binge-watching experiences of the web-TV series House of Cards, this videography explores what we consider to be the ‘extended frontiers’ of escapism. In contrast to passive/active classifications of escapism which risk reducing escapist fare to a textual resource which can be categorised discretely at the point of consumption, we consider ‘sustained encounters’ with escapist fare as appropriable textures characterised by ongoing and less immediately discernible processes. Drawing upon the concept of hyperdiegesis, we consider potentially ‘projective’ forms of narrative transportation in binge-watching; heterochronic breaks from normal patterns of time; and post-object behaviours. In doing so, we outline how forms of escapism traditionally considered passive may under certain conditions represent much richer and more complex enterprises than previously imagined …” Full video-article> Read the blog>
On critical collaborative videographies
Andreas Chatzidakis and Pauline Maclaran
“In Spring 2015, we produced a collaborative videography about Skoros, an anti-consumerist collective in Athens, Greece. We and the members of the collective jointly negotiated the end product, by discussing the script and editorial decisions about the content. The filming of the project, artistic direction, music supervision and graphics design were almost entirely done by the members of the collective. In this short commentary, we position our approach against the use of collaborative ethnographic techniques in consumer research and social sciences more broadly. We reflect upon the difficulties that we encountered and conclude by discussing the broader implications for filmic marketing and consumer research …” Full video-article> Read the blog>
Engaging the audience through videography as performance
Anastasia Seregina
“The audience is an important part of videography, but its role tends to be seen as passive and unengaged. The audience’s experience is often guided in videography, with intended reaction made clear. Yet such an approach to the audience does not make use of the possibilities of videography for inciting active interaction and incorporating multiple interpretations. Previous research has suggested that videography has potential for interventional influence on audiences by taking on the performative turn in research. Developing more deeply the notions of performance and performativity in the context of videography, this paper proposes that one way to activate audiences, interact directly with them and engage them in meaning-making is to approach videography as performance …” Read more> Read the blog>
Footwear with feeling: a cultural approach to product development
Skye-Maree Dixon and Avi Shankar
“Holt (2004) pioneered a change in marketing discourse by outlining how brands can become icons through tapping into cultural mythologies of the time. Yet, the theory has remained purely focused on branded consumption. This film extends the approach to the realm of product development and focuses on the transformation of a fashion trend into a consistent product category by examining the flatform shoe, a new shoe style that blends the height of a heel with the comfort of a flat. Through qualitative interviews and ethnographic analysis, this film argues that consumers are able to attach a strong postfeminist sensibility to the style. This helps to elevate the style to a mainstream category of its own through an adherence to cultural branding principles …” Full video-article>
Dodo Lé Là: how consumers promote a local iconic brand in postcolonial creole culture
Julie Leroy, Baptiste Cléret and Michel Boyer
“This videography shows how consumers in the Reunion Island (France) promote a local Dodo beer towards an iconic status through their identity work. An alternative approach to Holt’s theorising on iconic brands is taken on two levels. First, the videography contributes by offering a non-American, postcolonial and creole aspect of a brand myth-making, as well as the ‘promotion’ of the brand by the local consumers and multi-ethnic community. Second, the consumers’ voice in citing the brand is examined (Nakassis, 2012. American Anthropologist, 114(4), 624–638.). Based on the findings, the citing of the brand happens in two different ways: when including it into personalised identity narratives and when producing new brand tokens, thus nurturing the brand ontology further …” Full video-article>
More than meets the eye: videography and production of desire in semiocapitalism
Joel Hietanen and Mikael Andéhn
“In the light of the recent proliferation of interest in videographic methods in marketing and consumer research, we wish to make a call for thinking critically about the medium. In this article, we challenge traditional means of semiotic analysis and consider contexts outside aesthetic symbolism that take into account wider agencements of videographic inquiry. We sensitise thinking about videographic production to include a broad scope of influence beyond production and spectatorship. By positing a mode of desiring relationalities in ‘semiocapitalist’ markets, and through the illustrative example of pop-music videos, we show how videography not only produces symbols, but also has the tendency to discipline the viewer into particular subjective positions. We hope to add to the conceptual toolkit of aspiring video scholars and encourage them to be increasingly critical and reflexive about their potential impact …” Read more>
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