Marketplace Icon Research Articles

Coffee: a global marketplace icon

ABSTRACT Coffee is far more than just a beverage. It is a product that boasts an extraordinarily rich history, and its cultural identity has shifted over time. This article explores how coffee secured its status as a global marketplace icon. We argue that coffee is a metamorphic product based on its capacity to assume multiple and different cultural meanings over time. First consumed for its energizing properties and use as a medical treatment, coffee has morphed from a symbol of spiritual significance to a beverage representing conquest, independence, intellectual conversations, conviviality, hedonism, counterculture, prosperity, cosmopolitan lifestyle, and craft. In this article, we retrace the history of coffee to demonstrate its metamorphic qualities and its history of providing social value, which is critical to explaining its enduring global iconic status.

Meat: historicizing an icon through marketplace contestations

ABSTRACT Meat is both a loved and hated everyday consumption object across cultures and has become an icon throughout history. This article traces meat’s trajectory in the Global North and identifies four periods that contribute to its iconicity. Meat’s iconic status has been shaped by discourses on health, morality, ecology, class, science, and gender. It has been central to colonialism, wars, the Industrial Revolution, and scientific developments. We pinpoint the role of marketplace actors – from butchers to slaughterhouses to political institutions to corporations and scientists – in making meat a contested object and a marketplace icon. We conclude the article with a call for more research outside the Global North. We also invite researchers and policymakers to consider existing scholarly work that acknowledges a view of nature that is grounded in interspecies reciprocity, which can resolve enduring moral tensions that rely on rigid binary oppositions between humans and animals.

Plastic: a passengerial marketplace icon

ABSTRACT We provide a critical reading of plastic in consumer culture highlighting its furtive omnipresence and supporting role in enabling the consumption of countless products, services, and brands, including many previously identified marketplace icons. We introduce the term “passengerial icon” to explore how the iconicity of plastic is often characterised by its unobtrusive and inconspicuous presence in consumers’ lives. Like a passenger, plastic most typically accompanies consumers on various experiential journeys rather than drives them. Drawing upon Leder’s concept of dys-appearance, we discuss the “absent presence” of passengerial icons as they tend to fade from consumers’ awareness, remaining present but unseen and unthought about until something about them appears to dysfunction. We discuss the dysfunctional appearance of plastic as catalysed most dramatically by environmental and health consequences. Though plastic’s dys-appearance affects society broadly, it is often hermeneutically and fetishistically handled by individuals through precautionary consumption adjustments rather than collective political action.

Carmen Miranda: an Embodied Marketplace Icon

Abstract Building upon the CCT framework of incorporation of ideologies, taste regimes, and national and regional interests by consumer cultures, this paper proposes that social and political ideologies are also embodied in marketplace icons. This paper aims, then, to bring together the concepts of iconicity and liminality to provide an account of Carmen Miranda as a marketplace icon who not only embodied the national myths of her time but also continues to be employed in the current marketplace for a variety of purposes. As such, icons like Carmen contribute to the production of marketplaces in which historical, political, and ideological issues are naturalized. Carmen’s collaboration via cultural industries such as radio and cinema, her omnipresence in advertising campaigns and in the printed media, and her influence on female fashion contributed to the consumer culture of her time. Moreover, the mythical character of her persona and her cultural legacy hold an expressive symbolic power, making her a remarkable contemporary marketplace icon. The key to her iconicity is her liminality; unsettling hierarchies, traversing social planes, and questioning identity. As a marketplace icon, Carmen’s legacy is thus constantly reissued, founded upon the ambivalence of her persona and signaling her transgressive potential.

Carmen Miranda: an Embodied Marketplace Icon

Abstract Building upon the CCT framework of incorporation of ideologies, taste regimes, and national and regional interests by consumer cultures, this paper proposes that social and political ideologies are also embodied in marketplace icons. This paper aims, then, to bring together the concepts of iconicity and liminality to provide an account of Carmen Miranda as a marketplace icon who not only embodied the national myths of her time but also continues to be employed in the current marketplace for a variety of purposes. As such, icons like Carmen contribute to the production of marketplaces in which historical, political, and ideological issues are naturalized. Carmen’s collaboration via cultural industries such as radio and cinema, her omnipresence in advertising campaigns and in the printed media, and her influence on female fashion contributed to the consumer culture of her time. Moreover, the mythical character of her persona and her cultural legacy hold an expressive symbolic power, making her a remarkable contemporary marketplace icon. The key to her iconicity is her liminality; unsettling hierarchies, traversing social planes, and questioning identity. As a marketplace icon, Carmen’s legacy is thus constantly reissued, founded upon the ambivalence of her persona and signaling her transgressive potential.

Facemask: from pandemic to marketplace iconicity

ABSTRACT As a result of Covid-19 outbreak, surgical facemasks first emerged as a pandemic icon to then expand into a marketplace icon, with substantial transformations in their meanings, uses, and commercial expressions. This essay contends that facemasks have become a (post-)pandemic marketplace icon by articulating tensions in the socio-cultural, the public media, and the economic sphere. Relying upon secondary-data retrieved from mass media and scientific articles boomed during the pandemic, we propose a theoretically eclectic appraisal of (1) facemasks’ iconisation, (2) the distinct systems raising masks to that iconic status, and (3) the “Marketplace Icons” series more broadly.

Christmas markets – marketplace icon

ABSTRACT Christmas markets, originating in Germany in the Middle Ages, have transformed from small-scale, local consumption spaces into a global icon for Christmas consumption behaviours. What has facilitated this rise to a global cultural commodity for experiential consumption? Tracing the history of Christmas markets, we highlight two characteristics that have facilitated their iconicity: openness across historical and cultural contexts and an ability to incorporate a variety of complex meanings that have, at different points, “masked” or enhanced their commercial nature. We argue that the maintenance of Christmas markets as marketplace icons will rely on their ability to continue to adapt to the consumption zeitgeist of the multiple environments where they operate.

Gin: a marketplace icon

ABSTRACT Gin is far more than just a juniper-flavored alcoholic beverage distilled or infused with botanicals. This spirit boasts an incredibly rich (albeit tumultuous) cultural and social history, and its identity has shifted considerably over the centuries. Born as a medical treatment in the eleventh century, rising in popularity, especially in the Low Countries and in Germany, between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and held up as a material signifier of Englishness by the end of the seventeenth century, gin spawned a plague in England as the country transitioned to an era of modernization. It subsequently evolved from a symbol of English hegemony during colonialism to the spirit that is shaping the contemporary global drinking culture more than any other today. In this essay, we retrace the history of gin from the beginning to the present and recount how this spirit became a marketplace icon.

The handbag

The woman’s handbag is an iconic consumer artefact layered with meaning. Ideologies, economics, culture, social statuses, and identities converge in this object. Superfluous but fetishized luxury, essential useful tool, communications device, fashion arbiter, all this and more. To shed light on this fascinating artefact and its journey to a contemporary marketplace icon, we first clarify how the iconicity of the handbag emerged and changed over time. Tracking historical turning points and changes in society offers a basis for understanding how the handbag displays its iconic value today. We conclude this marketplace essay by looking into the many ways that handbag consumption manifests in contemporary times, through consumers’ everyday performances.

Synthesizers: an exploration into the iconicity of marketplace icons

ABSTRACT As the preeminent musical invention of the twentieth century, the synthesizer has become a ubiquitous device that not only informs the soundscapes of our lives, but one that also shapes what we consider to be music. At the heart of this unquestioned, though often polarizing, marketplace icon is a paradox between the synthesizer’s limitless power of sound design that appeals to musicians and the limiting power of culture that circumscribes the instrument’s potential in order to make it appealing to mass consumers. To understand how the synthesizer became a marketplace icon, we examine it in relation to the synthetic nature of icons (i.e. the dialectical tension at the heart of icons), the web of iconicity (i.e. the cultural associations necessary to elevate a product to iconic status), and the process of cultural appropriation of disruptive innovations (i.e. the necessity to tame, but seemingly promote, the iconoclastic nature of marketplace icons).

Marketplace icon: the fashion show

ABSTRACT In this paper, we reconstruct the history of fashion shows and highlight the crucial role mediatization process have played in the turning of these events into marketplace icons. As the media and image reproduction technologies changed, so too did fashion shows, providing a different basis for their iconicity. During their long history, the goal to diffuse promotional fashion collection images had to be balanced with the need to protect intellectual property rights. During the haute couture era, the latter prevailed, resulting in fashion shows having limited iconicity. With prêt-à-porter, the benefit of media coverage more than compensated the risks of imitation and counterfeiting, facilitating fashion shows’ elevation to full iconicity. The rapidity of fast fashion retailers’ adoption of catwalk trends makes intellectual property rights’ protection more salient in today’s social media-saturated environment. Seen as a historical process, marketplace elements’ iconicity rises, evolves, and, if not adequately sustained, may fall.

Forty years of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs): the evolution of a marketplace icon

ABSTRACT In spite of their normalized status in our global, cultural landscape, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) remain surprisingly overlooked as a marketplace icon. This paper goes on to argue that ARTs enact the superlative, iconic “myth of rebellion” by tinkering with life, determining cellular structures and offering a new view of human conception. We then briefly discuss why assisted reproductive technologies are underexplored in marketing scholarship and suggest reasons for this oversight. Finally, we demonstrate how ART procedures offer a fascinating lens through which marketing scholars can apprehend and further problematize consumer ambivalence, complex decision making, and new forms of consumer responsibilization.

The feminist politics of choice: lipstick as a marketplace icon

ABSTRACT Lipstick has been a dominant beauty practice across cultures and throughout history. Once deemed a sign of Satan, a potential health risk, and even an illegal product, lipstick has experienced centuries of controversy to secure its status as a marketplace icon – albeit a polarising one. Liberating to some; limiting to others. How have such tensions shaped lipstick’s cultural meanings? By examining lipstick’s gendered history, we highlight how lipstick reflects contested feminist politics of choice – regarded as playful and deliberately chosen as well as fostering appearance-based expectations based on idealised feminine beauty. We highlight how lipstick gives rise to tensions between empowerment and oppression across three main themes: self-expression and choice, privilege and choice, and morality and choice. We conclude that for lipstick to be pleasurable and freely chosen, it must first be decoupled from patriarchal standards of ideal feminine beauty for women.

TV series: marketplace icon

ABSTRACT Series were introduced into daily media culture through radio in 1930. By 1950, they had evolved into programmes that are built on the serial narrative structure that still exists today. Decades after their introduction, TV series still continue to serve as a programming staple for TV channels around the globe and are the building blocks of video-on-demand and streaming business models. TV series reflect on consumers’ both mundane and spectacular life events, and are reflected on by consumers. They may be considered iconic due to their ability to simultaneously disturb, provoke, divide, and consolidate audiences with their content. Consumption of TV series has, over time, transformed from low culture activity to “legitimate” cultural consumption. This paper illuminates the global flow of TV series, their place at the intersection of culture and politics, the role that they play in consumers’ lives, and why they can be viewed as a marketplace icon.

Rock festivals as marketplace icons

ABSTRACTRock festivals occupy an important place in contemporary consumer culture. This Marketplace Icons contribution elaborates on 50 years of rock festivals’ history to trace how festivals have moved from a status of a simple musical event to that of myth. I argue that the iconicity of rock festivals is based on two fundamental ideas: they reside in popular culture as theatrical mythical performances that push artistic and scenic limits, and they are a unique liminal field of expression and liberation for many people.

The bad boy archetype as a morally ambiguous complex of juvenile masculinities: the conceptual anatomy of a marketplace icon

ABSTRACTIn this article, we explore why the bad boy is a popular archetype in advertising, erotica, fashion, journalism, movies, songs, television serials, and other forms of commercial culture. First, we interpret the bad boy as a combination of juvenile masculinities (aggression, rebellion, hypersexuality), appealing qualities (charisma, ruggedness, sensitivity), and moral ambiguities (via confusion, contradiction, and cumulation), which keep audiences engaged. Second, we trace the evolution of these meanings in over a century of American popular culture. Third, we reveal the many commercial faces of the bad boy in the contemporary marketplace, including as an archetypal brand positioning strategy, a transformative protagonist in erotic fiction, an unapologetic voice for macho fantasies, a beguiling object of irrational love, a journalistic frame for polarizing masculinities, and an inexhaustible source of dramatic tension. In the final analysis, the bad boy archetype is a contemporary marketplace icon because it has historically been good at channeling all kinds of bad.

From the corset to Spanx: shapewear as a marketplace icon

ABSTRACTThis article presents the marketplace icon of shapewear—clothing that changes the shape of the human body by compressing or enhancing it. The trajectory of shapewear from the highly structured corset of the sixteenth century to the elastic Spanx of the 2000s evidences how this marketplace icon has come into being. Shapewear has materialized many evolving forms of beauty standards and gender roles as it participates in body-centered market assemblages. Market actors, such as manufacturers, designers, media, celebrities, activists, physicians, and consumers, translate shapewear to materialize intentions in the female body, shaping it accordingly. Whether promoting female autonomy or oppression, shapewear stands as a marketplace icon because it has maintained stable market appeal across time and body-centered market assemblages: it shapes the female body while symbolically articulating women’s roles.

Re-imagining the marketplace: addressing race in academic marketing research

ABSTRACTRace is a marketplace icon. How so? By holding true to an icon’s defining characteristics: high visibility, divisiveness, and uncritical devotion. In this brief musing, we describe how despite its centrality to market activities, race is uncritically addressed in academic marketing research. We next introduce the Race in the Marketplace (RIM) Research Network, a newly-formed interdisciplinary collective of scholars and scholar-activists that seek to break race of its iconic standing and bring greater equity to markets by disseminating critical, collaborative, and transdisciplinary race-based market research that supports liberatory public policies and community actions. We close with a call to join our effort to reimagine the marketplace through the critical examination of what has been a perpetually overlooked icon in marketing academia.

Organics: marketplace icon

ABSTRACTThis essay explores and debates the status of organics as a marketplace icon. Organic products are somewhat unique in having a place in both mainstream and niche markets. The breadth of organic products and sales continue to rise, and certification processes have become more sophisticated, stringent and successful. Organics are loved and loathed by consumers, and loved and loathed (and often parodied) in popular culture. The market is both friend and enemy of organic products and organic consumers. What organics mean is complicated and confusing, and their benefits for both the natural environment and human health are contested. Scrutiny of organics allows us to explore how the relationship between regulations, the market and popular culture contribute to the development of an icon, firmly rooted in the marketplace, while also maintaining its status as ambivalent commodity. I conclude that organics are indeed marketplace icons – but decline to offer advice on whether or not I recommend becoming an organic consumer (despite my own avid purchase of all things organic).

Copyright: a systemic marketplace icon

ABSTRACTThis article argues that copyright is a systemic marketplace icon because of the breadth of its effects on market operations. Copyright determines how intellectual property rights for creative work are allocated between the different actors involved in production and consumption, and must balance the civic priority of public access to creative work with the market-driven principle of rewarding private interests for their effort. This duality tends to polarise opinion about its implementation by rights holders, because very different ideological assumptions underpin civic and market objectives. Copyright discourses reveal how these ideological struggles play out among interested parties, who use the concept of copyright to make arguments about how markets should be structured, how creative work should be exchanged, and how consumers should behave. In the process, copyright is constructed, explained, branded and promoted as an object to which market actors must orient themselves if they wish to conduct themselves appropriately, and as a rationale for material changes to market structures. At the same time, copyright discourses reveal the implications of copyright, which invoke both the market and democracy, for the quality of democracy, the circulation of creativity, and the availability of public knowledge, and help explain why ideological struggles over copyright are so difficult to resolve.