How Market Research Shapes Market Spatiality

Abstract

This article focuses on how various ideological representations of the market—most notably the myth of the global market—produce certain effects on the way in which market spaces materialize and simultaneously draw the contours of ideal organizational and consumer subjectivities. We employ a governmentality perspective to address global myth market creation and hence the emergence of “glocal” market spaces. That is, the article explores how representations of glocal markets create specific interventions in the form of marketing tactics that subsequently have performative consequences for interorganizational and intraorganizational as well as consumer subject positions.

Keywords

market research globalization myth markets governmentality macromarketing

Beginning in 2007, chocolate consumers worldwide may have noticed a range of new products, packaging, commercials, and distribution channels from the chocolate manufacturer Anthon Berg—one of the oldest and best known Danish brands with a history reaching back to 1884. Particularly notable are the company’s continuous engagement in organic cocoa production and educational programs for children in Ghana, its investment in new production facilities with a complete in-house manufacture of chocolate mass (the only such facility in Scandinavia), and its striking economic success. These changes were the result of a brand repositioning strategy developed by the advertising agency DDB to transform the brand “from dusty grandma to modern hedonist” (DDB strategy document). The Anthon Berg CEO evaluated the success of the repositioning and the experience of economic growth as “an outcome of the focus to transform Anthon Berg into a leading international brand of high quality chocolate” (Politiken 2008).

The task was therefore to transform the image of a brand perceived to be somewhat old fashioned or even kitschy into a brand that appealed to contemporary consumers. Specifically, the repositioning encompassed the redesign of all product packaging, including the distinctive pink wrapping of the firm’s iconic “marzipan bread”; the opening of a luxurious flagship chocolatier shop, “A Xoco,” in Copenhagen’s most fashionable shopping area; distribution of the A Xoco brand through high-end department stores in the United States and Japan; and the development of novel products that combine aroma therapeutic ingredients with high-quality chocolate.

One new product, Courage, is a 400-g oval block of high-quality chocolate, wrapped in a stylish dark green/turquoise/golden packaging that includes a wooden stick for breaking the thick chocolate into attractively uneven bite-sized pieces. According to a senior strategic planner at DDB, the idea inspiring this product is to combine consumers’ increasing interest in the quality, origin, and history of the cocoa bean (denoted as consumer connoisseurship) with the demand for brands that serve as “social glue” and enable consumers to feel part of a community. The socializing aspect of Courage resides in the “happening” of breaking and sharing the chocolate. One of the marketing efforts related to Courage in Denmark features a double-page advertorial in the fashion magazine Costume, in which predominantly female consumers are presented with a combination of fashion items—ranging from underwear to handbags, shoes, dresses, and makeup to chocolate (Courage, by Anthon Berg) and sparkling wine—that should assure a perfect cocktail party.

The marketing communication hence assembles objects into a desirable lifestyle, supposedly reflecting a more contemporary consumer profile than had previously been associated with the brand. Furthermore, the overall strategy was to address such a consumer on a more global scale than had previously been the definition of the brand’s market space.

The case of Anthon Berg illustrates the concrete consequences of a brand repositioning strategy and its materialization into new products, distribution channels, and market communication. Such brand repositioning does not appear as a tabula rasa but is undertaken for purposes of institutional legitimacy as well as organizational and individual sense-making (Weick 1995), grounded in particular knowledge claims of the market, in this case achieved through global market research.

In this article, we explore one method of global market research, termed SignBank, in the worldwide advertising agency DDB. We follow the implementation of a new method of market research in the global advertising agency and especially how this method affects the promotion of the agency in the market for clients, the agency’s specific advice to clients, and ultimately the sociospatial configuration of market spatiality. We focus on global/local distinctions in the formation of market spaces emanating from marketers’ attempts to navigate in a globalizing world. The significance of the spatial arrangements of markets becomes particularly pertinent as globalization processes intensify, with the result that marketplace actors are increasingly reflexive (Giddens 1990; Waters 2001). The Anthon Berg brand illustrates how market research structures brand repositioning and its materialization in product development as well as the distribution of the repositioning across new spatial configurations. The dual elements of representation of markets and the performativity of market spaces and market subject positions are explored from the perspective of global governmentality.

The article’s argument follows the recent stream of literature addressing the internal logic and modes of operation of marketing practices by providing a look inside marketing (Zwick and Cayla 2010). This critical view on marketing practices replaces the positivist managerial dominance of marketing theory with a perspective that addresses the ways in which marketing practices are central to the functioning of contemporary global markets. The notion of performativity suggests that marketing research practices are not only descriptive or normative but also creative, in that they engage in processes of creating the reality they were set out to present (Law 2009). This makingup of reality happens in a complex interrelationship between historically embedded market actors and techniques. More precisely, marketing practices continuously stabilize/destabilize in sociohistorically contingent ways the naturalized cultural categories constituting and enabling economic transactions (Kjellberg and Helgesson 2007).

One predominant but poorly described cultural category in the marketing field is that of “the market,” which is often depicted as “a universal category of exchange relations, something immutable and natural rather than historically contingent and culturally constructed” (Zwick and Cayla 2010, 4). Hence, the study of marketing practices reveals the relationship between the practices and techniques employed by marketers, the power relations they produce, and the emergent subject positions available for marketers and consumers alike.

The particular focus of this article is on how various ideological representations of the market—most notably the myth of the global market—produce certain effects on the way in which market spaces materialize and simultaneously draw the contours of ideal organizational and consumer subjectivities. We employ a governmentality perspective to address global myth market creation and hence the emergence of glocal market spaces. That is, the article explores how representations of glocal markets create specific interventions in the form of marketing tactics that subsequently have performative consequences for interorganizational and intraorganizational as well as consumer subject positions.

This article contributes to the myth-marketing literature (Holt 2004; Thompson and Tian 2008) by demonstrating how myth-marketing works in a globalized context, hence empirically extending myth marketing beyond the nation-state as the core organizing frame for ideological tension and mythological competition. We also address how myth marketing operates in business-to-business contexts by constructing the sociospatial frame of the market and the client and organizational subject positions available within that frame. We therefore demonstrate how myth marketing is as much a sense-making and enactment exercise of the organization’s market and client subjects as it is an addressing of the anxieties of business-to-consumer marketers operating in a seemingly chaotic global market.

In the following, we discuss the lack of attention in marketing to the spatial dimension of market emergence and the unquestioned reproduction of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002). Subsequently, we summarize the few contributions of marketing to the discussion of market spatiality and introduce the key theoretical concepts from sociology and cultural geography on which we base our analysis.

Marketing Practices, Marketing Space

As proposed above and in the literature, the concept of “the market” is predominantly represented in the marketing field as a pregiven entity external to the actions and thoughts of marketing practitioners. The myth-marketing literature (e.g., Thompson and Tian 2008; Giesler 2008; Holt 2004; Peñaloza 2000) circumvents this hegemony and contains a number of contributions that discuss the production of market realities within particular sociohistoric contexts. One example examines how the complex development of competitive, historical, and ideological narratives about particular places underlies and influences contemporary marketers’ strategies in promoting consumer cultural lifestyles that reference particular sociohistoric spaces such as, in the United States, The South (Thompson and Tian 2008). Myth-marketing literature has also demonstrated the embeddedness of multiple marketplace actors in mythologies of particular places—for example, how consumers and producers are involved in a process of marketplace cocreation by leveraging particular marketplace mythologies such as the American West (Peñaloza 2000).

However, despite critical engagement with the notions of the market and market-making, much myth-marketing literature reproduces the spatial dimension of markets along national lines of division. Holt (2004) attributes the potency of iconic brands to their capacity to “address the collective anxieties and desires of a nation” (p. 6, emphasis added).

Another stream of marketing literature emphasizes how market spaces emerge progressively in deterritorialized form—hence questioning the nation-state as the naturalized unit of analysis for researchers and practitioners of international marketing—and particularly emphasizing how incongruence is increasing between social practices and bounded spaces (Cayla and Arnould 2008; Giddens 1990). This stream sees markets as more and more delineated by deterritorialized space of meanings, with social interaction defining a new spatiality for the study of brands and marketing. The study of deterritorialized meaning practices has been conducted in relation to migration (Peñaloza 1999), the idea of global consumers (Holt, Quelch, and Taylor 2004), youth culture (Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006), and geographically dispersed brand communities (Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001). However, these studies are not preoccupied by the materialization of market spaces, as these spaces are formed in/through transnational phenomena.

Spatial metaphors and conceptions therefore influence how marketers relate to and ultimately coconstruct market spaces. In her analysis of marketing and modernity, Lien (1997) discusses how spatial metaphors of the market serve to make the abstract notion of a market comprehensible and concrete to practitioners. Discursive representations of the spatial delineations of the market, such as being in/out of a market or visual representations of market share within a given product and/or national context, create the appearance of the market as an entity external to and independent from the practitioners themselves. In this way, the market becomes manageable. Discursive representations of marketplace spatiality are engaged in the formation of markets and thus guide, structure, and legitimize marketing action (Lien 1997, 95). A similar argument holds that brand managers undertake the manufacturing of a regional, Asian identity position through regional branding strategies (Cayla and Eckhardt 2008). This argument emphasizes how brand managers downplay the national origin of these brands and amplify a sense of Asianness by mobilizing urban milieus and young cosmopolitan consumers to facilitate an imagined Asian community and hence accentuates the role marketing managers play in place-making projects.

The relative lack of engagement with the spatial dimension of marketplace systems means that the marketing field risks myopically reproducing a notion of market spatiality defined by conventional categories (such as the nation) as given externally to social actors. In other words, research needs to address the production of the spatial configuration of markets. The study of marketer and consumer practices gives access to reflect on the ways in which market spatiality arises.

Marketing and Global Governmentality

In the following, we apply the Foucauldian notion of governmentality to explicitly address the spatial configuration of markets, as these are shaped through practices of global market research. That is, we use the governmentality perspective to address how global market spaces emerge through marketing practices.

Foucault defined governmentality as “the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very special albeit complex form of power which has as its target populations” (Rose 1990, 5). The definition designates the two analytically separate yet intricately related elements of knowledge and intervention as the defining features of governmentality. That is, on the one side governmentality denotes the regimes of knowledge or rationalities that render social reality knowable, and on the other side acknowledges the techniques used to act on and transform social reality. For the study of marketing practice, governmentality implies simultaneous attention to the representations of markets and consumers and the technologies of interventions.

Studies of governmentality challenge conventional units and scales of analysis in moving beyond traditional distinctions of the individual versus the social and micro versus macro (Miller and Rose 2008, 21), most notably by identifying and analyzing assemblages of social phenomena. The notion of governmentality has hence become central in the study of increasingly global and translocal reality, often denoted as global governmentality (Larner and Walters 2004). This perspective questions the naturalized conceptualization of markets as spatial and often complying with national boundaries. We acknowledge a range of exceptions to the predominant methodological nationalism in the studies of marketplace practices theorized in the light of global/local interplays, center-peripheries, flows, and disjuncture (Cayla and Arnould 2008). However, these studies continuously operate as if the local/global spatial allusions are self-evident, as reflected in a recent critique from cultural geography: “Over and again, the counterposition of local and global resonates with an equation of the local with realness, with local place as earthy and meaningful, standing in opposition to a presumed abstraction of global space” (Massey 2005, 183). In discussing space, Massey (2005) suggests that the understanding of space and place in Western philosophy and social theory is permeated by a number of unarticulated assumptions, including the assumptions of the local and global illustrated.

Global governmentality denotes an analytical perspective that examines how “the global” is brought into existence through imaginaries, technologies, and practices that circumvent the nation-state as the naturalized category organizing the social into the spatial. From this perspective, globalization does not denote any kind of totality or suggest a certain homogeneity. Rather, globalization remains an analytical concept that must be empirically explored through the careful study of everyday practices and discourses (Marcus and Saka 2006; Ong and Collier 2005). Consequently, even though naming is an act of power in itself, the notion of globalization should not suggest one particular a priori characterization of an empirical phenomenon. Global governmentality furthermore denotes the investigation of power relations beyond the nation-state (Larner and Walters 2004), as it becomes increasingly obvious that social phenomena are spatially nonisomorphic with standard sociological and anthropological units of analysis such as the nation-state, tribe, or community (Ong and Collier 2005).

This view leads to a reconfiguration of social analytical categories and methodologies (Beck 2004; Marcus 1995). The investigation of how the spatial dimension of marketplaces is formed and inscribed in thought is particularly important, as it coconstructs “the market” in and through which marketplace meanings and values are produced, circulated, and consumed. Hence, such an approach refrains from characterizing globalization as a political, social, cultural, technological, or economic force underlying contemporary society or driving it in a certain direction. Instead, globalization comes to denote the emerging, contested, and enacted process through which spatiality enters our imageries of the world through highly contextualized technologies, discourses, and practices. Thus, global governmentality as an analytical perspective holds important implications for the understanding of space. It questions the self-evidence of spaces as static and geographically bounded areas whose identities are homogenously created through opposition toward some specific outside. Instead, spaces emerge through the practices, discourses, and relations of social actors (Massey 2005).

The concept of governmentality is not new to the marketing field. However, heretofore it has mainly been applied to show how consumers are expected to act on themselves to become the “right kind.” That is, studies have examined how marketing practices and discourses powerfully establish normative representations of possible lives, which then operate as an internalized yardstick for the conduct of the individual consumer (e.g., Hodgson 2002; Miller and Rose 2008). Drawing on the notion of the culture of the customer (du Gay and Saleman 1992), researchers have argued that both consumers and employees become the targets of marketing governmentality, because they are increasingly expected to work on themselves to become flexible, service-minded, and disciplined providers of customer satisfaction operating in the name of profitability (Skålén, Felleson, and Fougère 2006). Through the study of marketing history, these authors demonstrate how the ideal of customer orientation has become ever more deeply embedded in marketing thought and thus affects the employee in new and more intimate ways.

Three aspects of the DDB case offer possible perspectives for approaching the present analysis of global marketing governmentality. First, the implementation of a novel method of market research imposes new modes of conduct on employees at the advertising agency, who invest their private as well as professional selves in the sense-making processes and become the self-managing, enterprising selves foreseen by du Gay and Saleman (1992). Second, the implementation of SignBank sets new standards for the conduct of agency clients and subtly inscribes an imperative of globalism, which reconfigures their market reality and alters their marketing practices. Third, the marketing practices analyzed govern the conduct of consumers, furthering their compliance with certain aspirational lifestyles and requiring them (within a reconfigured market space) to mold themselves to become the right kind of desiring self, as touched upon in the opening description of the assemblage of Anthon Berg products to suggest a particular consumer lifestyle. The analysis in this article addresses the second of these three aspects and explores how global marketing governmentality works in the context of market research, since market research “sets parameters around spatial heterogeneity by extracting and mapping diversity in space, but they do not eliminate difference. Instead they reproduce a rational system of control in a new cartography of difference and identity” (Maxwell 1996, 121).

The quotation expresses how market research functions in a globalizing world. It describes how these marketing practices—whose data production takes place in particular localities to strengthen transnational corporations’ ability to move closer to consumer desires and aspirations—engage in the reconfiguration of market spaces. In describing the context and method of this study, we sketch the empirical and methodological foundation for analyzing how globalization discourses function as a myth and charter for marketing practitioners (Applbaum 2000) and institute an ideoscape of globalism (Appadurai 1990), which powerfully transforms marketplace spatiality and market actor subjectivities on the level of agency clients.

Method and Context

To study the emergence of global market spaces through situated marketing practices may seem both pretentious and oxymoronic. However, one way to reach global ventures is through the discourses, imaginations, and practices of people who navigate an increasingly connected and interdependent globe. We argue that market research practitioners in advertising are central actors or cognitive map makers and that exploring their activities facilitates a bottom-up approach to understanding the spatial configurations of market spaces. We apply the extended case method (Burawoy 1998), or ethnographic case method (Visconti 2010), in an attempt to develop theory in an iterative analytical process that moves between micro-level data—interview narratives, participant observation, and document data—and macro-level constructs, which in our case are market spaces. Our research focuses on the way in which employees of the advertising agency DDB, in particular strategic planners, have developed and used a novel global market research method in new product development and branding.

Market and consumer research constitute central practices of knowledge production that establish versions of market reality and consumer subjectivity to be used within organizations to align organizational supply with consumer preferences. Previous research has analyzed these practices with respect to the ideological templates employed for making sense of markets and consumers. Within this perspective, we draw on Law (2009), who argues that measurement practices not only engage in neutral descriptions of reality but also in creating ideological and embedded versions of reality. Researchers have given particular attention to the emergence of consumer subjectivity and its embeddedness in certain cultural, political, and economic contexts (Arvidsson 2004; Cochoy 2005). For example, the economic boom in the post–World War II era, combined with accelerating urbanization, social mobility, increase in mass media broadcasting, and the development of new market research methods, may have created the conditions for a renewed understanding of the consumer as a creative, mobile, and lifestyle-oriented individual (Arvidsson 2004). This knowledge then forms the foundation for contemporary processes of value cocreation, in which companies capitalize on the creativity and mobility of consumers.

The focus of other research has been the negotiation of legitimacy of marketing and advertising as central market institutions through the association of consumer choice with democratic voting (Schwartzkopf 2011). However, while these studies mark the dependence of consumer subjectivity on socioeconomic development, institutional powers, and players and the development of new market and consumer research methodologies, they leave the consequences of the spatial configuration of markets unexplored. The omnipresent discourse of globalization and the globalization of marketing ideology makes the examination of how global market spaces are produced in and through marketing practices even more relevant.

SignBank, the method of research we investigate, is emically described as a global ethnographic market research method. SignBank was implemented during 2004–06 throughout sixty DDB offices on five continents. SignBank emerged from the DDB planning department’s frustration with the actionability and predictive potential of existing market research. In the DDB organization more widely, a sense of emergency—stemming from a perception of intensified competition, consumer empowerment, and technological development—stimulated the search for new routes to market and consumer insights. SignBank is generally understood as radically different from more conventional ways of generating knowledge about markets and consumers. This difference lies mainly in the fact that it is the employees at DDB who collect the data and that the method enables a distinct and novel perspective for understanding markets and consumers, as exemplified by the following quotation:

I think that’s what SignBank does, it gives you permission, and this is an important point, it gives you permission to look at other, seemingly unrelated areas and allow yourself to try to make the connection between those things. Other methods don’t allow these relations. . .. SignBank allows us to look everywhere for solutions (Jefri, Managing Director, DDB Singapore).

We describe the nature of the SignBank method further below. Despite the perception of uniqueness surrounding SignBank, the method is seen as a natural extension of the DDB culture, which is encapsulated in the values, humanity, and creativity that figure significantly in the minds of informants. Figures 1 and 2 present central visual representations of the SignBank method and were used in the description of the method to stakeholders internal and external to the DDB organization.

Figure 1.

Emic visualization of interpretation process (Source: DDB).

Figure 2.

Emic visualization of spatial levels of interpreation (Source: DDB).

The fundamental purpose of SignBank is to mobilize employees at DDB globally to detect changes in everyday culture. Such changes are labeled signs, and diverse examples include an increased number of children applying for the Danish Royal Ballet School, production of cupcakes in larger sizes, or groups of friends purchasing shared cemetery plots. Employees at DDB are instructed to report all sorts of small changes happening around them. In Figure 1, the signs are marked as small stars at the lower part of the figure. When each office has collected a critical mass of signs (600–2,000), these are grouped together around issues by designated “Friends of SignBank,” and through a process of interpretation the issues are transformed into so-called cultural narratives. Taken together, these cultural narratives are imagined to point toward an overall direction of cultural development, which can then be used to understand the world in all its complexity and also to inform the work of DDB.

As Figure 2 illustrates, SignBank is further based on the idea of orchestrating the interpretation of signs and formulating cultural narratives on national, regional, and global levels, which should enable SignBank to provide clients with locally situated yet nationally, regionally, or globally relevant knowledge about cultural changes and tendencies. The accumulation of the cultural narratives on various spatial scales (national, regional, and global), as implied in Figure 2, suggests a certain cognitive map, which is exactly the locus of attention for our analysis.

Our study builds on twenty narrative interviews as well as participant observation at seminars and meetings, media data, and numerous documents describing and employing the SignBank method for both internal and external organization purposes. Our data analysis proceeded through several steps. We first coded each type of data separately, giving special attention to thematic issues such as consumers, competitors, clients, the roles of market research, the differentiating elements of SignBank compared to other methods, and so on. All interviews contained both prompted and unprompted reflections on globalization in terms of what it is and its implications for consumers, clients, and the agency. The interviews in particular pointed our attention to the very strong discursive division between SignBank and other methods of market research, which allowed us to organize our analysis into “before” and “after” SignBank. Then, we continued with a comparison across categories of data, which revealed a rather strong discrepancy between the formal description of the SignBank method as it is represented in the document material and the everyday use of SignBank in relation to client businesses, as described in client presentations and interviewees’ narratives of their everyday work. These analytical steps crystallized three discourses of globalization, each sustained by a different logic of the spatial configuration of contemporary markets and each serving a different purpose of the organization. These three discourses constitute the foundation for our data analysis.

Findings

The following analysis focuses on the ways in which the market is spatially constructed in/through the SignBank method. This interpretive process of market enactment takes place at two levels. First, the advertising agency is engaged in the enactment of a new market for itself. SignBank produces representations of a global market reality, of which DDB becomes a savvy navigator and establishes itself as an expert in global consumer cultural knowledge vis-à-vis clients. Second, SignBank assists the agency in mapping new market terrains for its clients, which as the analysis shows materialize in a reconfigured marketing system forming new social spatialities.

Making Sense of Glocal Markets

The empirical material related to SignBank contains three discourses of globalization. Each discourse enacts a certain spatial market configuration—one establishing a homogenous and interconnected global whole, one envisioning a multiplicity of coexisting localities, and one evoking deterritorialized cultural narratives.

The first discourse addresses the global scope of SignBank and the ability to mediate a sense of connectedness to the global world. Such imagined potential to represent “the global” within one all-inclusive and homogenous depiction of markets is considerably valuable for the DDB organization because it legitimizes the organization as an expert regarding global markets. The following comments reflect the enthusiasm and hopes put into the realization of a dream.

Imagine the spectacular global stories we can make with SignBank! (Strategic planner, DDB New York).

People working on SignBank tend to be the smarter ones, the kind of people you really want to be around—those with a more European mindset. You are not always surrounded by them (Strategic planner, DDB New York).

The knowledge amassed in SignBank is explicitly categorized as having the potential to become global through the reworking and interpretation by the DDB employees, as Figure 2 shows. The sense of being in touch with and being connected to the world at large provides the planning community with a feeling of powerfulness, which differentiates SignBank from other types of market research. This discourse parallels Holt, Quelch, and Taylor’s (2004) report on global brands that seem to emanate an “aura of excellence.” In a similar way, the global scope of SignBank seems to function as a magical mantra that enacts a global market position for the agency, facilitates access to client and media relations, and makes the global visible and manageable to the organization. The discourse of a globally homogenous world envisions DDB employees as members of a cosmopolitan professional class, embedded in a transnational network as opposed to locally or nationally oriented organizational networks. The notion of “a more European mindset” in the quotation suggests a self-ascription to such a “cosmopolitan” position.

The second discourse of place involves the possibility for the agency to produce knowledge about markets and consumers “elsewhere.” These stories of what happens in other places are not necessarily perceived as having any immediate relevance for all clients, but the ability to report on “other possible lives” (Appadurai 1990) establishes each locality (nation, region) as a spatial referent.

In terms of being able to put your finger on the pulse of what is going on in various regions, globally and how they differ—that’s of major importance (Head of Global PR, DDB New York)

Whereas the former discourse of place represents the market as spatially connected and homogeneous within a global web of social relations, this discourse evokes a spatial representation of markets that emphasizes the coexistence of multiple spatial configurations (one locality next to the other). The organizational competence derived from this spatial configuration is one of the comparison between otherwise distinct and unique consumer cultures. These two discursive representations of market spatiality seek to naturalize and legitimize the global arrangement of marketing practices through reference to the wider acceptance and interest by other market actors. Furthermore, these discourses reflect the organization and the idea of the SignBank method and as such demonstrate how the market environment is integral to marketing practice and emerges from the marketing practice itself. Hence, SignBank displays a complex global market reality to which DDB and its creative solutions become the obvious answer.

The discourses of place emerging here bear the hallmarks of the assumptions outlined by Massey (2005)—“putting your finger on the pulse” of the local markets is abstracted into a notion of a kind of global panopticon in which the agency is capable of seeing the whole through an overview of all of the parts (regions, countries). While this view seems to reproduce predominant notions of spatiality (local places /global spaces), the process of transforming local signs into global stories has implications for market spatiality. One might interpret the specific understanding of the global and the local as a global space in which “the local” actually becomes topographical features of a market globality. This representation of globalization places DDB employees in the role of the cultural anthropologist who knows cultures from the inside. The official SignBank method prescribes the interpretation of signs to take place within the context in which the signs have been identified and thus establishes employees as cultural experts. Furthermore, in concordance with scientific ethnographic methodology, the validity of SignBank is ascribed to the establishment of a holistic understanding of the meaning system of a given culture.

The notion of cultural narratives, introduced in the description of SignBank, establishes the third discourse of place. The empirical material conveys a certain ambiguity concerning the spatial configuration instituted by the cultural narratives. On one side the legitimacy of these cultural narratives is based on their connection to particular localities through local signs and the detection of similar cultural changes in several localities/nations. This representation is prevalent in Figure 2 which shows the connection between the national, regional, and global levels of the cultural narratives. Informants’ accounts of the validity of SignBank also refer to this spatial configuration, which reproduces the anthropological dictum of “having been there” as the primary source of validity. The following quotation exemplifies how the local and the global are related through the cultural narratives:

I think that the idea can be assured globally. I generally think it’s maximized when the actual interpretation of that idea is done at the local market level. So I’ll give you an example of it; so this brand of cleaning products has always been about these disinfecting products. So both in Latin America and in North America we came up with the idea that it was all about growing happy healthy kids so it wasn’t about killing germs it was about the kids you grow. So that’s a North American idea, and you have to look at how that interprets itself in Buenos Aires. It might be really different than how it might manifest itself in China, what is a happy healthy kid, how is motherhood portrayed, all of those things have very local cultures associated with them. So, I do believe that ideas transcend, but are interpreted when they’re brought to life at the local market level. So in my sense there’re some fat things that people will love in every culture, you know like having healthy kids right, so the core of the ideas can be the same, but I think the local market interpretations will always be really valuable (Managing director, San Francisco).

The spatial imagery represented in the quotation illustrates how SignBank refrains from the conventional representation of market realities along predefined categories of nation-states and replaces it with an imagery of cultural narratives that cut across national borders but emerge in culturally specific ways in different contexts. However, at the same time this representation upholds the importance of geographical representation as a substantial source of validity. One example of a regional cultural narrative is the European story labeled “I-collectivism,” which portrays consumers in the following way:

We sample and snack. But in doing so, we have disconnected and as a result we are starting to feel the sense of isolation. We want to get our bearings back. We seek grounding and centers of gravity but within new paradigms.

From the “collective” to the “selective.” Having chucked institutionally driven collectives, we seek a sense of belonging but in a transient and customized way depending on self interest and self expression. . .. We “tribe up” for social glue, belonging and security, to feel less alone and to “hang out. . ..” (European SignBank meeting seminar material 2006).

These excerpts describe the consequences of an individualistic lifestyle, where traditional institutions no longer satisfy consumers’ need for social belonging and sense of community. The document material includes similar narratives under the headings of “New commandments” and “Give me some truth.” The former reports consumers’ tendency to demand brands that help them impose a certain self-discipline and reduce the plethora of choice offered by the marketplace. The latter exemplifies how SignBank enacts a consumer subject concerned with the legitimacy, genuineness, and authenticity of brands. Taken together, these narratives constitute myths of modernity, in which products and brands should restore the sense of certainty and community that is lost with the breakdown of traditional societal institutions. In this way, the ideological content circulating in and emanating from SignBank is not involved in a particular national conversation, as Holt (2004) suggests. Instead, the ideological content of the cultural narratives is related to a shared experience of living in late modern society. Thus, the sociocultural disruptions and tensions to which SignBank speaks are not related to a specific geographic location but to the experience of living inside a certain societal model dominated by market capitalism, individualization, science, and reflexivity.

The cultural narratives could in this sense be described through the notion of global structures of common difference (Wilk 1995), which conceptualizes globalization as based on global structures or formats of commonality exemplified by the imagery of “the good mother” in the quotation. These formats transcend traditional lines of division but are appropriated, interpreted, and expressed differently across different contexts, corresponding to the informant’s reference to the fact that the aspiration of growing happy healthy kids is universal but expresses itself differently across contexts. Following from the perspective outlined in the quotation, the spatial references and geography do not become obsolete owing to the shaping of market realities through cultural narratives. Instead of organizing markets along lines of separate national boundaries, informants perceive places to be connected through systems of meaning, and they consider themselves to be the experts able to identify and navigate this complex reality.

From Sign to Product: Unfolding Client Markets

The way in which SignBank is mobilized in the course of everyday advertising work differs in many ways from the formal methodological prescriptions introduced above. In the following text, we discuss how governmentality unfolds more specifically in the practices of Signbank. Observation of the way in which the signs and the cultural narratives are evoked in new product development or branding makes obvious how the spatial genesis of specific signs becomes more or less irrelevant. The contribution of signs to a holistic, coherent, and meaningful cultural narrative accounts for the narrative’s validity, legitimacy, not the degree of direct correspondence to a given geographical area. One example, mentioned at the outset of this article, is the Danish chocolate brand, Anthon Berg, which has been through an overall process of brand repositioning. SignBank played a decisive role in setting the overall direction of the repositioning process and in the development of concrete product concepts, as the quotation below demonstrates.

SignBank is very, very important in the development of new products. Of course [Anthon Berg] always must produce high quality chocolate, but at the conceptual level SignBank is decisive (Executive strategic planner DDB Copenhagen).

In the case of Anthon Berg, the arbitrariness of place is evident. No correspondence is present between the geographical origin of the signs, the locus of interpretation, and the national markets in which the new products are eventually launched. Thus, the European SignBank narratives have been used extensively, along with a more specific round of sign gathering throughout the global organizational SignBank network. The sign-gathering task was framed in terms of “look for signs within the area of chocolate.” These two sources of market information have formed the basis for the strategic and operational processes of brand repositioning of products that are distributed across fifteen countries that are not identical in terms of the origins of the signs. Thus, SignBank engages in the renegotiation of the meaning of place by ignoring the significance of geographical origin. In this way, the method enacts a market space that resists or circumvents the conventional conflation of marketplace representations with the actual distribution of the brand. Hence, it becomes clear that geographical market spaces, which we normally take for granted, depend on interpretive practices as much as the cultural narratives in SignBank do. The difference made by SignBank is the reorganization of market spaces from discrete geographical places to networked assemblages of market spaces.

One example of a new product is related to the cultural narrative of I-collectivism, which addresses anxieties related to living in modern society and the erosion of traditional institutions and social authorities characterizing this societal model. The following quotation describes how this cultural narrative becomes the springboard for new market opportunities for the chocolate brand and how it manifests in a new product concept: “The consumer’s increased need for alliances, communities, and positive togetherness creates room for chocolate in a new social role” (SignBank seminar material narrative for chocolate brand). The product is described by one informant as the logical consequence of insight into the increased need of consumers for new alliances—the product is “a facilitator of social positive relations and [acts] as social glue.”

The product consists of a thick block of high-quality dark chocolate in an exclusive packaging that includes a wooden stick to be used for breaking the chocolate into smaller pieces and is described as simultaneously appealing to the increasing consumer interest in high-quality chocolate and offering a little social game of “who does the breaking.” In this way, the consequence of modernity related to the erosion of traditional institutions and social relationships is addressed by developing a chocolate imagined to reestablish these with new forms of sociality. The case of the chocolate brand demonstrates how the relationship between the social and the spatial is reconfigured as geography and is not evoked as a signifier of a particular place and through reference to the nation-state, but as a signifier of reflexivity on the global configuration of markets and consumers’ shared experience of living on the edge of modernity.

As Figure 3 illustrates, SignBank has reassembled this particular brand across new spatial configurations, showing that taking a cultural perspective on market emergence not only highlights the inseparability of the system from the environment but equally demonstrates the relational, multiple, and emergent character of market spaces.

Figure 3.

Assemblage of client marketing space.

The representation in Figure 3 is intended to demonstrate how globalization imageries, which loosen the dependence on geographical place, enact a market as a cultural space and materialize in a geographically dispersed yet culturally coherent assemblage and show governmentality at work in the specific case of the development of the re-positioning of the Anton Berg brand. The macro-level discourses are instantiated in micro-level marketing and brand systems. However, the macro and micro dimensions are not aligned with a global–local distinction but rather appear as a deterritorialized assemblage of elements that constitute the specific market space connecting a variety of geographical and nongeographical entities into a new social space.

We have identified three discourses of globalization in our data and have addressed the ways in which they produce the spatial contours of market realities. Additionally, we have pointed to the subject positions for employees at DDB, who are engaged in the SignBank method, emerging through the variety of globalization discourses and the materialization of reconfigured market spaces for a particular client of the DDB agency. Much more than prescribing a particular position to the employees at Anthon Berg, through its multiplicity of globalization discourses the SignBank method inserts a particular identity position for the ideal client company, able and willing to engage with the challenges of globalization as they are depicted through SignBank.

Such representation of “the right kind” of client company becomes evident when informants at DDB distinguish between “those who get it (SignBank) and those who don’t.” The interviewees do not distinguish between different product categories or industries to account for the different degree of acceptance and use of SignBank by clients. Instead, they refer to some clients as being “ready” for SignBank and some as being “too linear or traditional” in their views to be able or willing to take the insights from SignBank into account. Thus, they engage in the production of organizational subject positions for agency clients and therefore in the construction of competent customers (Cova and Cova 2012). That is, marketing practices not only govern employee or consumer subjectivities, as previous research has demonstrated, but also in our case market research practices in advertising constitute central practices of market governmentality that produce particular organizational identity positions.

Discussion and Conclusion

As firms increasingly regard globalization as a condition under which they must operate, the character of market and consumer research practices changes. However, one fundamental assumption among marketers concerns the existence of cultural differences, primarily along national boundaries but also across lifestyle and demographic lines of division. This assumption preoccupies marketers with the dilemma of how to address consumers in different markets. A multiplicity of discourses on globalization assists marketers in making sense of their global market reality and organizing their marketing activities. Thus, we argue that what we could call the popular memory of globalization (Thompson and Tian 2008)—defined as the shared vocabulary for making sense of globalization processes and its impact on this particular market actor—becomes the cultural category most decisively engaged in structuring marketing activities.

In the following, we synthesize our findings in relation to spatiality as introduced by Massey (2005). We do so by highlighting the mutual constituency of three elements: market research as a cultural practice, myths of globalization, and the market and organizational context of the advertising agency. The interrelationship of these three elements constitutes a specific form of global governmentality. That is, these marketing practices produce sociohistorically embedded versions of “the market” by leveraging discourses of globalization, and they simultaneously institute moral ways of conduct for employees at the advertising agency, for the client companies, and ultimately for consumers dispersed in the renewed cultural market space.

In globalizing markets, marketing practices are increasingly addressing the problem of articulating the spatiality of the market. This articulation occurs in specific networks of interrelationships (Massey 2005). In our case, the interrelationships include the setup, methodology, organizational culture of DDB, and design of the SignBank organization. The identity politics of being a member of the SignBank community constitute particularly important, translocal interrelationships that become constitutive of market spatiality for the marketing system that is Signbank. This process demonstrates how marketing governmentality becomes part of constructing coherent global identities intraorganizationally, from the shared practices of generating representations of consumers. Organizational identities can then globalize destabilizing or relativizing individual workers’ frames of identity reference, further diminishing the dominance of the nation-state as the primary frame of reference.

We have pointed to the coexistence of several globalization ideologies that serve as interpretive templates for marketers and are activated and legitimate in different organizational settings. We have emphasized the divergence between the globalization ideology used to establish agency corporate identity vis-à-vis competitors and clients and the ideology that governs everyday advertising work. The implication is that globalization ideologies address a multiplicity of tensions and hence constitute a multiplicity of market spaces (Massey 2005) that goes beyond nation-state ideological tensions and thus is denoted global governmentality. We have demonstrated how marketing ideologies of space are not merely representational but are productive in that they delineate and in some cases expand the potentiality of market definitions.

As a consequence, market spaces are never fixed and static but are always emergent through market practices. In the case developed here, different forms of market spatiality emerged for different products, in different national contexts and from different practices of utilizing the cultural narratives in different branches of the organization.

This investigation extends discussions of the myth market in the consumer culture theory field. As became evident in our case, competing in myth markets stretches beyond addressing ideological tensions in the nation-state space. Our empirical site in an advertising agency extends the discussion of the formation of myth markets beyond the cocreative processes among organizations and their consumers (Holt 2004) but also beyond the competition among locally situated mythmakers (Thompson and Tian 2008). We demonstrate how the formation of market mythologies takes place in deterritorialized transnational advertising practices and governs the marketing decisions of agency clients. Our case demonstrates how myth markets operate higher up in the value chain,in the business-to-business market—in this case how DDB competes in the global advertising industry. Our study hence shows that myth marketing is as much a sense-making and enactment exercise of the organization’s market and client subjects as it is an addressing of the anxieties of business-to-consumer marketers operating in a seemingly chaotic global market. We demonstrate how the global is not an abstract symbolic category outside the local realm of marketing practices but an emergent and very material social space in the form of cultural marketing systems. This depiction has implications for the understanding of the global and the local, as these are predominantly understood as, respectively, abstract and concrete in studies of marketing and consumer culture.

The interrelationship of marketing and society as the overall focus for macromarketing has been studied across various dimensions, including levels of aggregation, the interplay of various structural parts of the marketing system, temporality, and spatiality. However, the symbolic dimension of marketing systems has been addressed only sporadically in a macromarketing context (Kadirov and Varey 2011). A global governmentality perspective enables us to investigate the contemporary marketing systems (Kadirov and Varey 2011; Venkatesh 1999) beyond a pregiven global–local dualism.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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