Trade softly because you trade on my dreams: a paradisal prolegomenon Stephen Brown Professor of Marketing Research at the University of Ulster, Jordanstown, Northern Ireland Anthony Patterson Research Assistant in the School of Management at the University of Ulster, Jordanstown, Northern Ireland Keywords Post-modernism, Marketing theory, Paradise Sailing to Byzantium In July 1999, Pope John-Paul II made a pronouncement on Paradise (The Times, An introduction to the special 1999; Owen, 1999) The conventional view of issue ``A taste of paradise'' Heaven, as a perfect place above the clouds Discusses the various where a white-bearded patriarch sits on a representations of paradise over gilded throne and the Pearly Gates are time and asserts that these have always reflected the society that guarded by St Peter the Pedantic, was produced them Stresses that formally abandoned by the papal powers that marketing is unavoidably be (Owen and Gledhill, 1999; Thompson, implicated in our perceptions of 1999) Time-steeped images of sweetness, paradise Refers to the different notions of marketing paradise held light, choirs invisible and harp-strumming by the various authors of the angels have had their day, according to God's papers in the special issue official goalkeeper, and are henceforth replaced by a ``living and personal About the Guest Editors relationship with the Holy Trinity'' Stephen Brown has written or coAlthough true believers might be edited ten books, including disconcerted by Christianity's new found Postmodern Marketing (1995), enthusiasm for relationship marketing ± one Postmodern Marketing Two (1998) and Imagining Marketing: hesitates to speculate on the identity of RM's Art, Aesthetics and the AvantHoly Trinity ± and although it may be some Garde (forthcoming from time before established Edenic images are Routledge) His papers have been erased from the collective memory bank, it is published in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, noteworthy that the Pope's paradisal Journal of Retailing, Journal of pronouncement was prompted by a Macromarketing and many more blasphemous television commercial (Owen, Anthony Patterson is co-editor, 1999) with Stephen Brown of Imagining Marketing: Art, Aesthetics and the Apparently, an Italian advertisement for Avant-Garde (Routledge, 2000) instant coffee depicted God having a Currently, he is doing a PhD on cappuccino in a cafe in the clouds, while themed environments watching sexy seraphims, cute cherubims and alluring angels pass provocatively by Worse, it concluded with His recommendation of the brand in question As celebrity endorsements go, they not come much more celebrated than that, or celestial come to think of it Still, at least they did not claim that Heaven is one Hell of a place Irreverent though this Italian amalgam of God and Mammon undoubtedly is, it is by no means unique On the other side of the Atlantic, for example, an anonymous donor Marketing Intelligence & Abstract Planning 18,6/7 [2000] 316±320 # MCB University Press [ISSN 0263-4503] [ 316 ] The research register for this journal is available at http://www.mcbup.com/research_registers/mkt.asp has recently splashed out $100 million on the Almighty's marketing makeover (heat, 1999) A combination of huge, roadside billboards; snappy verging on sacrilegious slogans (``We Need to Talk'', ``What Part of `Thou Shalt Not' Didn't you Understand?'', ``Don't Make Me Come Down There''); and, not least, enormous media interest clearly indicates that the Lord is perfectly capable of beating Luciano Benetton at his own attentiongrabbing, nun-kissing priest, condoms a-gogo game (Falk, 1997) How does the old song go? ``Red and yellow, black and white The united colours of Beulah.'' Touche Toscani In corporations across God's own country, moreover, it seems that the landlord is firmly ensconced behind boardroom tables on both sides of the Great Divide As Reed (1999, p 11) reports: ``All sorts of companies, from the Fortune 500 to medium-size firms and small businesses, are hiring chaplains, starting departmental meetings with prayer, permitting services, posting slogans and biblical quotations, and allowing employees to discuss religion'' What is more, a veritable host of evangelical pressure groups and management consultancies, such as Marketplace Ministries, The Churches Advertising Network and The Fellowship of Companies for Christ International, is spreading the gospel that God is good for business Spirituality, purportedly, is ``the ultimate competitive advantage'' (Denton and Mitroff, 1999) Praise the Lord and pass the Principles of Marketing The second coming Some people, to be sure, may be deeply dismayed by such seemingly unholy alliances of sacred and secular, saint and The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emerald-library.com Stephen Brown and Anthony Patterson Trade softly because you trade on my dreams: a paradisal prolegomenon Marketing Intelligence & Planning 18,6/7 [2000] 316±320 salesperson But the simple fact of the matter is that selling and salvation have always been closely related Aside from the truism that Jesus Christ hailed from a trading background and the archaeological evidence that early Christians successfully spread the word thanks largely to their extensive mercantile contacts (McDannell and Lang, 1988; Russell, 1997), it is common knowledge that the sale of indulgences, holy relics and offcuts from the true cross was an enormous industry in the pre-Reformation period (Moore, 1994) It only came to an end when John Calvin decided that nothing should come between him and his Holy Trinity As McDannell (1995) demonstrates, moreover, many mass-marketing methods were developed by itinerant American evangelists during the Great Awakening of the midnineteenth century One of the earliest advertising slogans ``End of the World in 43'' was coined by a millenarian cult, The Millerites (Brown, 1997) A surprisingly large proportion of Madison Avenue's marketing pioneers were sons and daughters of the manse (Twitchell, 1996) Saving the soul of big business was earnestly debated at the start of the twentieth century and precipitated the creation of publicity departments, marketing's much-maligned forerunner (Marchand, 1998) The single, best-selling sacerdotal book of the 1920s, The Man Nobody Knows, maintained that Jesus was a marketing man manque (Indeed, variations on Barton's (1925) ambitious thesis still top the best-seller lists, as Jones's (1995) Jesus CEO and Tam's (1991) God Owns my Business testify.) Even Christmas is not immune, since the celebration was conceived by commercial interests ± Macy's and Wanamaker's, in the main ± and owes much of its imagery to Haddon Sundbloom's immortal ads for Coca-Cola (Belk, 1989, 1993; Schmidt, 1995) Contemporary complaints about the over-commercialisation of Christmas completely miss the point, because it has never been otherwise Today, of course, we are becoming increasingly inured to the marketization of Zion We know that home shopping channels are a secular version of televangelism We routinely describe shopping centres as ``cathedrals of consumption'' We pray that the blessings of the National Lottery will be bestowed upon us, but not our backsliding neighbours We partake in an annual pilgrimage to Disneyland and stand in Limboesque line for what seems like eternity Shoppers, analogously, often use paradisal language when accounting for their acquisitions (``It was as if a light from Heaven was shining on the shoes I just had to have them'') or purgatorial language on occasion (Belk et al., 1989; Brown, 1999) And, public opinion surveys show that that many people's perceptions of Paradise are akin to the ideal world portrayed in gone-but-notforgotten television ads for Timotei shampoo ± sylvan glades, glistening waterfalls, gambolling unicorns and a good hair day (Gerrard and Ferguson, 1996) What more could anyone want? Before answering that question with a rueful shake of the head or an exasperated ``what on earth is the world coming to?'', it is important to appreciate that representations of Paradise have always reflected the society that produced them (McDannell and Lang, 1988) In medieval times, for example, when feudal society was rigidly stratified and everyone knew their place, discussions of Heaven tended to focus on its hierarchical organisation, the relative rankings of saints and angels, and the precise degree of rejoicing that the chosen few enjoyed In the nineteenth century, by contrast, Paradise was portrayed as a dynamic, progressive, forward looking entity, where romantic love obtained, extended families were reunited, hard work was rewarded and the stolid bourgeois pleasures of the parlour pianola helped wile away the long evenings It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that in our consumption-saturated, post-industrial, image-obsessed society we should see Paradise in predominantly commercialised ± well nigh commodified ± terms As Gerrard and Ferguson (1996, p 24) observe, ``our heaven must be renamed Ad-land Golden beaches of California; hair free of dandruff and split ends; ice cream with the one you love; that cup of tea after a hard day's work; the bottle of rum that makes a rainy day into an island paradise; the sanctuary called a building society where you can be calmly wealthy into sweet old age; that god called mammon Most advertisements promise to deliver order in the middle of your disorderly life They promise to look after you They promise quick-fix bliss.'' Running to Paradise Marketing, in short, is unavoidably implicated in our perceptions of Paradise The concept of Paradise is used to sell all sorts of goods and services: chocolates (Bounty Bar), fizzy drinks (Fruitopia), furniture (``Homeware Heaven at Brown Thomas''), holiday resorts (Paradise Island), theme parks (Heritage Village, USA, the Eden Project, Cornwall), Philadelphia Cheese (``A Little Taste of Heaven'') etc., etc., etc and [ 317 ] Stephen Brown and Anthony Patterson Trade softly because you trade on my dreams: a paradisal prolegomenon Marketing Intelligence & Planning 18,6/7 [2000] 316±320 [ 318 ] marketing, conversely, is used to promote images of Paradise, as the recent Heaven, Utopia and Seeing Salvation exhibitions (in the Tate, Liverpool, Bibliotheque Nationale and National Gallery respectively) bear artful witness Marketers, in the words of one academic apostate, ``portray a perfect world of perfect families, perfect appearances, perfect personalities, perfect pets, perfect pizzas, perfectly pulled pints and perfect imperfections'' (Brown, 1995, p 137) In this regard, it is entirely appropriate that a recent BBC sitcom, set in an advertising agency, should be entitled Perfect World Indeed, the merest glance in one's kitchen cupboard or refrigerator reveals that package designs often employ paradisal iconography, whether it be the shimmering nimbus of saintly light that surrounds the depicted product or the radiant rays of celestial luminosity emanating from the object of our adoration ± tea bags, pop tarts, Persil tablets or whatever (Marchand, 1985) Marketing's inherent utopianism, however, is not confined to the frivolities of FMCG Amusing though it is to imagine advertising hoardings in Heaven, Promised Land loyalty cards, ``ten trespasses or less'' lines at the Pearly Gates checkout and what have you, the discipline's paradisal predispositions go much deeper than many might suspect As Brown and Maclaran (1996, p 266) note: ``The very notion of a marketing orientation, with its ambition of perfectly satisfied, not to say delighted, customers, whose every conceivable want or need is anticipated, investigated and accommodated by perennially profitable companies, which are fully integrated around the marketing function and where careful analysis, planning, implementation and control are the orders of the day, is nothing less than an Utopian hallucination that is utterly preposterous, some would say megalomaniac, in its ambition and scope'' Not only is this utopianism manifest in many marketing concepts, from the three eras schema to ubiquitous textbook diagrams of marketing's component parts, but it is also evident in the prevailing attitude towards our field The traditional progressivist paradigm of new-and-improved, onward-andupward, things-can-only-get-better has been superseded in recent years by an overwhelming sense of decline, despair and degeneration Popularly known as the ``midlife crisis literature'', this represents nothing less than a replacement of paradise future with paradise past Thus, the ``marketing revolution'' of the 1960s, led by Levitt, Kotler and Levy, is increasingly regarded as a kind of ``golden age'', when marketing was in its pomp prior to the heretical depredations of passing management fads (TQM, re-engineering etc.) For many proselytes, indeed, this pre-lapsarian marketing paradise can be regained provided we place our faith in relationships and really, really, really love our customers this time round Marketing is love God is love Marketing is God Or something like that Under Ben Bulben A major conference devoted to marketing's representations of Paradise was held in September 1999 and this special issue of Marketing Intelligence & Planning contains a selection of papers from the Marketing Paradiso Conclave Appropriately enough, the event was held in a Retreat House situated in the hills overlooking Belfast, Northern Ireland Perhaps it was the pure, paradisal air surrounding St Clement's; or perhaps it was the spirits that moved amongst us, if you catch our drift; but the milieu seemed to work more than a little magic on the conference delegates Invited to wax lyrical on marketing paradise, the academic apostles outlined their arcadian visions of ± and for ± marketing As the papers in this collection testify, Marcadia exists, albeit it exists in many different forms, places and approaches Michael Thomas, for example, maintains that marketing paradise will be found in a renewed commitment to customer orientation and the continuing crusade for unimpeachable professionalism For Sherry, it is situated in the ecosphere, the eminent domain of marketing millenarians Belk believes ± in keeping with his neo-Rousseau credo that ``marketing was born free but everywhere is in chains'' ± scholarly ShangriLa languishes in the developing world of subSaharan Africa Kacen, by contrast, considers the celestial city of consumer research and concludes that its re-appearance is dependant upon the anticipated twenty-first century genderquake, an anti-androcentric apocalypse that will consign marketing's male chauvinism to the infernal regions where it belongs Pitchforks, mind you, are a patent penis substitute, as indeed are bananas, the subject of Brown's bizarre ruminations on the intellectual Elysium that awaits marketing in the new millennium Be that as it may, by far the most common conjugations of marketing's future perfect, as declaimed at St Clement's, are predicated on the arts The vast majority of conference Stephen Brown and Anthony Patterson Trade softly because you trade on my dreams: a paradisal prolegomenon Marketing Intelligence & Planning 18,6/7 [2000] 316±320 papers rested on artistic representations of marketing soteriology A selection of these have been assembled elsewhere (Brown and Patterson, 2000), but the belief in the salvatory power of the arts was so strong that it is important to include several herein Bearing in mind marketing's traditional, if over-ambitious, aspiration to scientific status, this artistic turn is especially striking Hence, Harris and Rees take us on a guided tour of Milton, Monet, Machiavelli and Mussorsky, whilst drawing metaphorical parallels with the present parlous state of marketing scholarship Hetzel shows the way in which a work of art can articulate the hopes and dreams of a nation in the nineteenth century, only to become a commercialised tourist attraction one hundred years later Schroeder, similarly, scours the fictional world of a distant ancestor, Edward Bellamy, in order to demonstrate how his utopian imaginings anticipate many of the marketing benefits that are taken for granted in contemporary consumer society And, not to be outdone in the prophetic literature stakes, Mayer, Job and Ellis turn to the Good Book for their vision of marketing future, albeit there is disconcerting evidence of a schism in the authorial ranks Despite this divinatory diversity, our contributors are as one in their belief that marketing has much to learn from the arts Whereas mainstream marketers are ready, willing and able to instruct artists and arts administrators on analysis, planning, implementation and control, we subscribe to the view that it is time to turn the tide, reverse the flow and shoot the rapids of ``martistry'' Although the artistic and commercial spheres have long been regarded as worlds apart ± art for art's sake, selling out, pandering to the philistines, I don't know much about art but I know what I like, etc ± the historical record clearly indicates otherwise Indeed, the close association between marketing and the arts is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of W.B Yeats, widely considered an exemplar of ethereal, airy-fairy, art with a capital ``A'' aestheticism Yeats, admittedly, was an appalling snob and utopian dreamer of the first water, as his Celtic Twilight twaddle testifies, but he was a brilliant marketing man whose self-promoting tactics guaranteed his place in history whilst ensuring that his reputation remained unsullied by base commercialism Only a tightrope walker of martistic genius could manage such a delicate balancing act and, in the final paper, Aherne asserts that Yeats's marketing mysticism, paradisal prognostications and hitherto unpublished manuscript, ``The Paradise Parchment'', contain important lessons for the future of our field Trade softly, as the great poet almost said, because you trade on my dreams References Barton, B (1925), The Man Nobody Knows, Bobbs-Merrill, New York, NY Belk, R.W (1989), ``Materialism and the modern US Christmas'', in Hirschman, E.C (Ed.), Interpretive Consumer Research, Association for Consumer Research, Provo, UT, pp 136-47 Belk, R.W (1993), ``Materialism and the making of the modern American Christmas'', in Miller, D (Ed.), Unwrapping Christmas, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 75-104 Belk, R.W., Wallendorf, M and Sherry, J.F., Jr (1989), ``The sacred and the profane in consumer behavior: theodicy on the Odyssey'', Journal of Consumer Research, June, Vol 16, pp 1-38 Brown, S (1995), Postmodern Marketing, Routledge, London Brown, S (1997), ``Six sixty-six and all that (or, what the hell is marketing eschatology?)'', European Journal of Marketing, Vol 31 No 9, pp 639-53 Brown, S (1999), ``De-valuing value: the apophatic ethic and the spirit of postmodern consumption'', in Holbrook, M.B (Ed.), Consumer Value, Routledge, London, pp 59-182 Brown, S and Maclaran, P (1996), ``The future is past: marketing, apocalypse and the retreat from Utopia'', in Brown, S et al (Eds), Marketing Apocalypse, Routledge, London, pp 260-77 Brown, S and Patterson, A (2000), Imagining Marketing: Art, Aesthetics and the AvantGarde, Routledge, London Denton, E and Mitroff, I (1999), A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America: A Hard Look at Spirituality, Religion, and Values in the Workplace, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA Falk, P (1997), ``The Benetton-Toscani effect: testing the limits of conventional advertising'', in Nava, M et al (Eds), Buy This Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption, Routledge, London, pp 64-83 Gerrard, N and Ferguson, E (1996), ``Heaven or hell: whose side are you on?'', Observer Life, April, pp 22-7 heat (1999), ``Ad agency scoops an Almighty client'', heat, 26 August-1 September, p 22 Jones, L.B (1995), Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership, Hyperion, New York, NY Marchand, R (1985), Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Marchand, R (1998), Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA [ 319 ] Stephen Brown and Anthony Patterson Trade softly because you trade on my dreams: a paradisal prolegomenon Marketing Intelligence & Planning 18,6/7 [2000] 316±320 [ 320 ] McDannell, C (1995), Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT McDannell, C and Lang, B (1988), Heaven: A History, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT Moore, R.L (1994), Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture, Oxford University Press, Oxford Owen, R (1999), ``Pope redefines nature of Paradise'', The Times, July, p Owen, R and Gledhill, R (1999), ``Pope challenges image of God as bearded patriarch'', The Times, 15 January, p Reed, C (1999), ``With God as my co-worker'', The Observer Business, Sunday 28 November, p 11 Russell, J.B (1997), A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ Schmidt, L.E (1995), Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ Tam, S (1991), God Owns my Business, Horizon House, New York, NY Thompson, D (1999), ``If the church questions Heaven, Hell and even the Resurrection, what does it believe in?'', The Mail on Sunday, August, p 40 (The) Times (1999), ``Paradise redefined: Heaven must be one hell of a place'', 23 July, p 25 Twitchell, J.B (1996), Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture, Columbia University Press, New York, NY