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Title: Carried Away by Rachel Bowlby ISBN: 0-231-12275-6 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: What Do Shoppers Want?
Comment: The best thing about "Carried Away," is the research Bowlby has done on marketers' changing models of shoppers' consciousness. She deftly shows that these models are empty of any true psychological insight, but instead entirely bound up with the culture and the time and the economic circumstances in which the models were devised. The worst thing is that she spends too much time researching British marketing publications from the 50s and 60s. The US has always been the hot molten center of marketing and retail trends -- a fact which Bowlby readily acknowledges throughout most of the book -- thus the inclusion textual readings from old British marketing journals seems to have everything to do with Bowlby being a professor in England and her original publisher being British, and nothing to do with whether this information is really appropriate.
But this is a relatively minor annyonance in what is really quite a witty, interesting look at the rise of the supermarket and the concomitant creation of new packaging, new advertising, new models of the shopper consciousness. Bowlby is at her best here, giving us an historical perspective of shoppers (mostly women in the early days of supermarket shopping) who,depending on the theorist, are believed to be extremely suggestible given certain conditions, or extremely rational no matter what the conditions. For instance, in the 50s, that era of mass outputs and mass consumption and McCarthyism, some social critics like Vance Parkard posited that advertisers were "hidden persuaders" using sophisticated brainwashing techniques to sell weak-minded women things they did not really need. But in the 60s and 70s, the model of shopper consciousness shifted. Suddenly, the shopper -- still nearly always seen as a woman -- was in charge, "with it," "sophisticated." The rise of the "power brand" in the 80s -- a time during which the appeals of certain brands were apparently so overwhelming that even the sophisticated 70s shopper succumbed -- swung the pendulum back to the weak-minded model. Bowlby neatly lampoons the variations these psycological models have gone through since the rise of the supermarket, but notes that ultimately, this bipolar model is still intact.
I particularly recommend "Carried Away" to marketers, especially young marketers who have never seen the vacillation in the models of shopper consciousness. Take it to the next marketer's conference you attend. It's the perfect antidote to those enlessly dull days spent listening to hour after hour of case studies in which consumers are uniformly described as "sophisticated," or "savvy." Bowlby's light touch and eye for the absurd will help you keep all the tepid, instrumetally tainted "shopper psychology" in perspective.
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Title: Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping by Paco Underhill ISBN: 0684849143 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture by Sharon Zukin ISBN: 0415945976 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India by William Mazzarella ISBN: 0822331454 Publisher: Duke University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: A Theory of Shopping by Daniel Miller ISBN: 0801485517 Publisher: Cornell University Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1998 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Passions and the Interests by Albert O. Hirschman ISBN: 0691015988 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 06 January, 1997 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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