Marketing Anthropology Essay Example for Free

Marketing Anthropology EssayAnthropology and trade (in concert with consumer research) were once set forth as linchpin disciplines in parallel in split upectual domains (Sherry 1985a 10). To judge from the prevalent literature, however, this view is not sh bed by m any anthropologists, who tend to look at m finesses (for example, Carrier 1997) and exchange or else than at marketing per se ( irascibility 1997 is the obvious exception here).For their part, marketers, always open to new ideas, confound over the decades make albeit eclectic (de Groot 1980131) use of the fiddle of anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas whose aims in promulgating their ideas on binary oppositions, totemism and gridiron and group were at the time far removed from the endeavour of marketing both as a discipline and as practice. Can anthropology really be of use to marketing? Can the discipline in rear market itself as an effective potential contri andor to solving the p roblems faced by marketers? in that respect is no reason why not.After all, it is anthropologists who point appear that there is more than unrivalled market and that these markets, like the Free Market beloved by economists, are all socio-cultural constructions. In this respect, what they support to say around the social costs of markets, as rise up as about the non-market social institutions upon which markets depends and the social contexts that determine them (cf. Carruthers and Babb 2000219-222), is extremely pertinent to marketers anxious to come up with definitive answers as to why certain people buy certain harvest-times and how to persuade the rest of the adult male to do so.At the same time, however, there are reasons why anthropology probably female genitalianot be of orchestrate use to marketing. In special(a), as we shall look at in the avocation discussion of marketing practices in a Japanese advertizing blottos, anthropology suffers from the fact that its conclusions are based on coherent-term immersion in a socio-cultural field of view and that its methodology is frequently unscientific, subjective and imprecise. As part of their persuasive strategy, on the primordial(a) hand, proponents of marketing direct to present their discipline as documental, scientific, speedy and producing the needful results.How they actually go about obtaining such results, however, and whether they really are as objective and scientific as they claim to their invitees, are moot points. This paper focuses, by means of a case field of operations, on how marketing is actually practised in a large advertising agency in Japan and has quaternity main aims. Firstly, it outlines the organisational anatomical structure of the agency to show how marketing acts as a social mechanism to back up inter-firm ties based primarily on sensitive personal relationships. Secondly, it reveals how these same interpersonal relations can affect the construction of apparently objective marketing strategies.Thirdly, it focuses on the problem of how all marketing escapes are obliged to shift from scientific to artistic criteria as statistical information, information and analysis are converted into 1 linguistic and visual images for public consumption. Finally, it give make a few tentative comments on the relations between anthropology and marketing, with a view to developing a comparative theory of advertising as a marketing system, based on the cultural relativity of a specific marketing practice in a Japanese advertising agency (cf. Arnould 1995110).The Discipline, Organisation and Practice of Marketing The Marketing disagreement is the engine room of the Japanese advertising agency in which I conducted my research in 1990. At the time, this agency handled more than 600 peckers a year, their value varying from several million to a few thousand dollars. The Marketing Division was closely invariably intricate in some way in the ad cam paigns, cultural and sporting events, merchandising opportunities, special promotions, POP constructions, and various different activities that the agency carried out on behalf of its thickenings.Exceptions were those peckers involving media placement or certain kinds of work expressly requested by a client like, for example, the organisation of a national sales force concourse for a car producer. Even here, however, there was often information that could be recyclablely relayed back to the Marketing Division (the number and regional distri only whenion of the manufacturers sales representatives, as well as possible advance information on new carrefours and/or services to be offered in the sexual climax year).Marketing Discipline As Marianne Lien (199711) points out, marketing is both a discipline and a practice. The main aims as a discipline of the Marketing Division were (and, of course, still are) firstly, to acquire as much information as possible from consumers about t heir clients carrefours and services jiffyly, to acquire as much information as possible, too, from clients about their own products and services and, thirdly, to use strategically both kinds of information acquired to develop new accounts.Marketing thus provided those working in the Marketing Division with the calm data that account executives call for in their personal ne bothrking with (potential) clients whom they cajoled, persuaded, impressed and pleaded with to part with (more) money. Marketing Organisation In order to achieve the three boilers suit objectives adumbrate above, the agency established a certain set of organisational features to en adequate to(p) marketing practice to relegate place.Firstly, the Marketing Division, which consisted of al almost 90 members, was structured into three separate, but interlocking, sub-divisions. These consisted of Computer Systems Market Development and Merchandising and Marketing. The last was itself sub-divided into three de partments, each of which was broken down into three or four slits. 1 severally section consisted of from six to a dozen members, led by a Section Leader, under(a) whom they worked in aggroups of 2 to three on an account. These aggroups were not fixed.Thus one member, A, might work with an separate, B, under the Section Leader (SL) on a contact lens advertising campaign, but find herself assigned to worked with C under SL on an airline companys business class service account, and with D under SL on a computer manufacturers consumer survey. In this respect, the daily life of members of the Marketing Note that, unlike the Marketing department in Viking foods discussed by Lien.Department was similar to that of product film directors described by Lien (199769), being characterised by frequent shifts from one activity to an separate, a wide ne cardinalrk of communications, and a considerable amount of time spent in meetings or talking on the telephone. Secondly, deputes (or accoun ts) were allocated formally through the hierarchical divisional structure by departments first, then by sections according to their existing responsibilities and perceived suitability for the job in hand.Each SL then distributed these tasks to individual members on the basis of their current overall workloads. At the same time, however, there was an informal allocation of accounts involving individuals. Each SL or DL could take on a job directly from account executives handling particular accounts on behalf of their clients. Here, prior experiences and personal contacts were important influences on AEs decisions as to whether to go through formal or informal channels of recruitment.The account executive in charge of the NFC contact lens campaign described in my book (Moeran 1996), for example, went directly to a particular SL in the Marketing Department because of some smart work that the latter had done for the AE on a diverse account some months previously. Mutual respect had b een established and the contact lens campaign provided both parties with an opportunity to assess and, in the event, positively formalize their working relationship.There were certain organisational advantages to the ways in which accounts were distributed in the manner described here. Firstly, by freely permitting interpersonal relations between account executives and marketers, the delegation hold backd that there was competitiveness at each structural level of department and section. Such competition was felt to be healthy for the Agency as a whole, and to encourage its continued growth.Secondly, by assigning individual members of each section in the Marketing Department to working in different combinations of people on different tasks, the Agency fitd that each member of the Marketing Department received training in a wide variety of marketing problems and was obliged to move fully with fellow section members, thereby promoting a sense of cooperation, cohesion and mutual un derstanding. This in itself meant that each section developed the broadest possible shared familiarity of marketing issues, because of the knowledge gained by individual members and the interaction among them.Marketing Practice Accounts were won by the Agency primarily through the liaison work conducted with a (potential) client by an account executive (who might be a very senior manager or junior salesman recruited scarcely a few years earlier). formerly an agreement was made between Agency and client and such an agreement might be limited to the Agencys union in a competitive presentation, the outcome of which might lead to an account being established the AE confine-to doe with would put in concert an account group.An account team consists of the AE in charge (possibly with assistants) the Marketing Team (generally of 2 persons under a Marketing Director MD, but sometimes much larger, depending on the size of the account and the work to be done) the originative Team (co nsisting of Creative Director CD, Copywriter, and Art Director AD as a minimum, but usually including two ADs one for print-, the other for TV-related work) and Media Planner/Buyer(s).The job of the account team is to ship out successfully the task set by the client, and to this end meets initially for an orientation meeting in which the issues and problems relayed by the client to the AE are explained and discussed to all members. 2 Prior to this, however, the AE provides the marketing team with all the information and data that he has been able to extract from the client (a lot of it highly confidential to the company concerned). The marketing team, therefore, tends to come prepared and to have certain quite specific questions regarding the nature of the statistics provided, the target market, retail outlets, and so on.If it has done its homework properly which is not always the case, given the number of different accounts on which the teams members are working and the pressure of work that they are under the marketing team may well have several pertinent suggestions for further research. It is on the basis of these discussions that the AE then asks the MD to slaver out such research as is thought necessary for the matter in hand. In the meantime, the notional team is asked to mull over the issues generally and to call back of possible ways of coping germinally (that is, linguistically and visually) with the clients marketing problems.Back in the Marketing Department, the MD will tell his subordinates to carry out specific tasks, such as a consumer survey to find out who precisely makes use of a particular product and why. This kind of task is fairly mechanical in its general form, since the Agency does this sort of work for dozens of clients every year, but has to be tailored to the present clients particular situation, needs and expectations. The MD will therefore discuss his subordinates proffer, make some suggestions to ensure that all points are overed (and that may well include some additional questions to elicit further information from the target reference that has taken on importance during their discussion), and then give them permission to have the work carried out. All surveys of this kind are subcontracted by the Agency to marketing firms and research organisations of one sort or another.This means that the marketing teams members are rarely involved in direct face-to-face contact or interaction with the consumers of the products that they wish to advertise,3 except when small focus group interviews take place (usually in one of the Agencys buildings). The informal nature of such groups, the different kinds of insights that they can yield, and the need to spot and pursue particular comments mean that members of the marketing team should be present to listen to and, as warranted, direct the discussion so that the Agencys particular objectives are achieved. In general, however, the only usher of consumers in the A gency is indirect, through reports, statistics, figures, data analyses and other information that, paradoxically, are always seen to be insufficient or incomplete (cf.Lien 1997112). Once the results of the survey are returned, the marketers enter them into their computers (since all such information is stored and can be used to generate comparative data for other accounts as and when required). They can make use of particular programmes to sort and analyse such data, but ultimately they need to be able to present their results in readily comprehensible form to other members of the account team.Here again, the MD tends to ensure that the information presented at the close meeting is to the point and properly hierarchised in terms of importance. This leads to the marketing teams putting forward things like a positioning statement, slogan, purchasing decision The Media Planners do not usually participate in these early meetings since their task is primarily to provide information of suitable media, and slots therein, for the finished campaign to be placed in. 3A similar point is made by Lien (1997. 11) in her study of Viking Foods. Focus Groups usually consist of about half a dozen people who represent by age, gender, socio-economic grouping and so on the type of target audience being administered, and who have agreed to talk about (their attitudes towards) a particular product or product trope usually in exchange for some gift or money. Interviews are carried out in a small meeting room (that may have a one-way mirror to enable outside observation) and tend to last between one and two hours. 4 2 4 odel (high/low participation think/feel product relationship), product message concept, and creative frame. integrity of the main objectives of this initial and, if properly done, only round of research is to discover the equaliser between what are terms product, user and end benefits, since it is these factors that determine the way in which an ad campaign s hould be presented and, therefore, how the creative team should visualise the marketing problems analysed and ensuing suggestions from the marketing team.It is here that we come to the crux of marketing as practised in an advertising agency (whether in Japan or elsewhere). Creative people tend to be suspicious of marketing people and vice-versa. This is primarily because marketers believe that they work rationally and that the creative frames that they produce are founded on objective data and analyses. Creative people, on the other hand, believe that their work should be inspired, and that such inspiration can take the place at the set down of the data and analyses provided for their consideration.As a result, when it comes to producing creative work for an ad campaign, copywriters and creative directors tend not to pay strict attendance to what the marketing team has told them. For example, attracted by the idea of a particular celebrity or filming location, they may come up wit h ideas that in no way meet the pragmatic demands of a particular ad campaign that may require emphasis on product benefits that are irrelevant to the chosen location or celebrity suggested for mug. This does not always happen, of course.A good and skipper creative team and such teams are not infrequent will follow the marketing teams instructions. In such cases, their success is based on a creative interpretation of the data and analyses provided. Agency-Client Interaction If there is some indecision and argument among different elements of the account team and it is the presiding account executives job to ensure that marketers and creatives do not come to blows over their disagreements they almost invariably band together when meeting and presenting their plans to the client.Such meetings can take place several, even more than a dozen, times during the course of an account teams preparations for an ad campaign. At most of them the MD will be present, until such time as it i s clear that the client has accepted the Agencys campaign strategy and the creative team has to fine-tune the objectives outlined therein. Very often, therefore, the marketing team will not stay on a particular account long ample to learn of its finished result, although a good AE will keep his MD abreast of creative developments and show him the (near) finalised campaign prior to the clients final approval.But marketers do not get involved in the production side of a campaign (studio photography, television commercial filming, and so on) unless one of those concerned knows what is going on when, happens to be nearby at the time, and drops in to see how things are going. In other row, the marketing teams job is to see a project through until accepted by the client. It will then dissolve and its members will be assigned to new accounts. Advertising Campaigns A exercise Study To illustrate in more detail particular examples of marketing practice in the Agency, let me cite as a ca se study the preparation of contact lens campaign in Japan.This example is illuminating because it reveals a number of typical problems faced by an advertising agency in the formulation and execution of campaigns on behalf of its clients. These include the interface between marketing and creative people within an agency and the interpretation of marketing analysis and data the 5 transposition of marketing analysis into creative (i. e. linguistic, visual and design) ideas the interface between agency and client in the selling of a campaign proposal and the problems of having to solicitation to more than one consumer target.When the Nihon Fibre Corporation asked the Agency to prepare an advertising campaign for its new Ikon jot O2 oxygen-passing GCL hard contact lenses in early 1990, it provided a considerable amount of product information with which to help and guide those concerned. This information included the following facts firstly, with a differential coefficient (DK factor) of 150, Ikon breathing place O2 had the highest rate of oxygen permeation of all lenses currently manufactured and marketed in Japan.As a result, secondly, Ikon Breath O2 was the first lens authorized for dogging wear by Japans Ministry of Health. Thirdly, the lens was particularly flexible, dirt and water resistant, durable, and of extremely high quality. The client asked the Agency to confirm that the targeted market consisted of junior people and to create a campaign that would help NFC capture initially a minimum three per penny share of the market, rising to ten per cent over three years. The Agency immediately formed an account team, consisting of eight members all told.Their first step was to arrange for the marketing team to carry out its own consumer research before proceeding further. A detailed survey of 500 men and women was worked out in consultation with the account executive and the client, and was punish by a market research company subcontracted by the Agency. Results confirmed that the targeted audience for the Ikon Breath O2 advertising campaign should be young people, but particularly young women, between the ages of 18 and 27 years, since it was they who were most likely to wear contact lenses.At the same time, however, the survey likewise revealed that there was diminutive brand loyalty among contact lens wearers so that, with effective advertising, it should be possible to persuade users to shift from their current brand to Ikon Breath O2 lenses. It also showed that young women were not overly concerned with price provided that lenses were safe and comfortable to wear, which meant that Ikon Breath O2s comparatively high price in itself should not prove a study obstacle to brand switching or sales.On a less positive note, however, the account team also spy that users were primarily concerned with comfort and were not evoke in the technology that went into the manufacture of contact lenses (thereby obviating the apparent advanta ge of Ikon Breath O2s high DK factor of which NFC was so proud) and that, because almost all contact lens users consulted medical specialists prior to purchase, the advertising campaign would have to address a second audience consisting mainly of middle-aged men.All in all, therefore, Ikon Breath O2 lenses had an advantage in being of superb quality, approved by medical experts and recognized, together with other GCL lenses, as being the safest for ones eyes. Its disadvantages were that NFC had no name in the contact lens market and that users knew very little about GCL lenses or contact lenses in general.This meant that the advertising campaign had to be backed up by point of purchase sales promotion (in the form of a brochure) to ensure that the product survived. Moreover, it was clear that Ikon Breath O2s technical advantage (the DK 150 factor) would not last long because rival companies would soon be able to make lenses with a differential coefficient that surpassed that develop ed by NFC. 5On this occasion, because the advertising budget was comparatively small, the media buyer was not brought in until later floors in the campaigns preparations. The AE in charge of the NFC account interacted individually with the media buyer and presented the latters suggestions to the account team as a whole. 6 As a result of intense discussions following this survey, the account team moved slowly towards what it thought should be as the campaigns overall timber and manner.Ideally, advertisements should be information-oriented the campaign needed to put across a number of points about the special product benefits that differentiated it from similar lenses on the market (in particular, its flexibility and high rate of oxygen-permeation). Practically, however as the marketing team had to emphasize time and time again the campaign needed to stress the available and emotional benefits that users would obtain from vesture Ikon Breath O2 lenses (for example, continuous we ar, safety, release from anxiety and so on).This meant that the advertising itself should be emotional (and information left to the promotional brochure) and stress the end benefits to consumers, rather than the lenses product benefits. Because the marketing team had concluded that the products end benefits should be stressed, copywriter and art director opted for user tomography rather than product characteristics when thinking of ideas for copy and visuals.However, they were thwarted in their endeavours by a number of problems. Firstly, advertising industry self-policing regulations prohibited the use of certain newss and images (for example, the notion of safety, plus a visual of someone asleep while wearing contact lenses), and insisted on the inclusion in all advertising of a warning that the Ikon Breath O2 lens was a medical product that should be purchased through a medical specialist.This constriction meant that the creative teams could not use the idea of continuous wear b ecause, even though so certified by Japans Ministry of Health, opticians and doctors were generally of the sagacity that Ikon Breath O2 lenses were bound to affect individual wearers in different ways. NFC was terrified of antagonizing the medical world which would often be recommending its product, so the product manager concerned refused to permit the use of any word or visual connected with continuous wear.Thus, to the account teams collective dismay, the products end benefit to consumers could not be effectively advertised. Secondly, precisely because Ikon Breath O2 lenses had to be recommended by medical specialists, NFCs advertising campaign needed to address the latter as well as young women users. In other words, the campaigns tone and manner had to appeal to two totally different segments of the market, while at the same time satisfying those employed in the client company.This caused the creative team immense difficulties, especially because thirdly the product manager of NFCs contact lens manufacturing division was convinced that the high differential coefficient set Ikon Breath O2 lenses apart from all other contact lenses on the market and would appeal to members of the medical profession. So he insisted on emphasizing what he saw as the unique technological qualities of the product.In other words, not only did he relegate young women who were expected to buy the product to secondary importance he ignored the marketing teams recommendation that user benefit be stressed. Instead, for a long time he insisted on the creative teams focussing on product benefit, even though the DK factor was only a marginal and temporary advantage to NFC. As a result of these two sets of disagreements, the copywriter came up with two different key ideas.The first was based on the products characteristics, and thus supported the manufacturers (but went against his own marketing teams) product benefit point of view, with the invent corneal physiology (kakumaku seiri) . The second also stressed a feature of the product, but managed to emphasize the user benefits that young women could gain from wearing lenses that were both hard and soft (yawarakai).The former headline was the only way to break brand parity and make Ikon Breath O2 temporarily obvious from all other lenses on the market (the product manager liked the distinction the marketing team disliked the temporary nature of that distinction). At this stage in the negotiations, the account executive in charge felt obliged to tow an obsequious line, but needed to appease his marketing team and ensure that the creative team came up with something else if at all possible, since 7 corneal physiology gave Ikon Breath O2 lenses only a temporary advantage.As a result, the copywriter introduced the word hard (majime) into discussions on the grounds that NFC was a serious (majime) manufacturer (it was, after all, a well-known and respected Japanese corporation) which had developed a product that, b y a process of assimilation, could also be regarded as serious moreover, by a further rubbing-off process, as the marketing team agreed, such seriousness could be attributed to users who decided to buy and wear Ikon Breath O2 lenses. In this way, both the distinction between product benefit and user benefit might be overcome.The copywriters last idea was the one that broke the deadlock (and it was at certain moments an extremely tense deadlock) between the account team as a whole and members of NFCs contact lens manufacturing division. After a series of meetings in which copywriter and designer desperately tried to convince the client that the idea of balminess and hardness was not a product characteristic, but an image designed to support the benefits to consumers wearing Ikon Breath O2 lenses, the product manager accepted the account teams proposals in principle, provided that serious was used as a back-up selling point.Soft hard (yawaraka hard) was adopted as the key headline ph rase for the campaign as a whole. It can be seen that the marketing teams analysis of how NFC should successfully enter the contact lens market met two stumbling blocks during the early stages of preparation for the advertising campaign. The first was within the account team itself, where the copywriter in particular tended to opt for the manufacturers approach by emphasising the product benefit of Ikon Breath O2. The second was when the Agencys account team had to persuade the client to accept its analysis and campaign proposal.But the next major problem facing the account team was how to convert this linguistic rendering of market analysis into visual terms. What sort of visual image would adequately fulfil the marketing aims of the campaign and make the campaign as a whole including television commercial and promotional materials readily recognizable to the targeted audience? It was almost immediately accepted by the account team that the safest way to achieve this important ai m was to use a celebrity or personality (talent in Japanese) to endorse the product.Here there was little argument, because it is generally recognized in the advertising industry that celebrity endorsement is an excellent and readily appreciated gene linkage device in multi-media campaigns of the kind requested by NFC. Moreover, since television commercials in Japan are more often than not only fifteen seconds long and therefore cannot include any detailed product information, personalities have proved to be attention grabbers in an image-dominated medium and to have a useful, short-term effect on sales because of their popularity in other parts of the entertainment industry.At the same time, not all personalities come across equally well in the rather differing media of television and magazines or newspapers, so that the account team felt obliged to look for someone who was more than a mere pop matinee idol and who could act. It was here that those concerned encountered the most d ifficulty. The presence of a famous personality was crucial since s/he would be able to attract public attention to a new product and hopefully draw people into retail outlets to buy Ikon Breath O2 lenses.It was agreed right from the start that the personality should be a young woman, in the same age group as the targeted audience, and Japanese. (After all, a blue eyed foreigner endorsing Ikon Breath O2 contact lenses would scarce be appropriate for brown-eyed Japanese. ) Just who this woman should be, however, proved problematic. Tennis players (who could indulge in both hard activities and soft romance) were discarded early on because the professional season was already in full swing at the time the campaign was being prepared.Classical musicians, while romantic and thus soft, were not seen to be hard enough, while the idea of using a Japanese talent, Miyazawa Rie (everyone on the account teams favourite at the time), was reluctantly rejected because, even though photographs of h er in the nude were at the time causing a 8 minor sensation among Japanese men interested in soft-porn, she was rather inappropriate for a medical product like a contact lens which was aimed at young women. Any personality chosen had to show certain distinct qualities.One of these was a presence (sonzaikan) that would attract peoples attention on the page or screen. another(prenominal) was topicality (wadaisei) that cauline from her professional activities. A third was future potential (nobisei), meaning that the celebrity had not yet peaked in her career, but would attract further widespread media attention and so, it was hoped, indirectly promote Ikon Breath O2 lenses and NFC. Most importantly, however, she had to suit the product. In the early stages of the campaigns preparations, the creative team found itself in a slight quandary.They wanted to choose a celebrity whose personality fitted the soft-hard and serious ideas and who would then anchor a particular image to Ikon Breat h O2 lenses, although it proved difficult to find someone who would fit the product and appeal to all those concerned. Eventually, the woman chosen was an actress, Sekine Miho, who epitomized the kind of modern woman that the creative team was seeking, but who was also about to star in a national television (NHK) drama series that autumn a series in which she vie a starring role as a soft, romantic character.Although popularity in itself can act as a straightjacket when it comes to celebrity endorsement of a product, in this case it was judged correctly, it transpired that Sekine had enough depth (fukasa) to bring a special image to Ikon Breath O2 lenses. Once the celebrity had been decided on, the creative team was able to fix the tone and manner, expression and style of the advertising campaign as a whole.Sekine was a high class (or one set up up in Japanese-English parlance) celebrity who matched NFCs image of itself as a high class (ichiryu) company and who was made to refl ect that sense of eliteness in life and clothing. At the same time, NFC was a serious manufacturer and wanted a serious, rather than frivolous, personality who could then be photographed in soft-focus, serious poses to suit the serious medical product being advertised. This seriousness was expressed further by means of ery slightly tinted black and white photographs which, to the art directors but, not initially, the product managers eye made Sekine look even softer in appearance and so match the campaigns headline of yawaraka hard. This fog was further reinforced by the heart-shaped lens cut at the bottom of every print ad, and on the front of the brochure, which the art director made green rather than blue partially to differentiate the Ikon Breath O2 campaign from all other contact lens campaigns run at that time, and partly to appeal to the fad for ecological colours then-current among young women in particular.This case study shows that there is an extremely complex relati onship linking marketing and creative aspects of any advertising campaign. In this case, market research showed that Ikon Breath O2 lenses were special because of the safety that derived from their technical quality, but that consumers themselves were not interested in technical matters since their major concern was with comfort. Hence the need to focus the advertising campaign on user benefit.Yet the client insisted on stressing product benefit a positioning made more difficult for the creative team because it could not legally use the only real consumer benefit available to it (continuous wear), and so had to find something that would appeal to both manufacturer and direct and indirect consumers of the lens in question. In the end, the ideas of soft hard and serious were adopted as compromise positions for both client and agency, as well as for creative and marketing teams. Concluding Comments Let us in conclusion try to follow two separate lines of thought.One of these is, as p romised, the relationship between marketing and anthropology the other that between advertising and marketing. 9 Although convergence between anthropology, marketing and consumer research may be growing, the evidence suggested by the case study in this paper is that huge differences still exist. Marketing people in the advertising agency in which I examine may be interested in anthropology they may even have dipped into the work of anthropologists here and there. But their view of the discipline tends to be rather old-fashioned, and they certainly do not have time to go in for the kind of intensive, detail ethnographic nquiry of consumers that anthropologists might encourage.If anthropologists are to make a useful contribution to marketing, therefore, they need to present their material and analyses succinctly and in readily digestible form, since marketing people hate things that are overcomplicated. It is, perhaps, for this rather than any other reason that someone like Mary Doug las (Douglas and Isherwood 1979) has been so favourably received. In the end, marketing people aim to be positivist, science-like (rather than scientific, as such), and rationalist in their ad campaigns.They aspire to measure and predict on the basis of observer categories, if only because this is the simplest way to sell a campaign to a client. In this respect, they are hand-to-hand to the kind of sociology and anthropology advocated in the 1940s and 50s (which would explain their adoption of Talcott Parsonss theory of action, for example), than to the present-day interpretive trends in the discipline, and thus favour in their practices an outmoded and among most anthropologists themselves, discredited form of discourse.So, if anthropologists are kings of the castle, it is a castle most other people have never heard of (Chapman and Buckley 1997 234). As Malcolm Chapman and Peter Buckley wryly observe, we need perhaps to spend some time entirely outside social anthropology in ord er to be convinced of the truth of this fact. Secondly, as part of this positivist, science-like approach, marketers in the Japanese advertising agency tended to make clear-cut categories that would be easily understood by both their colleagues in other divisions in the Agency and by their clients.These categories tended to present the consumer world as a series of binary oppositions (between individual and group, modern and traditional, idealist and materialist, and so on cf. Lien 1997 202-8) that they then presented as matrix or quadripartite structures (the Agencys Purchase Decision Model, for example, was structured in terms of think/feel and high/low involvement axes). In this respect, their work could be said to exhibit a basic form of structuralism. One of these oppositions was that made between product benefit and user benefit (with its miscellaneous end benefit).As this case study has shown, this is a distinction that lies at the heart of all advertising and needs to be t eased out if we are successfully to decode particular advertisements in a manner that goes beyond the work of Barthes (1977), Williamson (1978), Goffman (1979) and others. Thirdly, one of the factors anchoring marketing to the kind of structured thinking characteristic of modernist disciplines, perhaps, is that the earthly concern of meaning in commodities is inextricably bound up with the establishment of a sense of difference between one object and all others of its class.After all, the three tasks of advertising are to stand out from the surrounding competition to attract peoples attention to communicate (both rationally and emotionally) what it is intended to communicate and to dispose people to buy or keep on buying what is advertised. The sole preoccupation of those engaged in the Ikon Breath 02 campaign was to create what they referred to as the parity break to set NFCs contact lenses apart from all other contact lenses on sale in Japan, and from all other products on the m arket.At the same time, the idea of parity break extended to the style in which the campaign was to be presented (tinted monochrome photo, green logo, and so on). In this respect, the structure of meaning in advertising is akin to that found in the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of structural linguistics where particular choices of words and phrases are influenced by the overall structure and availability of meanings in the language in which a speaker is communicating. That the work of LeviStrauss should be known to most marketers, therefore, is hardly surprising.Marketing practice is in many respects an application of the principles of structural anthropology to the selling of products. 10 Fourthly, although those working in marketing and consumer research take it as given that there is one-way flow of activity stemming from the manufacturer and targeted at the end consumer, in fact, as this case study shows, advertising as well as the marketing that an advertising agency condu cts on behalf of a client always addresses at least two audiences.One of these is, of course, the group of targeted consumers (even though they are somewhat removed from the direct experience of marketers in their work). In this particular case, to complicate the issue further, there were two groups of consumers, since the campaign had to address both young women and middle-aged male opticians. Another audience is the client. As we have seen, the assumed or proven dis/likes of both consumers and advertising client affect the final meaning of the products advertised, and the client in particular had to be satisfied with the Agencys campaign approach before consumer needs could be addressed.At the same time, we should recognise that a third audience exists among different members of the account team within the Agency itself, since each of the three separate parties involved in account servicing, marketing and creative work needed to be satisfied by the arguments of the other two. In this respect, perhaps, we should note that marketing people have spent a lot of time over the decades fashioning use of insights developed in learning behaviour, personality theory and psychoanalysis which they then apply to individual consumers.In the process, however, they have tended to overlook the forms of social organisation of which these individuals are a part (cf. de Groot 198044). Yet it is precisely the ways in which individual consumers interact that is crucial to an understanding of consumption and thus of how marketing should address its targeted audience how networks function, for example, reveals a lot about the vital role of word-of-mouth in marketing successes and failures how status groups operate and on what grounds can tell marketers a lot about the motivations and practices of their targeted audience.Anthropologists should be able to help by providing sociological analyses of these and other mechanisms pertinent to the marketing endeavour. In particular, their extensive work on ritual and symbolism should be of use in foreign, third world markets. Fifthly, most products are made to be sold.As a result, different manufacturers have in mind different kinds of sales strategies, target audiences, and marketing methods that have somehow to be translated into persuasive linguistic and visual images not only in advertising, but also in packaging and product design. For the most part, producers of the commodities in question find themselves obliged to call on the specialized services of copywriters and art designers who are seen to be more in tune with the consumers than are they themselves. This is how advertising agencies market themselves.But within any agency, the inception of advertising involves an ever-present stress between sales and marketing people, on the one hand, and creative staff, on the other between the not necessarily compatible demands for the dissemination of product and other market information, on the one hand, and for l inguistic and visual images that will attract consumers attention and push them into retail outlets to make purchases, on the other. This is not always taken into account by those currently writing about advertising.More interestingly, perhaps, the opposition that is perceived to exist between data and statistical analysis, on the one hand, and the creation of images, on the other, parallels that seen to pertain between a social science like economics or marketing and a more humanities-like discipline such as anthropology. Perhaps the role for an anthropology of marketing is to bridge this great divide.