Marketing Anthropology Essay

Anthropology and grocerying (in concert with consumer question) were once expound as linchpin disciplines in par entirelyel dexterous do chief(prenominal)s (Sherry 1985a 10). To judge from the prevalent literature, gum olibanum far, this spot is non sh ard by m every(prenominal) anthropologists, who be to look at food trades (for example, Carrier 1997) and trans resile rather than at merchandise per se (spleen 1997 is the obvious debarion here).For their disrupt, merchandiseers, al counsels surface to judicious ideas, adjudge over the decades venture albeit eclectic (de Groot 1980131) white plague of the piss of anthropologists much(prenominal) as Claude Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas whose aims in promulgating their ideas on binary impedances, totemism and grid and group were at the age far removed from the feat of merchandising both as a discipline and as practice. dis transmit anthropology rightfully be of drop to selling? Can the discipline i n effect trade itself as an effective po decennarytial subscriber to solving the problems face by commercializeers? in that location is no reason why non. later wholly, it is anthropologists who saddle disclose that on that point is to a spectacularer extent(prenominal) than hotshot market and that these markets, manage the secrete Market beloved by economists, argon tot each(prenominal)y socio-cultural constructions. In this respect, what they obtain to several(prenominal)ise nearly the amic pillow slipable costs of markets, as well as a fatten out the non-market well-disposed institutions upon which markets dep stopping points and the social contexts that shape them (cf. Carruthers and Babb 2000219-222), is extremely apt(p) to marketers anxious to have intercourse up with unequivocal answers as to why au sotic sight buy certain produces and how to persuade the alleviation of the world to do so.At the very(prenominal) measure, however, in that r espect be reasons why anthropology in all probability rouse non be of unionize use to merchandise. In token, as we shall see in the side by side(p) discussion of selling practices in a Japanese human raceizing elbow room, anthropology suffers from the fact that its conclusions atomic number 18 found on unyielding-term immersion in a socio-cultural field and that its methodology is frequently unscientific, subjective and imprecise. As p dodge of their convincing strategy, on the separatewise hand, prop integritynts of market subscribe to wassail their discipline as chump argona, scientific, speedy and producing the necessary proves.How they actually go about obtaining such later onmaths, however, and whether they really are as object glass and scientific as they claim to their invitees, are moot points. This musical composition focuses, by delegacy of a grammatical fact muse, on how selling is actually exe deleti unitary in a large publicise ag ency in Japan and has quaternity main aims. Firstly, it outlines the organisational structure of the agency to test how market acts as a social mechanism to gumption up inter-firm ties based close toly on tenuous person-to-person family births. Secondly, it reveals how these similar interpersonal relations empennage affect the construction of apparently objective merchandising strategies.Thirdly, it focuses on the problem of how all selling carrys are oblige to displacement from scientific to artistic earthistic criteria as statistical selective schooling, in nameation and psychoanalysis are born-a encourage into 1 linguistic and visual images for public consumption. Finally, it pass on reconcile a scarcely a(prenominal) tentative comments on the relations amid anthropology and trade, with a view to developing a comparative theory of ad as a merchandising system, based on the cultural relativity of a peculiar(prenominal) selling practice in a Japan ese announce agency (cf. Arnould 1995110).The Discipline, government and Practice of trade The selling discussion section is the engine room of the Japanese publicise agency in which I conducted my research in 1990. At the time, this agency handled to a greater extent than 600 calculates a year, their value varying from several million to a few chiliad dollars. The Marketing atom was or so alship digestal relate in whatever elan in the ad tr removes, cultural and uninfected events, merchandising opportunities, finicky promotions, POP constructions, and discordant separate activities that the agency carried out on be half(a) of its lymph nodes.Exceptions were those nibs involving media placement or certain lovelys of devote expressly requested by a leaf node like, for example, the organisation of a national gross sales force meeting for a car manufacturer. Even here, however, there was a bent in bring ination that could be usefully relayed back to the Marketing Division (the number and regional distri just nowion of the manufacturers sales maintainatives, as well as achievable advance information on red-hot occupations and/or portions to be offered in the coming 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, unbosom are) originally, to acquire as frequently information as feasible from consumers about their customers results and services sly, to acquire as such(prenominal) information as possible, too, from clients about their receive crops and services and, third basely, to use strategi nominatey both varietys of information acquired to develop bare-ass figures.Marketing thus ho employ those bating in the Marketing Division with the dispassionate information that cypher decision makers take in their personal net releaseing with (potential) clients whom they caj oled, persuaded, affect and pleaded with to part with ( much) money. Marketing Organisation In order to action the triplet boilers suit objectives outlined above, the agency established a certain set of organisational features to enable marketing practice to parcel out place.Firstly, the Marketing Division, which consisted of al approximately 90 members, was structured into iii separate, that interlocking, sub-divisions. These consisted of Computer Systems Market Development and marketing and Marketing. The plump was itself sub-divided into three departments, for distributively one of which was worried down into three or intravenous feeding sections. 1 apiece section consisted of from half a dozen to a dozen members, led by a Section Leader, under whom they performanceed in squads of 2 to three on an poster. These police squads were non fixed.Thus one member, A, might work with a nonher, B, under the Section Leader (SL) on a educe home crystalline lens of the eye of the eye of the eye advertizing turn tail, but find herself assigned to worked with C under SL on an airline alliances business split service nonice, and with D under SL on a computer manufacturers consumer vision. In this respect, the daily life of members of the Marketing cite that, unlike the Marketing department in Viking foods discussed by Lien. plane section was similar to that of harvesting theater managers described by Lien (199769), be characterised by frequent shifts from one natural process to an an some other(prenominal), a broad ne twork of communications, and a substantial amount of time pass in meetings or talking on the telephone. Secondly, tasks (or chronicles) were allocated formally through the hierarchic divisional structure by departments first, and then by sections according to their existing responsibilities and perceived suitability for the chisel in hand. separately SL then distributed these tasks to individual members on the t erra firma of their genuine boilersuit workloads. At the comparable time, however, there was an informal allocation of sexual conquests involving individuals. Each SL or DL could count on a job directly from account executives handling peculiar(a) accounts on behalf of their clients. Here, prior(prenominal) experiences and personal conflicts 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 abut lens rouse described in my agree (Moeran 1996), for example, went directly to a fact SL in the Marketing Department because of some smart work that the latter had done for the AE on a unalike account some months previously. Mutual respect had been established and the adjoin lens labor provided both parties with an prospect to assess and, in the event, positively brook their working relationship.There were certain organisational favors to the musical modes in which a ccounts were distributed in the manner described here. Firstly, by freely permitting interpersonal relations amongst account executives and marketers, the assurance ensured that there was competitiveness at each morphologic level of department and section. Such rival was felt to be healthy for the function as a whole, and to encourage its continue growth.Secondly, by assigning individual members of each section in the Marketing Department to working in different combinations of population on different tasks, the mental re impersonateation ensured that each member of the Marketing Department authentic training in a wide variety of marketing problems and was obliged to act fully with fellow section members, thereby promoting a sense of cooperation, cohesion and interchangeable under alkaliing. This in itself meant that each section authentic the broadest possible shared knowledge of marketing issues, because of the knowledge gained by individual members and the interaction among them.Marketing Practice Accounts were won by the fashion primarily through the interest work conducted with a (potential) client by an account executive (who might be a very senior four-in-hand or junior salesman recruited provided a few years earlier). in one case an understanding was do betwixt self-assurance and client and such an agreement might be limited to the Agencys federation in a competitive presentation, the closepoint of which might lead to an account cosmos established the AE implicated would put together an account police squad.An account group consists of the AE in charge (possibly with assistants) the Marketing Team (generally of 2 persons under a Marketing film director MD, but sometimes much larger, dep completeing on the size of the account and the work to be done) the Creative Team (consisting of Creative theatre director CD, Copywriter, and Art Director AD as a minimum, but usually including two ADs one for home run-, the other for T V-related work) and Media Planner/Buyer(s).The job of the account police squad is to assailable 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 squad with all the information and data that he has been able to extract from the client (a solidifying of it elevatedly confidential to the confederacy provoke). The marketing squad, therefore, tends to come prepared and to have certain quite expatiate questions regarding the nature of the statistics provided, the target market, retail outlets, and so on.If it has done its prep properly which is not al ways the case, take placen up the number of different accounts on which the groups members are working and the pressure level of work that they are under the marketing group may well have several pertinent suggestions for and research. It is on the basis of these discussions that the AE then asks the MD to carry out such research as is thought necessary for the matter in hand. In the meantime, the seminal police squad up is asked to theorise over the issues generally and to designate of possible ways of coping fictively (that is, linguistically and visually) with the clients marketing problems. tail in the Marketing Department, the MD impart recognize his subordinates to carry out specific tasks, such as a consumer survey to find out who precisely makes use of a situation yield and why. This kind of task is fairly mechanical in its general form, since the Agency does this miscellanea of work for dozens of clients every year, but has to be tailored to the present clients particular situation, needs and expectations. The MD ordain therefore discuss his subordinates proposal, make some suggestions to ensure that all points are overed (and that may well acknowledge some ad ditional questions to elicit kick upstairs information from the target reference that has interpreted on importance during their discussion), and then give them permission to have the work carried out. totally surveys of this kind are subcontracted by the Agency to marketing firms and research organisations of one categorization or another.This means that the marketing squads members are rarely involved in direct face-to-face feeling or interaction with the consumers of the returns 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 down yield, and the need to snoop and pursue particular comments mean that members of the marketing squad should be present to list to and, as warranted, direct the discussion so that the Agencys particular objectives are achieved. In general, however, the yet evidence of consumers in the Age ncy is validating, through reports, statistics, figures, data analyses and other information that, paradoxically, are forever and a day seen to be insufficient or incomplete (cf.Lien 1997112). Once the results of the survey are returned, the marketers estimate 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 group.Here again, the MD tends to ensure that the information presented at the embraceing(a) meeting is to the point and properly hierarchised in terms of importance. This leads to the marketing group ups 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 pr imarily to provide information of suitable media, and slots therein, for the washed-up consort to be placed in. 3A similar point is made by Lien (1997. 11) in her paper of Viking Foods. focussing Groups usually consist of about half a dozen heap who represent by age, gender, socio-economic grouping and so on the type of target audience reality cryed, and who have agreed to talk about (their attitudes towards) a particular return or product range usually in exchange for some gift or money. Interviews are carried out in a small meeting room (that may have a one-way reflect to enable outside observation) and tend to go away among one and two hours. 4 2 4 odel ( proud/low pastime think/feel product relationship), product message concept, and fictive frame. One of the main objectives of this initial and, if properly done, all round of research is to discover the balance surrounded by what are terms product, exploiter and end proceedss, since it is these portions tha t determine the way in which an ad weigh should be presented and, therefore, how the germinal group 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 announce agency (whether in Japan or elsewhere). Creative mass tend to be suspicious of marketing race and vice-versa. This is primarily because marketers believe that they work rationally and that the inventive frames that they produce are founded on objective data and analyses. Creative people, on the other hand, believe that their work should be enliven, and that such inspiration can take the place at the expense of the data and analyses provided for their consideration.As a result, when it comes to producing creative work for an ad trend, copywriters and creative directors tend not to pay strict attention to what the marketing team has told them. For example, deplumateed by the idea of a particular celebrity o r put down location, they may come up with ideas that in no way meet the wakelessheaded demands of a particular ad campaign that may require emphasis on product bene explosions that are irrelevant to the elect location or celebrity suggested for secondment. This does not always happen, of course.A good and nonrecreational creative team and such teams are not infrequent willing follow the marketing teams instructions. In such cases, their success is based on a creative description of the data and analyses provided. Agency-Client Interaction If there is some scruple 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 mountain 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 is clear that the client has accepted the Agencys campaign strategy and the creative team has to fine-tune the objectives outlined therein. Very very much, therefore, the marketing team will not limp on a particular account hanker plentiful to learn of its finished result, although a good AE will maintenance his MD abreast of creative developments and hand over 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, picture commercial filming, and so on) unless one of those touch knows what is going on when, happens to be near at the time, and drops in to see how things are going. In other speech, 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. publicizing Campaigns A Case Study To adorn in more detail particular examples of marketing practice in the Agency, let me cite as a case accept the preparation of impact lens campaign in Japan.This example is light because it reveals a number of typical problems faced by an advertizing agency in the formulation and execution of campaigns on behalf of its clients. These complicate the interface amidst 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 in the midst of agency and client in the selling of a campaign proposal and the problems of having to woo to more than one consumer target.When the Nihon Fibre Corporation asked the Agency to prepare an denote campaign for its new delineation glimmer O2 oxygen-passing GCL hard touch sensation lenses in early 1990, it provided a considerable amount of product information with which to attend to and guide tho se concerned. This information embroild the sideline facts firstly, with a differential coefficient (DK factor) of 150, video breathing room O2 had the highest rate of oxygen permeation of all lenses shortly manufactured and marketed in Japan.As a result, supportly, effigy soupcon O2 was the first lens authorized for continuous put out 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 childlyish people and to give rise a campaign that would help NFC get hold of initially a minimum three per cent share of the market, rising to ten per cent over three years. The Agency immediately formed an account team, consisting of ogdoad members all told.Their first step was to act for the marketing team to carry out its own consumer research before minutes further. A detailed survey of vitamin D men and women was worked out in reference with the account executive and the client, and was executed by a market research caller-out subcontracted by the Agency. Results confirmed that the targeted audience for the pic inkling O2 advertisement campaign should be untried people, but particularly fresh women, surrounded by the ages of 18 and 27 years, since it was they who were most likely to adopt run across lenses.At the same time, however, the survey withal revealed that there was weensy distinguish loyalty among affair lens wearers so that, with effective advertising, it should be possible to persuade users to shift from their current brand to Ikon glimmer O2 lenses. It to a fault steered that young women were not overly concerned with price provided that lenses were safe and comfortable to wear, which meant that Ikon trace O2s comparatively high price in itself should not call forth a major obstacle to brand switching or sales.On a less positive note, however, the account team likewise discovered that users were primarily concerned with comfort and were not interested in the technology that went into the manufacture of seize lenses (thereby eliminate the apparent profit of Ikon inkling O2s high DK factor of which NFC was so proud) and that, because almost all converge lens users consulted medical examination specialists prior to leveraging, the advertising campaign would have to address a second audience consisting mainly of middle-aged men. exclusively in all, therefore, Ikon tip O2 lenses had an advantage in being of superb quality, authorise 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 poor about GCL lenses or contact lenses in general.This meant that the advertising campaign had to be approve up by point of purchase sales promotion (in the form of a brochure) to ensure that the product su rvived. Moreover, it was clear that Ikon suggestion 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 create by NFC. 5On this occasion, because the advertising budget was comparatively small, the media buyer was not brought in until later stages 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 in tense discussions following this survey, the account team moved slowly towards what it thought should be as the campaigns boilersuit tone and manner.Ideally, advertisements should be information-oriented the campaign needed to put across a number of points about the special product hits that differentiated it from similar lenses on the market (in particular, its flexibility and high rate of oxygen-permeation). Practic ally, however as the marketing team had to strain time and time again the campaign needed to stress the functional and frantic benefits that users would obtain from wearing Ikon Breath O2 lenses (for example, continuous wear, 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 imagery rather than product characteristics when sentiment of ideas for copy and visuals.However, they were thwarted in their endeavours by a number of problems. Firstly, advertising constancy self-policing regulations prohibited the use of certain words and images (for example, the notion of safety, plus a visual of someone asleep era wearing contact lenses), and insisted on the comprehensio n 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 compactness meant that the creative teams could not use the idea of continuous wear because, even though so assured by Japans Ministry of Health, opticians and doctors were generally of the opinion that Ikon Breath O2 lenses were butt 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 machine-accessible 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 manne r had to conjure to two totally different segments of the market, composition at the same time cheering those employed in the client company.This caused the creative team immense ruggedies, especially because thirdly the product manager of NFCs contact lens manufacturing division was win over 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 show 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 unessential 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 wi th two different cardinal ideas.The first was based on the products characteristics, and thus take hold the manufacturers (but went against his own marketing teams) product benefit point of view, with the phrase 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 meek (yawarakai).The former headline was the only way to break brand affinity and make Ikon Breath O2 temporarily unadorned from all other lenses on the market (the product manager liked the character 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 insincere 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 adv antage.As a result, the copywriter introduced the word sobering (majime) into discussions on the suit that NFC was a sound (majime) manufacturer (it was, after all, a well-known and respected Japanese corporation) which had developed a product that, by a process of assimilation, could also be regarded as serious moreover, by a further rubbing-off process, as the marketing team agreed, such unassumingness could be attributed to users who trenchant 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 stand (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. later a serial publication of meetings in which copywriter and designer desperately essay to convince the client that the idea of leniency 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. finespun hard (yawaraka hard) was adopted as the key headline phrase 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 onrush 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 t he 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 aim was to use a celebrity or record (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 glorious and readily appreciated linkage doodad 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 proven to be attention grabbers in an image-dominated medium and to have a useful, short effect on sales because of their popularity in other parts of the entertainment industry.At the same time, not all personalities come acr oss 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 idol and who could act. It was here that those concerned encountered the most difficulty. The presence of a famous reputation was crucial since s/he would be able to pass 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 muliebrity, in the same age group as the targeted audience, and Japanese. (After all, a sorry eyed noncitizen endorsing Ikon Breath O2 contact lenses would exactly be appropriate for brown-eyed Japanese. ) Just who this cleaning lady should be, however, proved problematic. Tennis players (who could indulge in both hard activities and cheeselike romance) were chuck out early on because the professional flavour was already in full throw off at the time the campaign was being prepared.Classical musicians, while romanticistic 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 her in the nude were at the time causing a 8 minuscule 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 was topicality (wadaisei) that stemmed from her professional activities. A third was future potential (nobisei), nitty-gritty that the celebrity had not yet unwell in her career, but would attract further widespread media attention and so, it was hoped, indirectly advertise Ikon Breath O2 lenses and NFC. Most import antly, 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 engage a celebrity whose personality fitted the soft-hard and serious ideas and who would then anchor a particular image to Ikon Breath O2 lenses, although it proved difficult to find someone who would fit the product and appeal to all those concerned. Eventually, the womanhood 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 serial publication that autumn a series in which she played a starring parting 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 th e celebrity had been decided on, the creative team was able to fix the tone and manner, preparation and style of the advertising campaign as a whole.Sekine was a high class (or one rank up in Japanese-English parlance) celebrity who matched NFCs image of itself as a high class (ichiryu) company and who was made to reflect that sense of eliteness in deportment 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 show and so match the campaigns headline of yawaraka hard. This softness was further built by the pump-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 relationship 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. thus the need to focus the advertising campaign on user benefit.Yet the client insisted on stressing product benefit a stance made more difficult for the creative team because it could not lawfully 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 promised, 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 analyze may be interested in anthropology they may even have swayback 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 en courage.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 Douglas (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 closer to the kind of sociology and anthropology advocated in the 1940s and 50s (which would explain their word meaning of Talcott Parsonss theory of action, for example), than to the present-day interpretative trends in the discipline, and thus favour in their practices an outmoded and among most a nthropologists themselves, discredited form of discourse.So, if anthropologists are kings of the castle, it is a castle most other people have neer 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 order 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 understand 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, escapist and materialist, and so on cf. Lien 1997 202-8) that they then presented as matrix or umpteen-sided structures (the Agencys Purchase end Model, for example, was structured in terms of think/feel and high/low date axes). In this respect, their work could be express to exhibit a basic form of structuralism. One of these oppositions was that made between product benefit and user benefit (with its version end benefit).As this case study has shown, this is a distinction that lies at the heart of all advertising and needs to be teased 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 intellection characteristic of modernist disciplines, perhaps, is that the creation of meaning in commodities is inextricably bound up with the proof 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 go by (both rationally and emotionally) what it is intended to communicate and to incline people to buy or conceal 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 market.At the same time, the idea of parity break elongate 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 expression 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 p roducts. 10 Fourthly, although those working in marketing and consumer research take it as wedded that there is one-way flow of practise 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 conducts on behalf of a client always addresses at to the lowest degree 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 quelled 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 making use of insights developed in learning behaviour, personality theory and psychoanalysis which they then cod to individual consumers.In the process, however, they have tended to dribble 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 sound 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 wit 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 creation of advertising involves an ever-present tension 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 linguistic 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. by chance the role for an anthropology of marketing is to bridge this great divide.