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Provides a fully impartial commentary on Stephen Brown’s Postmodern Marketing. Implores readers to ignore all rumours to the contrary. Notes that it is very difficult to summarize this commentary in 100 words or less and refuses to even try. Nonetheless, the author says he worked quite hard on this paper and that you really must read it, lest you will be overwhelmed with guilt and subject to a dreadful curse. Also pledges to get even with the author’s anonymous reviewers. Finally, reports that the author has been under a great deal of stress lately but that his therapy has been going well.

The history and heritage of some brands is such that an accumulation of brand equity occurs whereby stocks of images, symbols, logos and icons are built up. The role of brand managers in these cases is to release this equity in an attempt to both realise the value of brand equity and provide a foundation for future development of brand equity. Using a case from global sport, this study analyses the branding of a property and how this drew from a number of equity enhancing features, as well as capitalising upon changes in marketing and the marketplace.

Consumer discourse is a narrative of generically (in)formed, goal‐directed activity. If research interprets such practice, it is often deemed to draw upon phenomenology. Returning to the philosophers (Gadamer, Heidegger, Merleau‐Ponty and Ricoeur) who shaped phenomenology, the purpose of this paper is to argue that consumer studies should further cultivate their important insight – that action (particularly perceiving) is structured temporally as always already realising our pre‐given meaning. Entities are prima facie experienced as “ready‐to‐hand” “equipment” enabling “potentiality‐for‐being”. Hermeneutic phenomenology is thus a philosophical resource offering appropriate spatio‐temporal images for people responding to media marketing's branded life‐styles.

Drawing upon authoritative academic resources, the paper proceeds from philosophical definition to resulting analytical methods in marketing research, using a brief Malaysian case study as an example. Philosophically, phenomenology's core perception is of persons as located in a life‐world of socially shared concepts whose employment/ emplotment is said to “fore‐structure” (Heidegger) their understanding, shaping their “projections” (Gadamer) or expectation of events. Phenomenology posits one engages in a “hermeneutic circle of understanding” – aiming at resolving contradiction between such “fore‐sight” and our subsequent perceptions of events. Consumers thematise “pre‐understood” experience in articulating their storied accounts.

Drawing on phenomenology's account of perceiving, the paper suggests qualitative marketing research unpacks consumers' generic expectation of branding narrative as equipment enabling potentiality‐for‐being, regarding narrative as addressing assumed audience expectation.

The paper provides a conceptual route through phenomenology's application to marketing communication research practice.

The paper aims to look at some of the problems commonly associated with qualitative methodologies, suggesting that there is a need for a more rigorous application in order to develop theory and aid effective decision making.

The paper examines three qualitative methodologies: grounded theory, ethnography, and phenomenology. It compares and contrasts their approaches to data collection and interpretation and highlights some of the strengths and weaknesses associated with each one.

The paper suggests that, while qualitative methodologies, as opposed to qualitative methods, are now an accepted feature of consumer research, their application in the truest sense is still in its infancy within the broader field of marketing. It proposes a number of possible contexts that may benefit from in‐depth qualitative enquiry.

The paper should be of interest to marketers considering adopting a qualitative perspective, possibly for the first time, as it offers a snap‐shot of three widely‐used methodologies, their associated procedures and potential pitfalls.

The purpose of this paper is to explore introspection in marketing research, its controversial origins, its positioning as an art form, the possibilities and the pitfalls of research based on this method, and how to successfully enter into its creative spirit.

Although its overall approach is broadly conceptual, in a similar fashion to the dramatic device of a‐play‐within‐a‐play, the paper makes a habit of using introspection to reflect on introspection.

While it is clear that well‐written introspections can deliver rich stream‐of‐consciousness accounts of marketing‐relevant goodness from beginning to end, they provide more than just frivolous entertainment. The innermost imperative of introspection equates well with consumption, creativity and aestheticisation, the corner‐stones of arts marketing.

The inherent mucky‐mindedness of introspection as a formal method lays its success or failure on the shoulders of the paper's author.

Whatever their interpretive methodology of choice, arts marketers, indeed all marketers, should give serious thought to integrating introspection into their research approach.

While many of the ideas in the paper are pilfered from other sources (see long list of references), the author is proud to assert that precisely these words have never been written in precisely this order.

Considers the results of recent studies of celebrity endorsers in advertisements. Analyses the results of a particular study evaluating three product categories: bath towels, blue jeans, and VCRs; two endorsers: Madonna and Christie Brinkley; and the product when advertised by each celebrity. Concludes that the endorser tends to pass their own image onto the product, particularly if the product has an undefined image, so it is important that the endorser′s image is consistent with the desired product image.

Examines the use of celebrity endorsement in advertising. Reviews the results of a recent study looking at the effect of a celebrity′s attractiveness, trustworthiness and expertise on product purchase intentions, and of one examining the relevance of physical attractiveness and other symbolic attributes of the endorser in relation to product meaning. Considers implications for marketing managers and concludes that further research is necessary.

A crisis, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a decisive moment”, “a turning point”, “a time of great difficulty”. If this is the case, then marketing cannot possibly be in crisis. Crises are temporary states of heightened anxiety, whereas marketing is in a semi‐permanent philosophical pickle. Or so scholarly commentators would have us believe. This paper argues that there is no crisis of representation in marketing. There are more, and more varied, representations of marketing than there have ever been. Representationally speaking, marketing is living in a golden age, a time of Croesus and King Midas. The real problem is that many of these representations are not very good, albeit for understandable reasons. We need to raise the quality rather than increase the quantity of our “experimental” endeavours and this paper makes five recommendations to that end.