Dr. Jim Gentry and Dr. Sandy Grossbart of the UNL marketing department will be presenting papers at the 36th Annual Macromarketing Conference titled "The New World: Macromarketing Yesterday and Today," June 5-8, hosted by The College of William and Mary, Mason School of Business in Williamsburg, VA. The conference is sponsored by the Macromarketing Society, which is an international group of scholars who are interested in examining the many interactions among markets, marketing and society.
Gentry will be presenting two papers, “The Holiday Version of the Sacred and the Profane: Thanksgiving and Black Friday” co-authored with Dr. Robert L. Harrison III (UNL 2009). This paper investigates the interface of Thanksgiving and Black Friday, noting that the latter would not exist without the former but also that Black Friday is slowly encroaching on the sacred holiday itself (Toys R Us) opened at 10 PM Thursday night in 2010. We find that the intergenerational nature of Thanksgiving is not always 'sacred' given family tensions and that the crass commercialization of Black Friday may be offset in some cases by the (typically female) intergenerational bonding aspects of the shopping planning and the carnivalesque nature of the shopping experience.
Gentry will also be presenting “Global Advertising Positioning,” co-authored with Dr. Sunkyu Jun (UNL 1993), Dr. Yong Jin Hyun, and Yoojeong Jeong. The paper looks at cultural imperialism and how it is reputed to be incurred as Western culture (including advertising) encroaches upon the cultures of the developing world. Individuals wishing to be members of global consumer culture are attracted to global brands, which are promoted predominantly using global cultural positioning rather than local positioning. The authors present two studies conducted among Korean adult female consumers that 1) determine the differences in brand personality between global and local cultural positioning, and 2) investigate whether more vulnerable consumers (which they perationalize as those having low self-esteem) are influenced more by global positioning than those with high self-esteem, as proponents of cultural imperialism would expect.
Grossbart’s will be presenting his recent paper, “Resources, Tragedy, and Comedy in Marketplace Marketing Systems,” which was co-authored with Dr. Susie Pryor, (UNL 2006) Washburn University. This paper discusses the increasing focus on downtown marketplaces’ (DMs’) economic, marketing-related, consumption-related, social, cultural, and political resources as factors in community development and viability. It describes the overlapping and interrelated nature of these communal resources. It also explains how diverse individuals’ efforts to manage, protect, and sustain these resources may foster so-called tragedy, comedy, and tragi-comedy in DM commons, which will be of interest to macromarketing scholars.
Published: June 1, 2011