Avant-garde marketing
In the 1960s, Alain Robbe-Grillet was a proponent of the New Novel, whose purpose seems to have been to dispense with plot and characters, forcing readers to sift through a pile of description in search of what might be the writer’s guiding purpose. A collection of Robbe-Grillet’s essays, For a New Novel sheds less light than you would think on what he was up to, but I found it very interesting to read in conjunction with Rob Walker’s book about contemporary marketing techniques, which are avant garde in their own way, ignoring traditional limits and taking on unexpected forms and dispensing with its expected purpose of delivering an unambiguous sales pitch.
It’s no accident that Robbe-Grillet’s most famous film, Last Year at Marienbad, has been a continual source inspiration to luxury marketers since it was released in 1961. It is hyperstylized but sufficiently empty, so that one can invest whatever significance one wants into the unresolvable situations depicted. It’s a perfect approach for marketing goods like perfume conjure an aura akin to that which perfume is supposed to have, but make it indeterminate and “mysterious.â€
The film is an encyclopedia of techniques for destroying the sense of time, place, contingency, and logicall things that marketing seeks to undermine in order to exert its illogical, free-associational form of persuasion that relies on consumers to connect the dots. The nature of the marketing is adaptable enough to inspire and then absorb a wide variety of wishes projected by consumers. Effective marketing coaxes us into doing the work of persuading ourselves. The goods have a chance of becoming placebos, that work because we believe.
That strikes me as marketing’s broader sales mission: draw consumers in, entice them to fantasize and narrate themselves into a slightly refreshed existence through a vicarious participation in the indeterminate fragments of experience the marketers supply and of course through purchasing the goods associated with the whole process, which come to seem like the catalyst for all that creativity.
Tags: 1960s, alain robbe grillet, conjunction, consumers, contemporary marketing, contingency, continual source, creativity, dots, effective marketing, fragments of experience, inspiration, last year at marienbad, logicall, mak, marketer, marketers, Marketing, marketing techniques, new novel, perfume, persuasion, pitch, proponent, rob walker, time place